by Becker, Jo
In three of the four states where marriage was on the ballot, gays and lesbians were on the offensive. In Washington and Maryland, voters would decide whether to approve same-sex marriage laws already blessed by their state legislatures, and in Maine they would decide whether to reverse themselves and allow gay couples to wed. In Minnesota, where gays and lesbians were playing defense against a proposed constitutional ban, the National Organization for Marriage had been reduced to pleading with companies to stay on the sidelines, as major employers like Target and General Mills declared the ban bad for business.
The marriage debate, which once largely divided Americans along secular and religious lines, was increasingly dividing religious Americans. The Episcopal Church and the conservative branch of American Judaism had recently blessed gay wedding ceremonies, and faith leaders from the denominations that favored allowing their gay and lesbian congregants to wed had been providing testimony and political cover in the state-by-state political battles.
Institutions like the Catholic Church and the Conference of Southern Baptist Evangelists remained staunch opponents. But young evangelical voters were increasingly supportive of the right of gays and lesbians to marry, causing some church leaders to rethink how best to talk about the issue, and it remained an open question as to how Catholics would divide on the question when it came time to vote. Quiet discussions with the Mormon Church, which had provided the bulk of the funding for Proposition 8, were beginning to bear fruit: It was not playing a funding role this cycle. And while the church’s position had not changed, it was moving toward what it called a more “Christ-like” approach, working to address high rates of gay Mormon youth homelessness and suicide, for instance, by calling on parents not to reject their gay children.
Back in California, the legislature had recently voted to outlaw conversion therapy as junk science. More prominent Republicans were stepping forward to endorse same-sex marriage, most recently former secretary of state Colin Powell. Straight allies from what had long been considered a bastion of homophobia—the professional sports locker room—were also joining the cause.
In Maryland, Baltimore Raven Brendon Ayanbadejo was so outspoken that Emmett C. Burns Jr., an African American state delegate opposed to same-sex marriage, pressured the football team’s owner to order his linebacker to cease and desist. That so angered Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe that he published a profanity-laced response, then jumped into the marriage campaign in his state.
“Your vitriolic hatred and bigotry make me ashamed and disgusted to think that you are in any way responsible for shaping policy at any level,” Kluwe wrote in an open letter to Burns that went viral. “I can assure you that gay people getting married will have zero effect on your life. They won’t come into your house and steal your children. They won’t magically turn you into a lustful cockmonster. They won’t even overthrow the government in an orgy of hedonistic debauchery because all of a sudden they have the same legal rights as the other 90 percent of our population—rights like Social Security benefits, child care tax credits, Family and Medical Leave to take care of loved ones, and COBRA healthcare for spouses and children. You know what having these rights will make gays? Full-fledged American citizens just like everyone else, with the freedom to pursue happiness and all that entails. Do the civil-rights struggles of the past 200 years mean absolutely nothing to you?”
In one sign of just how much the times were changing, rising hip-hop artist Frank Ocean came out about falling in love with a guy on his blog, and rather than having it derail his career in an industry known for intolerant lyrics filled with references to “faggots,” he was met with an outpouring of support. “Thank you,” hip-hop megastar Jay-Z wrote on his Life+Times Web site. “We are all made better by your decision to share publicly.” The album Ocean released shortly afterward debuted at number two on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart and earned six Grammy nominations.
Olson’s legal briefs would not take note of what happened that evening, win or lose, in part because it would be unseemly to suggest that the justices decide cases with a finger to the political wind, and also because the entire point of the case was that the rights of a minority should not be put up for a vote. The Constitution, with its guarantee of equal protection under the law and substantive due process embrace of fundamental rights that the Court sees as “implicit to the concept of ordered liberty,” trumps elections.
But earlier in the year, Justice Ginsburg had reiterated her concern that the Court had moved too fast in issuing its milestone Roe v. Wade decision. In what was reported as a possible window into her thinking on the Proposition 8 case, she told a symposium at Columbia Law School that it might have been better to decide the case more incrementally or delay hearing it altogether in order to allow the political debate over abortion that was under way more time to play out.
In Olson’s estimation, “atmospherically,” winning mattered, quite a bit.
Chad had invested $5.3 million into the four states where marriage was on the ballot, plus $145,000 to keep Iowa Supreme Court justice David Wiggins from becoming the fourth justice to be ousted in a retention vote over that court’s unanimous 2009 decision, which made the Hawkeye State the third in the nation to allow gays and lesbians to marry.
Maine looked solid. Ken Mehlman had been working closely there with Marc Solomon, the national campaign director for Evan Wolfson’s group, Freedom to Marry. Solomon felt an affinity for Mehlman; he too had been a closeted gay Republican, as an undergraduate student at Yale working to elect Bob Dole president and later as a staffer on the Hill. They had met to talk about how they might advance the cause together, and Solomon had come away thinking that Mehlman was a huge asset. “He was like, ‘You’re the expert, I’m just a foot soldier,’” Solomon recalled. “I took that with a grain of salt, because he’s a mastermind.”
