Winning Marriage

The Inside Story of How Same-Sex Couples Took on the Politicians and Pundits—and Won

Marc Solomon

• Publisher: ForeEdge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781611689198
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this updated, paperback edition of Winning Marriage, Marc Solomon, a veteran leader in the movement for marriage equality, gives the reader a seat at the strategy-setting and decision-making table in the campaign to win and protect the freedom to marry. With depth and grace he reveals the inner workings of the advocacy movement that has championed and protected advances won in legislative, court, and electoral battles over the years since the landmark Massachusetts ruling guaranteeing marriage for same-sex couples for the first time. The paperback edition includes a new afterword on the historic 2015 Supreme Court ruling on marriage that includes practical lessons from the marriage campaign that are applicable to other social movements. From the gritty clashes in the state legislatures of Massachusetts and New York to the devastating loss at the ballot box in California in 2008 and subsequent ballot wins in 2012 to the joys of securing President Obama's support and achieving ultimate victory in the Supreme Court, Marc Solomon has been at the center of one of the great civil and human rights movements of our time. Winning Marriage recounts the struggle with some of the world's most powerful forces—the Catholic hierarchy, the religious right, and cynical ultraconservative political operatives—and the movement's eventual triumph.

MASSACHUSETTS

THE DECISION HEARD ’ROUND THE WORLD

November 18, 2003. Mary Bonauto, the forty-two-year-old civil rights project director at the New England legal defense organization Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD), left her home in Portland, Maine, at 6:00 a.m. It was a cold, clear morning as she got in her maroon Chevy Prism for the 201-mile drive to Hartford, where she was scheduled to testify on a proposed law before a committee of the Connecticut Legislature.

More than eight months earlier, on March 4, Mary had argued a marriage case before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, a case that she had painstakingly assembled along with her colleagues at Boston-based GLAD. So many had been waiting with great anticipation for the ruling, which ordinarily came within 130 days of the oral arguments. With this one, however, the normal rules didn’t apply.

At 8:00 a.m., Mary had just reached Boston when her phone rang. It was Evan Wolfson, the longtime marriage advocate with whom Mary had worked for many years making the case for marriage equality, at first to a skeptical gay community and later to judges and the American people. Earlier that year, Evan had established Freedom to Marry, a non-profit organization driving a strategy to achieve marriage for same-sex couples nationwide.

“It’s on the website,” Evan said.

“What’s on the website?” Mary asked him.

“The decision’s coming out,” Evan said.

Today was the day.

Mary, whose smarts, discipline, and relentless drive to win were packed into a slight, five-foot frame, had been GLAD’s first civil rights lawyer beginning in 1990. For years, Mary had heard firsthand the heartbreaking stories of same-sex couples, some together for decades, who had to deal with indignities such as having blood relatives who had been out of touch for years swoop in after a death to claim property that the couple had shared for their entire lives, or needing blood relatives to rush across the country to make medical decisions because the life partner was not permitted to do so. She knew marriage would fix all of this, as well as serve as a marker of the full citizenship of gay and lesbian people for whom the denial of marriage was a powerful injustice. But Mary held off on filing a marriage lawsuit for years, believing the courts weren’t yet ready.

After the victory in the Hawaii trial court in 1996, Mary knew the time was right. She wasn’t deterred by the fact that Hawaii voters in 1998 approved a constitutional amendment undoing the decision and giving the Legislature the power to restrict gay couples from marrying. The Hawaii ruling also triggered Congress to pass the so-called Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, by the overwhelming margins of 342 to 67 in the House of Representatives and 85 to 14 in the Senate. It was signed into law immediately by President Bill Clinton. That law established that the federal government would not respect the marriages of same-sex couples performed in a state where it was legal.

Ever the meticulous lawyer, Mary’s assessment was that of the six New England states she worked on, Vermont made the most sense to go first, due to a combination of the political legwork that had already been done and the relative difficulty to amend the state Constitution to undo a ruling. So she worked with two Vermont attorneys to identify three same-sex couples to apply for marriage licenses in 1997. When they were denied, the attorneys filed a suit on their behalf. Two years later, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the state’s prohibition on marriage for same-sex couples violated the Vermont Constitution. It ordered the Vermont Legislature to either extend marriage laws or create a separate status that provided all of the state benefits and protections.

The outcry in Vermont from our opponents was powerful. Lawmakers quickly took marriage off the table and instead settled on a new status called “civil union,” which offered benefits and protections to gay couples but not the status of marriage. In the following elections, what became known as the “Take Back Vermont” movement organized campaigns against lawmakers who voted for the civil union law and defeated sixteen. This defeat gave the GOP control of the state’s House of Representatives for the first time in sixteen years.

Following the Vermont ruling, Mary Bonauto went right to work on a marriage case in Massachusetts. By April 2001, she was ready. Seven carefully vetted same-sex couples went to their town clerks to apply for marriage licenses. Each was denied. And on their behalf, Mary filed Goodridge et al. v. Department of Public Health, named for the lead plaintiffs, Julie and Hillary Goodridge. In oral argument, Mary explicitly repudiated civil unions, stating, “One of the most important protections of marriage is the word because the word is what conveys the status that everyone understands is the ultimate expression of love and commitment.”

