Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality

by Becker, Jo

  But Obama’s campaign team remained wary. They feared that embracing same-sex marriage could splinter the coalition he needed to win a second term, depressing turnout among socially conservative African American and Latino voters and working-class Catholic whites. North Carolina, a battleground state Obama had won in 2008, appeared poised to pass a constitutional amendment banning both same-sex marriage and civil unions by wide margins in a special election in May.

  “We understood that this would be galvanizing to some voters and be difficult with other voters,” Jim Messina, who had left the White House to manage Obama’s 2012 campaign, recalled. “My thing was, let’s do it in a way that makes sense.”

  Mehlman talked to Plouffe again when he ran into him in April 2012 at OutGiving, the annual gathering of gay donors where Black had tested the waters for AFER three years earlier. In addition to the May special election in North Carolina, same-sex marriage was on the ballot in four states in November: Lawmakers in Washington and Maryland had voted to allow gays and lesbians to wed, twin legislative victories that voters were now being asked to ratify, voters in Maine would decide whether to reverse the ban there, and voters in Minnesota, where same-sex marriage was already prohibited by statute, would be asked whether to write a Prop 8–like ban into their constitution. Mehlman was working with groups in all four states to build Republican support, but he told Plouffe he worried that the president’s silence would be used against them.

  “Good point,” he said Plouffe told him. “We need to deal with this.”

  And that was where things stood when Biden, Chad’s question still ringing in his ears, gave the answer he did on Meet the Press on May 4, sending everyone into panic mode and forcing the president’s hand.

  In the immediate aftermath, media commentators would speculate that Biden’s comments either constituted a trial balloon or were cleared by the White House as a way to mollify the gay community without the president having to take a position. They were not privy to the chaos that erupted inside the West Wing after an e-mailed transcript of the interview landed in the in-box of the White House press team.

  Jarrett, who had been hoping and pressing for a big presidential moment, was so furious she accused Biden through an intermediary of downright disloyalty. The president was often accused of “leading from behind,” and this would play into that meme. Biden had launched his 2016 campaign—at the president’s expense, other aides bitterly complained. Campaign officials were also agitated. As one White House official with direct knowledge put it, “They felt they already were vulnerable, and they had not fully resolved yet what they wanted to do.”

  The White House’s early attempts at spin reflected that lack of resolution. Biden, in the interview from his West Wing office eighteen months later, said he fully meant to endorse marriage equality. As vice president, “I didn’t go out volunteering a position, but when asked a question, I had to say, because I think it’s the ultimate civil right of our day. I had to respond to it,” he said.

  But his comments were just elliptical enough that the White House’s first response was to try to walk them back. “What VP said—that all married couples should have exactly the same legal rights—is precisely POTUS’s position,” Axelrod tweeted on Sunday, May 6, the day Biden’s interview aired. The vice president’s office was told to put out a “clarification” echoing that sentiment: “The Vice President was expressing that he too is evolving on the issue,” it said.

  Though the statements were greeted with outright disbelief within the gay community, the entire episode nevertheless seemed “headed into the category of Joe Biden-isms, where the vice president accidently speaks the truth,” said one top official, “but then [Education Secretary] Arne Duncan was asked on Monday for his position, and had to answer that he supported same-sex marriage. And then it was like, ‘Oh, shit—they are going to ask every single cabinet member.’”

  The president had to act, sooner rather than later. On Tuesday, the White House hastily offered Good Morning America’s Robin Roberts an exclusive sit-down the following day. She was a woman, as Mehlman had suggested, but as important she was African American, a community that the political team was particularly worried about, and the White House liked her conversational style.

  Then everyone scrambled to get the president ready. Axelrod drafted the White House’s in-house expert: Kristina, who was flourishing in her job as Michelle Obama’s communications director. “Focus on the golden rule,” she advised.

  In explaining how his “evolution” had come full circle, Obama brought up Malia and Sasha, and how “it doesn’t make sense to them” that the law treats same-sex parents of their friends differently than their own. As Mehlman had advised, Obama stressed the need to respect religious liberty—“What we’re talking about here are civil marriages”—but said that as a practicing Christian, his faith was rooted “not only [in] Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the golden rule.” The president spoke about the “soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf, and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is gone, because they’re not able to commit themselves in marriage.” And he said that while he respected the views of those who disagreed with him, “I think it’s important to say that in this country we’ve always been about fairness, and treating everybody as equals.

  “I actually think that, you know, it’s consistent with our best and in some cases our most conservative values, sort of the foundation of what made this country great.”

  “He was very much at peace once he did that interview,” Axelrod said. “It was cathartic.”

  Some of the president’s top advisers had urged him to take Biden to the woodshed, but he had refused to do it. One of the things the president liked best about Biden, according to Axelrod, was his “exuberant honesty.” In his interview with Roberts, Obama said he was “probably” going to endorse same-sex marriage before the election. The vice president, he said, just “got out a little bit over his skis.”

