Awakening
The right of same-sex couples to marry provoked decades of intense conflict before it was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015. Yet some of the most divisive contests shaping the quest for marriage equality occurred not on the culture-war front lines but within the ranks of LGBTQ advocates. In Awakening: How Gays and Lesbians Brought Marriage Equality to America Nathaniel Frank tells the dramatic story of how an idea that once seemed unfathomable — and for many gays and lesbians undesirable — became a legal and moral right in just half a century. This brief excerpt is a retrospective after the supreme court ruling on same-sex marriage.
Obama’s speech honoring the Obergefell ruling came on a bittersweet day. Following his remarks, he flew to Charleston, South Carolina, to deliver a eulogy for Clementa Pinckney, a pastor, state senator, and one of nine African Americans murdered in a racist rampage in one of the nation’s oldest black churches. The juxtaposition of the president’s palpable emotions in both speeches — exultation at the Court’s ruling and anguish over the racist mass shooting, both sentiments perceptible on his face — augured an era of emotional whiplash for the country as pockets of resistance to the dramatic social and economic changes of modern life flared up to cement deep divisions in the nation and the world.
By 2016, a full-fledged populist awakening had emerged, with variations on each end of the political spectrum, crystallized with the rise of both Donald Trump (who, in a nod to anti-gay social conservatives, chose Mike Pence as his running mate) and Bernie Sanders as anti-establishment presidential challengers to Hillary Clinton, the first woman to win a major party’s nomination. Trump’s stunning upset victory in the November 8 election (in which Clinton nevertheless won the popular vote) reflected a worldwide reaction against the perception that global economic, technological, and demographic and social changes were making life difficult to control for too many people. LGBTQ issues did not appear to play a major role in the U.S. presidential election, and there is little reason to suspect that an anti-LGBTQ backlash played a major role in Trump’s rise. Still, it’s clear that a significant segment of Americans who had long nursed cultural and racial grievances alongside economic insecurity greeted the waning years of the Obama era with both anxiety and contempt. The first African American president had served for eight years and left office not only having presided over the legalization of same-sex marriage but with impressive overall favorability ratings. It seemed, to many, a time when traditional familiarities were under attack by outsiders enjoying outsize sympathy from coastal elites and establishment forces.
Such resistance to the growing inclusion and equal treatment of minorities served as a constant reminder of the limits of change, of the impossibility of leapfrogging over incremental steps to progress. In the year after the Supreme Court’s decision, a dozen counties in Alabama continued to resist granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples (by refusing to grant marriage licenses to anyone at all, or by citing “technical difficulties”). In Kentucky, Kim Davis, a thrice-married Apostolic Christian who served as a county clerk, chose to go to jail rather than hand out marriage licenses to same-sex couples. North Carolina and Mississippi passed so-called religious freedom measures allowing officials to refuse to perform marriage duties for religious reasons. North Carolina became the subject of costly boycotts when it passed another law aimed at gay and transgender Americans that barred discrimination protections and required that bathroom use be dictated by what was written on a person’s birth certificate. Celebrities, businesses, and tourists refused to visit or do business in the state, and both the National Basketball Association and the National Collegiate Athletic Association announced they would move high-profile championship games out of the state as a result of the law.
The boycotts reflected how far mainstream opinion had moved toward embracing LGBTQ equality. And in November the reelection loss of Gov. Pat McCrory, who had signed and staunchly defended North Carolina’s mean-spirited bill, further demonstrated that anti-LGBTQ positions could be politically costly. That same year, however, thirty-four states across the country saw the introduction of roughly two hundred bills meant to allow anti-LGBTQ discrimination, nearly double the number from the previous year. Months after Obergefell, the proportion of Americans who were uncomfortable seeing same-sex couples hold hands had dropped by 20 percent from the previous year but still stood at nearly a third. Nowhere was the anti-gay incarnation of this ongoing intolerance more vividly displayed than when a disturbed twenty-nine-year-old man (with possible terrorist sympathies and an uncertain sexual orientation of his own) massacred forty-nine patrons of a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, weeks before the one-year anniversary of the Obergefell decision. Those who envisioned a world where it was safe to be different still had their work cut out for them.
Yet if the changes wrought by the triumph of marriage equality were incomplete, they were nevertheless profound. Even amid the rise of Donald Trump, who came to power by appealing to vocal anti- minority sentiment, marriage equality appeared deeply enough rooted to survive a full- scale reversal. With grinding persistence and a commitment to durable, incremental progress, the marriage movement had helped increase familiarity with, and approval of, LGBTQ people across the country; it spawned countless conversations about who gay people were, what marriage was for, what it meant to be normal, queer, an outlaw or an in- law; it created numerous tangible legal protections for gay people and their families; it strengthened and spread feelings of dignity and self- worth among LGBTQ people in ways few other efforts were able to achieve; and it endowed America with new and larger understandings of love, law, liberty, family, and equality.
It was not long ago that gay marriage was regarded by most of America as utterly ridiculous. It took ordinary gays and lesbians who held tenaciously to a deadly serious vision to transform that fanciful idea into a reality. “If politics is the art of the possible,” said Josh Friedes, the Massachusetts marriage equality activist, “grassroots organizing is the art of making the impossible possible.” Gays and lesbians brought marriage equality to America through a popular awakening that, while eventually steered by professional movement strategists, began as a people’s movement of same- sex couples, accidental activists, street protestors, political organizers, straight allies, and brilliant lawyers both from inside and outside the LGBTQ movement, who gave hours and dollars, conducted research, held bake sales, marched in the streets, lobbied legislators, studied the law, fi led suits, and over time came to embrace the full worth of same- sex love. The marriage movement awakened first itself and then a nation, laying brick upon brick upon brick until it created a temple — to an ideal. That ideal was not about marriage per se, but about the dignity of love, about the promise of equality, about liberation from the compulsion to be someone you weren’t. When Wolfson first sat down to read the Obergefell decision, he noted how much it sounded like his 1983 paper, which read: “the reason same-sex marriage is particularly essential to gay individuals is” because of “the importance it has as an expression of their equal worth as they are.” Bonauto’s reflections on the ruling were characteristically understated. “I feel like I do this work because of love for so many people,” she mused, “who just want to be who they are.”