=

After receiving Evan’s call, Mary pulled off the highway, told those expecting her in Hartford that she wouldn’t be able to make it, and instead headed to GLAD’s office in downtown Boston. Shortly before ten, Mary walked along Boston’s famous Freedom Trail to the historic John Adams Courthouse, named for the author of the Massachusetts Constitution, to pick up a copy of the opinion. Although opinions posted instantaneously to the court’s website at ten, Mary didn’t want to stand around a computer with a bunch of others and scroll through it. She wanted to have a hard copy of the opinion handed to her in the way she was accustomed to, and wanted her own private moment looking at it.

By the time she arrived, the opinions were already being handed out. She took one and opened to the middle, to where she thought the ruling would be, and began reading. Her heart sank. It looked like a loss. But then she realized she was reading a dissenting opinion. She skipped to an earlier page, found the majority opinion, and realized that it was a full win by a 4–3 decision. It took her breath away.

=

That morning, New England Cable News (NECN) called me and asked if I’d provide live commentary as the decision came in. For the past three years, I had been an active volunteer and, during one intensive period, a paid lobbyist, for the Massachusetts Freedom to Marry Coalition, a grassroots group advocating for marriage for same-sex couples. I was thirty-seven years old, living in Boston, and finishing up a mid-career master’s degree at Harvard’s Kennedy School. I had made my way to school early that morning to complete an assignment and was wearing a flannel, black-checked shirt. I wanted to go home to change, but there wasn’t time, so flannel it would be. I got into a taxi in Harvard Square for the ten-mile ride to their Newton studio. As my taxi pulled up right at ten o’clock, I called Gavi Wolfe, GLAD’s public education staffer, to find out what the ruling was.

Hold on, he told me. Mary Bonauto was flipping through the decision at the courthouse, and they were waiting.

I waited, butterflies fluttering in my stomach.

It’s a win, Gavi said excitedly.

What’s that mean? I asked. A full win?

A full win. Same-sex couples would be able to marry in Massachusetts.

I walked into the NECN headquarters and was whisked into the studio, wired up, and then directed to join the anchors who were reporting live on the decision. They were confused about what it meant. Did it mean marriage, or could Vermont-style civil unions suffice? I said that, while I hadn’t read the opinion, I understood it to be full marriage for same-sex couples, for the first time ever in American history.

Statements from political leaders across the spectrum began pouring into the newsroom. The anchors literally pulled them off the fax or wire and asked me to comment. I knew that opposition would be fervent, though the rapidity of response from some of the most powerful forces in the country was jarring. The White House immediately released a statement from President George W. Bush, who was gearing up for his reelection campaign: “Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman. Today’s decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court violates this important principle. I will work with congressional leaders and others to do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage.”

Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney responded with similar resolve. “I agree with 3,000 years of recorded history,” he said. “I disagree with the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Marriage is an institution between a man and a woman. Our Constitution and laws should reflect that,” said the governor, who by the day was tacking to the right as he geared up for a possible presidential run.

Religious right groups jumped into the fray, predicting apocalyptic consequences. Dr. James Dobson, who headed up Focus on the Family, the largest religious right organization in the country with a $130 million annual budget, said in a statement, “The dire ramifications of what is happening in the United States and other Western nations cannot be overstated.” The Catholic hierarchy, which until the recent sex scandal had near veto power over legislation in Massachusetts — the second most Catholic state in the country after Rhode Island — was apoplectic. Former Boston mayor and US ambassador to the Vatican Raymond Flynn, who served an informal mouthpiece for the church in Massachusetts, called the issue “a ticking time bomb in America for the last several months that has exploded in Massachusetts.”

What was especially painful was that from those who were normally sympathetic to gay rights on the national level, we heard mostly silence or tortured attempts to rationalize their opposition. Dick Gephardt, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives from Missouri and then a long-shot candidate for president, spoke out in opposition to the ruling, in spite of the fact that he had a lesbian daughter. Our own senator, John Kerry, who was locked in battle with Howard Dean for the Democratic presidential nomination, reiterated his opposition even while trying to sound positive: “I have long believed that gay men and lesbians should be assured equal protection and the same benefits — from health to survivor benefits to hospital visitation — that all families deserve. While I continue to oppose gay marriage, I believe that today’s decision calls on the Massachusetts State Legislature to take action to ensure equal protection for gay couples.”

The only statement the anchors read to me from an elected official that was 100 percent supportive was from openly gay Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank. The decision, said Frank, “will enhance the lives of probably thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of Massachusetts citizens, and will have no negative effects on anyone else.”

=

That night, the Freedom to Marry Coalition, GLAD, and numerous other groups in support of the freedom to marry that had formed a loose coalition called MassEquality held a huge rally at Boston’s Old South Meeting House, the historic Quaker house of worship where in 1773 the Boston Tea Party was organized. It had served as a hub of rebellion for many years, from abolitionism to pro-Union organizing during the Civil War.