  The first lady, relaying her conversation with her husband to several other White House officials, saw it as a blessing in disguise. You don’t have to dance around this issue anymore, she said she told him over breakfast, before he left the residence that morning. Now you can speak from your heart.

  “Enjoy this day,” she said. “You are free.”

  ABC kept a tight lid on its exclusive, which the network planned to begin airing in a special report Wednesday afternoon. But by the time Chad and Adam woke up in California, rumors were already flying that the president was going to make a major announcement that day. We need to be ready, Chad told Adam before heading into the office.

  The day before, the initiative to amend North Carolina’s constitution had passed. Frank Schubert, the consultant who had engineered Proposition 8’s passage, had run a campaign that pitted much of the state’s religious establishment against gays and lesbians. One pastor sermonizing in favor of the ban had even urged congregants to beat their effeminate children.

  “Dads, the second you see your son dropping that limp wrist, you walk over and crack that wrist,” Sean Harris, senior pastor of Berean Baptist Church, said in a sermon caught on videotape. “Man up. Give him a good punch. Okay? ‘You are not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you are going to be a male.’”

  The video had gone viral, forcing the pastor to say he wished he had chosen his words differently, but its exposure did little to alter the political landscape: The amendment passed by a 22-point margin. Chad, who served as a media adviser in the race and had enlisted former president Clinton to record a call urging voters to reject the initiative, was demoralized. Once again, despite rising popular support for same-sex marriage and legislative success stories like New York’s, gay and lesbians had been crushed at the ballot box.

  Now, North Carolina all but forgotten, he texted Kristina. A
re the rumors true?

  Her reply electrified him. Confirmed, she wrote. But embargoed until 3 P.M.

  Chad’s next call was to Mehlman. The presidential endorsement would be a watershed moment, one that would show just how far gays and lesbians had come in their fight for equality. “How can we ring the bipartisan bell on this?” Chad asked.

  When Mehlman first came out, Mitt Romney had sent him a note. Romney, now the presumptive Republican nominee, had praised his character, saying that his love life was irrelevant. It had meant a lot to Mehlman, arriving at a time when he was still uncertain how his Republican colleagues would react. Since then, he had shared his Project Right Side data with the all the leading Republican presidential campaigns, including Romney’s, as well as the Republican congressional leadership. As he put it, “I’m not going to persuade all Republicans to come around, but if I can make them ambivalent, that’s my goal.”

  With their candidate about to make the pivot into the general election, the party’s leaders understand that it is not in their political interest to make a lot of noise about this, he assured Chad.

  Chad next reached out to Olson. We need to get this into our next court filing, he said.

  The rest of the day was a blur of press calls and appearances.

  “If you are one of those who care about this issue you will not forget where you were when you saw the president deliver those remarks,” Chad told the New York Times after the interview aired. “Regardless of how old you are, it’s the first time you have ever seen a president of the United States look into a camera and say that a gay person should be treated equally under the law.”

  By the time Chad had wrapped up the day with an appearance on CNN’s Piers Morgan, both he and Adam were exhausted. Arriving home, Adam sat down at his desk and began reading the coverage. Romney had declined to attack Obama, instead merely reiterating his own position: “My view is that marriage itself is a relationship between a man and a woman, and that’s my own preference, I know other people have different views,” he said. It was a far cry from the kind of red-meat rhetoric he had thrown out on the subject in the heat of the primaries.

  “Today Obama did more than make a logical step. He let go of fear,” wrote Andrew Sullivan, a prominent gay blogger. “That’s the change we believed in.”

  Adam looked up at his bulletin board. Next to an OBAMA 08 pin in the shape of Montana, where Adam had worked as a field organizer, was a photograph of him standing next to the president. For months, he had been talking about how important it was to reelect Obama, even though he was totally wrong on the issue Adam cared most about. He had rationalized it by telling himself that as wrong as Obama was, Romney was worse. But in that moment, it hit him just what a bitter pill that had been to swallow. The president’s symbolic step changed nothing, and yet, at a personal level, it changed everything.

  “I realized I’d been totally lying to myself about how much it meant to me,” Adam said. “It reminded me of being in the closet, when you are trying to reconcile things in your head that don’t quite make sense. It’s mostly the pretense, knowing there’s this thing that’s really important to you that you are shutting out or denying. Here we are, this supposedly rebel organization that people were saying had jumped the gun or moved too fast, and if I’m honest with myself, I was being too conservative. I thought, ‘This is a smart campaign team,’ and I thought, ‘We just can’t cost him the election.’”

  He thought back to the 2011 White House Christmas party he had attended with Chad, and how the president had thanked him for the work he was doing. When Adam told the president he was looking forward to the next step in his evolution, the president had replied, “You just keep doing what you’re doing.”

  Would Obama have done what he did if the polls still showed that the majority of the country opposed same-sex marriage, as they had at the outset of the case? Adam couldn’t say, but he did know that it was a hell of a lot easier to embrace it now.

