The NPR Politics Podcast - Why Was Marriage At The Center Of The Fight For LGBT Civil Rights?

Episode Date: December 28, 2021

In the latest NPR Politics Book Club, Danielle Kurtzleben talks with journalist Sasha Issenberg whose book The Engagement chronicles the path of marriage equality from a fringe issue to one of the nation's central civil rights fights. His book explores the complex ways that money and disagreements among activists shape political movements in the United States.This episode: demographics and culture correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben.Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it is the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover demographics and culture. And today we are doing another installment of our book club series. And we're talking about a book that's about both demographics and culture. Sasha Eisenberg's The Engagement is an exhaustive, deep, really kind of monumental look at the long road to marriage equality in the United States, from its early beginnings in places like Hawaii and Massachusetts, to the landmark 2015 Supreme Court ruling that made same-sex marriage legal across the country. As with all of our book club

picks, we have read this book along with you, and we have discussed it in our podcast Facebook group. And today, I have the privilege of posing your questions, and mine, to Sasha Eisenberg. He's a journalist who has written for an array of publications. It's a list too long to get into. And he's also written three prior books, including 2012's The Victory Lab, about modern political campaigns. Sasha, welcome. Thanks, Danielle. Really glad to be here. Yes. Well, we have a lot to get into. So let's start with a very basic question. Why was this book important to write to you? Was the goal just to capture, lay out the history of same-sex marriage, or was it something

bigger? I came to realize as I was working on it that this was, in a certain way, a kind of history of the American culture wars over the last generation, basically over my lifetime. You know, I'm 41 years old. I started working on this 10 years ago. And it was at the point when we were starting to talk about this as the defining civil rights movement of my generation. And I realized I'd been alive for the whole life of this as an issue. And I did not understand how it had emerged and in many ways eclipsed not only other concerns to the LGBT community, but lots of other points of sort of conflict or tension within our politics and came in many ways to dominate American social policy

debates for much of my adult life. Also gets at just how even while people were fighting for marriage equality, many of them were kind of they were in the same boat, but rowing in different directions is maybe a way of putting it. What are some good examples in your mind of exactly how strategy got so messy during the same sex marriage debate? Yeah, I mean, so, you know, one thing that I think we as political journalists do terribly and are often unaware, I think, of how terribly we do it is write about conflicts within movements. So, you know, you'll read or hear stories that say the labor movement is doing X or evangelical clergy will realize that they spend much more time often bickering among themselves than they do necessarily thinking about how to work in a unified way. And as I dug into this history, that really became clear. So, you know, what we would call

the gay rights movement or the LGBT community, that's a very big coalition, you know, and there are a whole lot of both different constituencies, you know, gay men and lesbians who are invested in marriage, bisexual, transgender people who often could marry the people that they that they loved, regardless of what state law was about marriage. And within the LGBT community, there are a lot of different policy concerns. 1990s when this debate emerged, and there were people whose, you know, top priority was desegregating, you know, military and government service so openly gay people could serve, or who wanted just basic non-discrimination protections, writing sexual orientation into hate crimes laws. story is not just how ultimately gay marriage campaigners triumphed over opponents of same-sex marriage, but how within their own LGBT community and political movement, they raised the issue of marriage so that it went higher and higher on the list of priorities. And frankly, a lot of that was driven by money. I told the story of a circle of very wealthy donors led by Tim Gill, who had been a software pioneer. He started the company Quark, the desktop publishing company. with a massive pile of cash and decides that a lot of his philanthropy is going to be about gay rights. And marriage is the issue that resonates most with him, more than employment discrimination, more than this hate crimes question, whatever it may be. of like-minded donors, almost all of whom are men who have either made their money through founding companies or through inheritance, who are very concerned about marriage. I think in part

because very wealthy people spend a lot of time worrying about estate planning, and they build an infrastructure that is focused on marriage above or maybe at the expense of some of these other priorities and help bring together some of the leading lawyers and strategists in the movement. And I write about a meeting that they had in Jersey City, New Jersey in the spring of 2005 when a lot of gay rights activists saw their movement, saw this cause at a low point. And they set out a path to get a winning case before the Supreme Court within 20 years. And what that did was it forced other established gay rights groups like the Human Rights Campaign or the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force

to adjust their priorities because they realized that the major money within their community cared about marriage. And if they weren't doing marriage work, they were going to lose out on some of that funding. I want to switch to another institution. Let's talk about the Supreme Court, which, of course, is a huge part of this book. This book really gets at the complex relationship between the Supreme Court and public opinion. And I was hoping you could talk more about that because this is a thing that I'm always curious about. Is it something justices pay attention to, and how does it affect them? We have a tough time figuring out what justices pay attention to, because they're often not in real-time public about their thoughts. But all the folks who are working on this issue

operated from the assumption that the justices were not operating in some sort of, you know, vacuum, purposeful or inadvertent, in which they were oblivious to what was going on in the world around them. And so in that 2005 strategy meeting I mentioned, you know, they map out a 20-year path to a successful Supreme Court decision. So what is seen as wildly optimistic at that point is getting before the Supreme Court in 2025. What they sort of assumed was that the court would be willing to take bold stands for civil rights as it has in its history, but that they did not want to be seen as working from a minority position, that the court wanted to be in a position where they were happy sort of reigning in outlier states as they did when they struck down school segregation, for example, or those interracial