Mehlman, as he had in New York, called Republican state lawmakers in all four states. He helped raise money. He also drafted the Republican microtargeting firm, TargetPoint, the one he had used to help reelect President Bush, to identify and persuade likely same-sex marriage supporters. Consumer data, such as the kinds of books or music a person buys, and public records containing information such as whether a person owns a pickup truck or a Volvo, were used to slice and dice the electorate. In Maine, TargetPoint created thirty-three different groups and, using predictive modeling, ranked them according to their likely support for same-sex marriage. Voters who might lean their way but were judged to be susceptible to the message of opponents were visited by door knockers, who were armed with particularized, focus-group-tested talking points designed to assuage their concerns. By election day, Solomon said they had knocked on the doors of “more than half of the movable middle.”
Maryland had started off looking unwinnable. It had the highest percentage of black voters of any state outside the South, and early polls showed a majority opposed to same-sex marriage. Freedom to Marry had urged donors to send their money elsewhere, where there was a bigger chance of success. But following President Obama’s endorsement, those numbers had flipped virtually overnight. There had been slippage since, as opponents worked the black churches. But prominent African American ministers like the Reverend Delman Coates of the Mt. Ennon Baptist Church in Prince George’s County were offering black voters a countervailing theological narrative, one that evoked the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. to argue that standing up for gays’ and lesbians’ right to marry was in keeping with the social justice traditions of evangelical black Christianity.
Chad, seeing promise, had funneled money to the NAACP, which was headquartered in Baltimore, to run a grassroots campaign. The civil rights group’s chairman emeritus, AFER advisory board member Julian Bond, had cut a radio ad as part of the effort. “I know a little something about fighting for what’s right and just,” Bond said in the ad. “I believe that people of faith understand this isn’t about any one religious belief—it’s
about protecting the civil right to make a lifelong commitment to the person you love.”
With the strong leadership of the state’s governor, Martin O’Malley, and Ben Jealous, the current president of the NAACP, it just might be enough. “It was an honor to fight by your side in this noble battle,” O’Malley e-mailed Chad after voting himself. “Whatever happens, we have made progress here and the future is bright.”
Minnesota and Washington could go either way. David Blankenhorn had been enlisted to cut a Minnesota campaign video. In it, he played off his famous Prop 8 trial admission that “we would be more American on the day we permit same-sex marriage than the day before.”
“There are powerful reasons to believe that we will be a better society if we include gay and lesbian people and their relationships as full and equal parts of society,” Blankenhorn said in the campaign video. “The good people of Minnesota should not do this.”
And a game-changing $2.5 million donation from Jeff Bezos, the founder of Seattle-based Amazon.com, had allowed for a state-of-the-art media blitz in Washington. The advertising campaign by Hilary Rosen and her firm SKDKnickerbocker, which had run the New York campaign, drew upon all the available polling data and lessons learned to date.
Mehlman liked to say that “a great Ford dealer does not say, ‘You were wrong to buy a GM.’ A great Ford dealer says, ‘GM is a lot like Ford, only Ford is better.’” That applied equally to same-sex marriage. Nobody wants to feel bad about themselves. Rather than tell voters why they were wrong to believe gays and lesbians should not marry, the key was to give them permission to change their minds. Straight people describing their own evolution, sharing why they had come to believe that family members and friends should be able to marry the person they love, just as they could, was one of the most effective ways to do that. Rosen’s campaign had emphasized that “journey” message, as had the campaigns in the three other states.
But over lunch earlier that day, Rosen told Chad that the internal overnight polling numbers had been trending down in recent days. “I’m worried,” she confided.
Maggie Gallagher was too. As Chad and Rosen were finishing up their lunch, the cofounder of NOM—the National Organization for Marriage—was sitting down to hers, at a restaurant nearby called D.C. Coast.
A heavyset woman with a dark, fringed bob, Gallagher was gay marriage’s most ardent foe, and she came to it from a deeply personal place. As a young woman at Yale University in the 1970s, she had accidentally gotten pregnant. She was already deeply conservative, eschewing the counterculture to join Yale’s conservative debating society, the Party of the Right, and she did not want an abortion. The father, though, wound up wanting little to do with her or her baby, and she had raised her boy on her own.
Listening to her small son’s make-believe stories about some imaginary millionaire father, and answering his questions about why he was not a part of their lives, had been heartbreaking, she said. “It was very challenging. Most days I’d come home and weep for ten minutes from the stress.”
The experience had led her to the view that children have a right to be raised by a married mother and father, and nothing her good friend and former employer David Blankenhorn was now saying about the disconnect between fighting same-sex marriage and achieving that goal could convince her otherwise.
What about the fact that her own son had grown up, gone to college, and done just fine?
“I was advantaged,” she said. “I had a lot of help. But when I ask myself, was I able to give my son as much as I was given? The answer is no.”
What about the children of gay parents? Don’t they have a right to grow up with married parents?
