The way we normally tell stories about civil rights in this country is that there’s a push for civil rights, and then there’s a reactionary backlash to that—which has effects of its own. But one of the interesting things about your book, I thought, was that in a way you’re saying that the backlash to gay marriage helped the gay-marriage cause, or pushed it along. And the normal story we tell is reversed in some way.
Yeah. So, this big victory at the Hawaii Supreme Court leads to the Defense of Marriage Act, which is clearly a form of backlash against this significant, but local, victory in Hawaii. Then all of a sudden Congress and the President are preëmptively defining marriage for one of the first times in federal law. And we see a slight hit to the polling support for gay marriage. Something similar happens in 2003 after the Massachusetts Supreme Court rules in favor of marriage: public opinion dips again, and you get an active push for a federal marriage amendment eventually supported by the Bush White House, and a blossoming of the state-level constitutional bans. And I think you can look at what happened in California in 2008, where the California Supreme Court orders that same-sex couples have the right to marry and, within six months, Proposition 8 has passed at the ballot box, taking away that right.
So there were examples of backlash all over this story, but, over the longer arc of this, the backlash ended up proving counterproductive. So, in the mid-nineteen-nineties, anti-gay activists on the mainland who respond to this court decision in Hawaii end up unifying a gay-rights movement that had been uninvested in marriage as a cause and fractured ideologically over it as a strategic proposition—over the trade-offs, in terms of incremental gains that would have to be put aside in the quest for marriage rights. And, all of a sudden, some gay-rights activists who had been principled opponents of seeking marriage decide that, because their opponents want to deny them that right, they feel basically obliged to fight for it.
It’s not a bad argument, right? It’s, like, people want to take something away from you, you should damn well want to fight for it.
Yeah. It’s also the nature of coalition politics. And gays and lesbians and bisexuals and transgender people were in a coalition, and their opponents decided that what was within that coalition had been a niche issue but was now going to be the primary area in which they were going to fight. They basically ended up inadvertently baiting the whole coalition into defending something they hadn’t wanted to defend. Then the level at which this conflict could be resolved changed.