  Sitting there in his pajamas, he began to get emotional. “Not teary,” he later explained. “I was smiling. I felt proud. I was reminded that this is how you make things happen.”

  Chad, back at his own home, was feeling it too. He sent a text to Adam and Lance Black: “Shouldn’t we be out celebrating?”

  Adam changed into a pair of jeans and dug through his closet until he found his old OBAMA 08 T-shirt. He hesitated—too dorky?—then put it on.

  “Let’s go toast Barry!” he texted back.

  Across the country, Chuck Cooper was feeling nearly as good. Because for all the hoopla surrounding the announcement, Obama had added a few important caveats that may have assuaged the concerns of his political team, but that would be featured prominently in briefs and decisions still to come.

  THIRTY-ONE

  CHAD AND THE CASE ENTER A NEW PHASE

  Over the years, Chad had been to hundreds of events at the Reiners’ home in Brentwood. He’d organized fund-raisers there for Bill and Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean, and Al Gore. But he had never before been the guest of honor, and as he mingled with the guests who had gathered in the candlelit courtyard on June 4 for his going-away party, he kept having to remind himself that he wasn’t a staffer, responsible for everything from the temperature of the outdoor heaters to the care and feeding of donors.

  The guest list was a mix of people old and new. Longtime supporters of the case like Norman Lear mingled with old friends of the Reiners: “Jerry and Janet Zucker, how are you?” Rob boomed in his New York accent, introducing the director and his wife to some of the young lawyers on the team. They had just gotten word that the Ninth Circuit would issue its decision on whether to rehear the case en banc, or leave the three-judge panel’s ruling in place and allow the case to proceed to the Supreme Court.

  Elsewhere, befitting Chad’s new status, Human Rights Campaign board members socialized with supporters of the organization like talk show host Ellen DeGeneres’s mom. Everyone was talking about Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage a few weeks earlier. Since then, marriage equality for gays and lesbians had been endorsed by both the NAACP and the National Council of La Raza, the largest civil rights advocacy groups representing African Americans and Hispanics respectively, the two communities the president’s advisers had most worried about. A Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 59 percent of African Americans now supported same-sex marriage, compared with 41 percent before Obama’s announcement. It was proof that nothing leads like leading.

  But the initial jubilation had worn off as people began to focus on a few lines in the president’s interview that, while offering him political cover, presented a legal danger to the case. Once again, even as Obama personally endorsed the right of gays and lesbians to marry, he had hedged by framing it as a matter for the states to decide.

  “What you’re seeing is, I think, states working through this issue in fits and starts, all across the country,” Obama had said. “And I think that’s a healthy process and a healthy debate. And I continue to believe that this is an issue that is going to be worked out at the local level, because historically, this has not been a federal issue, what’s recognized as marriage.”

  Yeardley Smith, an actress best known as the voice of Lisa Simpson on Fox’s animated sitcom The Simpsons, chatted with Kris and Sandy about how the cover of Newsweek, featuring an image of Obama with a rainbow halo over his head, had made her want to throw up. Smith was one of AFER’s most generous straight allies—she had donated $1 million and had played one of the expert witnesses in the play 8. She liked to joke that her donation to the marriage equality cause had cost her less than her two divorces and brought her more joy. Smith couldn’t figure out why many of her gay friends weren’t equally exercised.

  How, she seethed, could the president have said such a thing? “I was so mad.”

  Kris tried to explain why she personally wasn’t all that bothered. There was still something
profoundly important about the president telling gay and lesbian kids, growing up in places like Bakersfield, California, where she had, that their love was equal. She had cried, sitting in her office, listening to the interview.

  “He’s a politician, himself controversial,” she said, excusing him, “and he has to be careful navigating the divisions in this country.”

  “You have to give him kudos,” Chad said, “but I thought, okay, if you’re going to do it, go all the way.”

  The magnitude of Chad’s new job had truly begun to sink in. He would be responsible for a portfolio that went well beyond the Proposition 8 case and marriage equality, representing the entire LGBT community. His role would entail taking on the Boy Scouts’ ban on gay scouts and leaders, working in the corporate world to expand the number of companies that provided benefits to the partners of their gay and lesbian employees, and standing up for the transgendered community. He would oversee the funneling of millions of dollars into state and federal campaigns, and work with the White House, Congress, and state lawmakers on issues ranging from HIV/AIDS treatment to employment discrimination.

  He was leaving AFER in safe hands with Adam. The two fund-raising productions of 8 had raised close to $3 million, and AFER now had nearly enough money on hand to fund its operations through 2014 and pay its mounting legal bills. Though Boies had quietly donated back everything he had been paid and then some, Olson had negotiated a more than 50 percent increase in Gibson Dunn’s fees, to $5.6 million, citing the unexpected twists and turns in the case. That was still deeply discounted, but with donors increasingly directing that their money be used for purposes other than to pay for legal work that other attorneys would have done pro bono, the hike had caused some consternation on the board. The ticket sales from 8 could be used to pay off that debt.