Gallagher paused and put down her fork before answering. She had gone to see 8, the play, because she liked the theater, and said it was amusing at some level to see herself portrayed as a zealot. She had once called same-sex marriage one of “the most destructive ideas of the sexual revolution” and compared losing the same-sex marriage battle to “losing American civilization.” But now she chose her words carefully.
If it could be definitively proven that children of gay couples do better when their parents are able to marry, she said slowly, that would pose a “morally troubling” question, because “you have to care for all children. I’d have to rethink my position.
“What I’d really want is two generations of a society which adopts gay marriage as the norm, and manages to sustain a reasonably functional marriage institution. Then I’d say I was wrong.”
Of course, if she and NOM had their way, no such data would exist, because gay marriage would be banned everywhere, a tension she glided over as she made her election night predictions. She was hopeful, she said, that when the votes were all counted later that evening, Minnesota would enact the constitutional prohibition on the ballot there. Maryland and Washington, though less likely, could also tilt her way. But she acknowledged that Blankenhorn was right about one thing: Opponents of same-sex marriage were losing the war of ideas.
Most of the National Organization for Marriage’s budget these days came from just a few megadonors. Onetime supporters were abandoning the cause. Thanks in part to the efforts of Ken Mehlman, fewer GOP elected officials were willing to appear on news programs to speak out against same-sex marriage, while prominent Republican commentators like former Bush White House communications director Nicole Wallace were out making the case for it. And it was getting harder and harder to find platforms that could be used to persuade this new generation of voters that, as Gallagher put it, “this vision of marriage that I have is a good thing.”
Conservative outlets like the Drudge Report, so influential on the right in other areas, covered developments on the same-sex marriage front matter-of-factly, with none of the lathered outrage they worked up for, say, the president’s health care overhaul.
“You don’t even get on Fox News if you are opposed to gay marriage,” she complained. “Basically we don’t get a message out anymore unless we are willing to pay for it.”
“How are you doing,” Jerome asked, patting Chad’s knee. “Is your throat okay?”
“I’m good,” Chad said.
It was a little after 7 P.M., and they were in Chad’s Ford Escape driving over to pump up the crowd that had gathered at the restaurant where Chad was holding an election night party for supporters. Checking his e-mail, Chad saw that Maryland governor O’Malley had sent in an update from the field.
“It’s happening,” Chad said as they pulled up to the restaurant. “The governor has exit polls showing us two points up.”
Inside, the noise was deafening. Hundreds of people—donors, supporters, and staffers—many of whom Chad was still getting to know, had come to watch the results now beginning to flash across a huge television screen. Chad stuffed his hands in his pockets and stood still, just watching for a few moments. Election day was the one day over which he had no control. Then, shedding his shyness, he climbed up on a riser and grabbed a microphone.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m feeling good. How ’bout you?”
The crowd cheered.
“We have an opportunity to finally win marriage equality at the ballot box, and we will take that talking point away from our opponents,” he said. “All the breaking news is it’s too close to call, but I feel optimistic. I feel optimistic, because of you!”
Back at headquarters a half hour later, Chad grabbed a seat at one of the long tables in the conference room. Around him, staffers updated the whiteboard as states were called in the presidential race. Chad absently clicked and unclicked the pen he was holding. Open. Shut. Open, shut. The back of his chair tipped back and forth as his right foot did a tap dance of its own, the way it always did when he was nervous.
Kristina, from the president and first lady’s suite in Chicago, sent him a text. Ohio now looked like a lock, according to the president’s campaign team. Though the race had ye
t to be called, they were all just waiting for Mitt Romney to concede. Tammy Baldwin was declared the winner in Wisconsin, making history, and as more Senate races were called, it seemed clear that the chamber would remain in Democratic control.
Chad conferred by phone with Mehlman, who was in New York watching the returns come in with friends. Olson had already gone to bed. He had played Joe Biden in debate prep with Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan, and had even packed a bag in the event that Romney needed his services in a recount. He was hoping for the best when it came to the marriage initiatives, but he was a Republican, and he had not felt like staying up to watch his party get routed.
“Wake me up if anything changes,” he told his wife, Lady, somewhat grumpily.
Chad texted Richard Carlbom, the manager of the campaign to defeat the constitutional amendment in Minnesota. “Richard says it’s going to be close,” he announced.
In Maryland, with more than half the vote counted, they were winning 51 percent to 49 percent, a staffer announced. Heavily black Baltimore County was in, and more than half of liberal Montgomery County was still out. O’Malley e-mailed that they should hold off making a announcement, but it was looking good.
“Jesus,” Chad said.
Then, at 10:12 P.M., NBC projected that President Barack Obama had won a second term in office, with just over 50 percent of the vote.
“The world is not a crazy place,” Jerome said to Chad.
Obama had swept most of the battleground states, riding a diverse wave of support to overcome a still foundering economy and crises at home and abroad, from a disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the Arab Spring roiling the Middle East.