marriage bans, but they did not want to be in a position where they were seen imposing policy on a majority of the country on a sensitive issue. Why is it that the court is worried about public opinion if they're nominally ruling on constitutionality? Why should it matter that Anthony Kennedy sees a headline about a Gallup poll over his cornflakes? Why should it matter that Anthony Kennedy sees a headline about a Gallup poll over his cornflakes? Why should that affect him? I mean, so the question of should is one. I mean, why does it is because, you know, people have said the court gets its legitimacy from the other branches of government, from state and local governments, and thus from the public. And so, you know, whatever the joke

was that the Supreme Court doesn't have any armies, well, you know, they have no ability to enforce their decisions with anything other than both the public and governments that will go along and accept them. And so, you And so one of the things I certainly expected after the Supreme Court ruled in 2015, that there would be more examples of local resistance in conservative states, mostly in the South and the rural West, where I thought there would be county clerks, county executives, governors, state attorneys general, who said, we will not enforce this order. And ultimately, almost all of them sort of dropped their opposition pretty quickly. And I think that is a sign of a legitimacy that the court has earned over years by not taking decisions that public opinion and local politicians would not be willing to sustain. And I think that's the kind of big

deal that we've had since the founding of the republic that gives court decisions their force. All right. I have a lot more questions for Sasha, but for now, we're going to take a quick break. And we're back. Another big question I think a lot of us have continually had is how exactly did opinion on same-sex marriage change? Because it has swung so decisively towards marriage equality during our lifetimes. Yeah, this is one of the things that sort of drew me into this mystery 10 years ago was I was having a lot of conversations with pollsters who would tell me they had not seen opinion on a single issue move as quickly as it moved on on marriage. And at that point, attitudes were moving four or five percentage points a year, only in one direction. Those people now, in part, I think because of pop culture and general cultural acceptance, feel more comfortable coming out than they did a generation ago. But people are realizing that

they know people who are gay and social scientists call this contact theory, the idea that we become more sympathetic or friendly to the concerns of people once we've had personal contact with them. And it becomes a lot easier to be open, I think, to the arguments for same-sex marriage and more resistant to the arguments that were made against it when you know somebody in your life who is gay or lesbian and see the fundamental humanity of them lesbian and see, you know, the fundamental humanity of them and in a certain way, the fundamental modesty of the demand to for them to share their life with somebody they love. I want to switch gears here and make sure we get to our listener questions because we got some really excellent ones. There is one that we got from various listeners, a sort of flavor of it from various listeners, including Vidya Ravella. She asked, what's the action plan for all the legal challenges that

are expected if there's a concerted effort to overturn this right? As is expected, this is the next fight, particularly if Roe is overturned this summer. So before we even get to Vidya's question, maybe let's back up and ask, how likely do you think it is that Obergefell could be overturned? Is that a pretty durable ruling or could a concerted effort back that up? I do not think that there is any serious likelihood that the core holding of Obergefell, that the fundamental right to marry should extend to same-sex couples, is in doubt. And I think a large part of that is that it is politically unappealing. There's not a political demand for it the way there is a political demand for a change in abortion laws around the country. And I certainly understand why the fear is there for folks. But I think it's

worth looking at the intersection of law and politics. Since the Obergefell decision, there were three Supreme Court justices appointed by a Republican president. Many people wanted to know their positions on Roe v. Wade. Nobody cared their positions on Obergefell. Groups are focused on other issues now. And once you get to a point where justices see 70% of the country looking the other way, regardless of what their sort of personal preferences might be, I think that that becomes a really significant impediment to them taking up this cause. Does that make marriage equality a unique issue in that it's much harder to make the case that a same-sex marriage infringes upon your personal rights if you do not have a same-sex marriage. It's harder to make that case than to make the case that, as abortion opponents do,

that an abortion hurts someone or that affirmative action takes something away from someone. Is marriage equality just kind of in its own class? You can look back at the sort of history of social movements in the United States on one hand as these sort of contests over public values, over justice, liberty, freedom, privacy, fairness. But you can also often read them very clearly as competitions for scarce resources. And so, you know, when women demanded property rights, husbands and fathers saw that as a as a challenge to their to their wealth. power. Any effort to expand rights or opportunities for immigrants has been seen by native-born people as a threat to their jobs and public benefits. Desegregation of schools set up this rivalry for places in neighborhood institutions on which people saw their property values implicated. As you say, affirmative action, and maybe in the purest sense, sets up a rivalry for jobs or places in academic institutions.

Even the Americans with Disabilities Act forced landlords or developers to shift some of their budgets to paying for things that they might not have wanted to pay for. In every case, the majority had to give something up, something tangible to accede to the demands of justice by a minority. And I think that that is a really important difference here. And I think made it very difficult to sustain opposition to this because there weren't really stakeholders on the other side. Well, I could ask you more hours and hours worth of questions, but we're going to have to leave it here. Sasha, thank you so much for joining us. This has been great. I really enjoyed it. And thanks to everybody for sending in questions. Again, join our Facebook group, Speaking of Questions, at n.pr slash politics group to see more of our discussion with Sasha about his book and to be ready for when we pick our next book club pick

so you can ask that author questions about their book. You will not want when we pick our next book club pick so you can ask that author questions about their book. You will not want to miss it. I'm already very excited. Until then, I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, and thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.