We reveled in the decision.

“The day in Massachusetts when same-sex couples could be excluded from the institution of civil marriage is over,” proclaimed GLAD’s executive director Gary Buseck to an enormous roar. Couples were singing, “Going to the State House and we’re going to get married.” The building was electric, the joy palpable, and the cheers raucous; a new freedom movement was gaining strength.

=

My path to becoming an activist for the freedom to marry was anything but a direct one.

I grew up in an activist liberal political household in Kansas City, Missouri, going door to door as a child with my mother on behalf of her favorite, usually female, candidates. Nixon was terrible, Reagan was very bad, Carter was okay, Ted Kennedy was better, and JFK was great.

Around adolescence, I started developing my own political identity, and it was to the right, away from my parents, to their horror. By 1984, I was seventeen years old and driving my grandmother’s old 1972 Oldsmobile Cutlass to Reagan campaign headquarters to volunteer, with a sticker affixed to the back that said, “Another Student for Reagan-Bush ’84.” I parked the car in front of our house, which had a large “Mondale-Ferraro” sign in the front yard. Our house was like the television show Family Ties, with me in the role of Alex Keaton, played by Michael J. Fox.

In retrospect, it was no coincidence that I turned to the right. In addition to being an adolescent rebellion against my parents’ political views, I think my shift had to do with my recognition that I was gay and desperately didn’t want to be. I was casting about for anything I could come up with to prove to myself that I wasn’t really gay. If I were a Republican, so my thinking went, that was a sign I was tough, not weak, and straight, not gay. Horseback-riding, Russia-hating Ronald Reagan was the embodiment of the strength and toughness that I thought would provide an antidote to what I was hoping beyond hope wasn’t actually my sexual orientation.

I have a pretty stubborn and determined make-up, and so I stuck to my guns, both my Republicanism and unwillingness to accept that I was gay. My junior year at Yale, I teamed up with two college friends to form “Connecticut Students for Dole,” organizing college students from throughout Connecticut to travel to New Hampshire and stump for the Kansas senator, who was running for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination. Even though Dole lost to Reagan’s vice president, George H. W. Bush, I was rewarded with an internship in Dole’s leadership office in the US Capitol the summer after my junior year. It was exhilarating being in one of DC’s epicenters of power, watching the senators I read about coming in and out for strategy meetings. I was also asked to serve as an alternate delegate from Connecticut to the Republican National Convention in New Orleans, where I cheered as Vice President Bush said, “Read my lips, no new taxes,” and as President Ronald Reagan gave his farewell address to adoring fans, of whom I was one.

Following college, I returned to Capitol Hill in 1989 and went to work as a policy adviser, this time for my home state senator, Republican Jack Danforth of Missouri. When Clinton took the White House in 1992, I began to recognize that I was more in sync with him ideologically than I was with Danforth and other Republicans on the Hill. That said, I liked Danforth a great deal, especially his willingness to think things through for himself and let the chips fall where they may, rather than following a rigorous party line.

In DC, I attempted other ways to repress or change my sexuality — dating women, engaging in Freudian psychoanalysis (many analysts who were classically trained at places like Harvard and Yale still offered up hope that analysis could change one’s orientation), and trying observant Judaism. But none of it made any difference at all, and the agony of denying — actually trying to crush — an essential part of myself became too much to bear and, I had come to know, pointless. So at the age of thirty, I decided it was time to accept and begin to embrace my sexuality. I began dating men and telling the important people in my life that I was gay.

I left DC and moved to St. Louis to rejoin Danforth, who had retired from the Senate, to help him launch a region-wide civic revitalization venture called St. Louis 2004. It was during that time that I had an experience that more than anything propelled me into marriage equality advocacy work and helped shift my politics leftward back to my family’s roots. I was selected to participate in a fellowship called Next Generation Leadership, or NGL for short, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. It brought cohorts of advocates together a half dozen times over the course of two years to probe different challenges facing democracy. We went to Mississippi for four days to discuss inequality and race, to Los Angeles to focus on immigration, and to South Africa to explore a newly emerging democracy with its profoundly difficult history and its struggles with the AIDS epidemic.

In my cohort were advocates in policy areas such as immigration reform, gun safety, economic inequality, youth empowerment, labor rights, indigenous people’s rights, and more. This group of people supported me, as friends and allies, as I came out as a gay man and challenged me to think hard about how the discrimination I endured as a gay man and the path I’d put myself on to try to deny who I was, was similar to the discrimination and oppression that other groups of people endure. It sunk in, and I recog...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Deval Patrick
• Author’s Note
• Prologue
• State Victories, 2003–2015
• Massachusetts
• New York
• Winning at the Ballot
• A Presidential Journey
• Courting Justice
• Epilogue
• Afterword: On the Final Supreme Court Decision
• Acknowledgments
• Index