It's Not Over by Michelangelo Signorile

Author:Michelangelo Signorile
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Marriage Equality and the Force of the Grass Roots

In fact, the recent trajectories of the marriage-equality movement and the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” provide all the proof we need that timid, incremental approaches are no way to chart a path forward. This chapter doesn’t at all purport to be a complete history of achievements on marriage equality and “don’t ask, don’t tell”; there are many books and articles, some of them excellent, that do tell those stories in much fuller detail, and there will surely be more. But simply in sketching out the course of events, particularly in regard to pressuring Washington politicians and the White House, we can see how making big demands and building support from the grass roots up were the secret to our greatest wins.

In the years after the battle in Hawaii and the vote on the Defense of Marriage Act, couples in Massachusetts took the lead. Their guide was the pioneering attorney Mary Bonauto at Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, who fought right up to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. That state became the first to achieve marriage equality, in 2003. (Bonauto later went on to successfully challenge DOMA in federal court.) In the following years antigay ballot measures were passed in states across the country, and the backlash against marriage equality was used by George W. Bush and the GOP in elections year after year, including in 2008, when Prop 8 was passed in California.

In response, the American Foundation for Equal Rights—cofounded by filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, producer Bruce Cohen, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, and Chad Griffin, who now is president of the Human Rights Campaign—was formed to take Prop 8 to federal court. It was bold of Griffin and others in Hollywood to create a group and bring in superattorneys Ted Olson and David Boies. This sent a message that we wouldn’t just sit back. It put us on the offensive, even as other LGBT groups at first opposed the idea, worried about a possible setback. The Prop 8 trial was important in changing public opinion. Getting a federal ruling striking down a marriage ban in California was an important achievement.

Jo Becker’s book Forcing the Spring, which covered the Prop 8 case but presented itself as a history of the entire marriage movement, rightly came under scrutiny for ignoring the early history and groundbreakers like Evan Wolfson and Mary Bonauto, as well as gay and lesbian writers and pundits like Andrew Sullivan, E. J. Graff, Gabriel Rotello, and others who’d been making the case for marriage equality since the late ’80s and early ’90s. As many critics (including me) pointed out when the book was published, it overplayed the Prop 8 case, which in the end didn’t do what its architects set out to do: end same-sex-marriage bans across the country. The monumental, pivotal case, which got short shrift in the book, was United States v. Windsor, in which Edie Windsor, represented by attorney Roberta Kaplan, won at the Supreme Court, and DOMA was struck down.

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