Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality (37 page)

C
had almost didn’t ask the question. A little over a month had passed since the West Coast premier of
8,
and he was cohosting a small gathering for Vice President Joe Biden at the Los Angeles home of HBO executive Michael Lombardo and his husband, actor Sonny Ward. Chad was working hard to reelect President Obama—he was one of his top fund-raisers—but he had given up hope that the president would embrace marriage equality before the November election.

The previous year, Chad had attended a high-dollar fund-raiser for the president at the St. Regis Hotel. “How can we help you evolve more quickly?” he had asked the president. Obama’s answer—that Chad ought to be able to tell from the actions he had taken on DOMA and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell the direction he was headed—was heartening in substance but noncommittal in terms of timing.

“
The sense I got from him was, ‘Give me credit—look what I already have done,’” Chad said afterward.

Three events had cemented that impression. The first was a private conversation Chad had with First Lady Michelle Obama during a Los Angeles fund-raiser he cohosted for the campaign in June 2011.
Reporting back to the AFER team afterward, he said the first lady’s message was clear: “Hang in there with us, and we’ll be with you after the election.” Days later, White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer, Chad’s close friend, was asked about the
president’s stated support for same-sex marriage on that old 1996 questionnaire from back in the days when Obama was just an unknown state senate candidate. Pfeiffer first claimed it had been filled out by someone else, then, after it was pointed out that Obama had signed it, claimed Obama was “really referring to civil unions.” And then there was the president’s tepid states’ rights response to the passage of same-sex marriage in New York that same month.

More recently, as incoming president of the largest gay rights organization in the country, Chad had been invited to a White House State Dinner. He and Jerome had been seated at the president’s table, along with the guest of honor, British prime minister David Cameron, a conservative leading the push to legalize same-sex marriage in Britain. There were still places in the world where being gay was a crime, punishable by up to life in prison or even death by public stoning. Still, nine countries, including deeply Catholic nations like Argentina and Portugal, now recognized same-sex marriages, as did parts of Brazil and Mexico City, and Chad had talked to both leaders about the growing trend. But there was little to indicate that Obama was ready to take such a bold step here at home.

Why ask the vice president about the administration’s position on marriage equality, Chad thought as he sat waiting for Biden to address the group he had gathered together at Lombardo and Ward’s home in Los Angeles, when he already knew the answer? Instead, he planned to press Biden on why the administration was refusing to take a far less controversial step: Just days before the event, the White House had infuriated gay rights activists with an announcement that while the president continued to support stalled legislation that would prohibit employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, he would not be signing an executive order banning federal contractors from engaging in it.

But as Chad watched the hosts’ two children, ages four and seven, press flowers and a note into Biden’s hand, he changed his mind. They were sitting in the home of two married men, with their children. The vice president should have to answer to them. When it was Chad’s turn to speak, he decided to make it personal.

“When you came in tonight, you met Michael and Sonny, and their two beautiful kids that they’re the married parents of. And I wonder if you can just sort of talk in a frank, honest way about your own personal views as it relates to equality, but specifically as it relates to marriage equality.”

It was clear from Biden’s body language that the question made him uncomfortable. His public position was no different than the president’s. As a senator, he had voted for DOMA. As a presidential candidate, he said he supported civil unions. And as vice president, he had studiously towed the administration’s evolving line, except to note that that there was a growing national consensus that made same-sex marriage inevitable.

The vice president stood up and flipped his barstool around, so that the back was between him and the rest of the guests, then straddled it. He looked almost pained, Chad would later remark to Lance Black, who was standing next to him.

“I look at those two beautiful kids—as a matter of fact, your daughter said, ‘Can we go out and play? Can you come outside with me?’ They’re the only good thing in the whole world,” Biden began. “I wish everybody could see this. All you got to do is look in the eyes of those kids. And no one can wonder, no one can wonder whether or not they are cared for and nurtured and loved and reinforced. And folks, what’s happening is, everybody is beginning to see it.

“Think about how much has changed. And think about what you guys—and one of you in particular—did,” Biden continued, referencing Chad and the case. “Things are changing so rapidly, it’s going to become a political liability in the near term for an individual to say, ‘I oppose gay marriage.’ Mark my words.”

Having started down this road, he seemed incapable of stopping. People his kids’ age could not understand why gays and lesbians should not be allowed to marry, he said. “‘I mean, what’s the problem, Dad?’

“And my job—our job—is to keep this momentum rolling to the inevitable.”

The answer stunned everyone in the room, even top aides who were used to the gaffe-prone vice president’s habit of going off script.

“He’d been answering that question the same way for years,” said one. “But being in that house, seeing that couple with their kids, the switch flipped. It was like his hard drive got erased.”

Sitting in his West Wing office more than a year and a half later, the vice president said he could still picture that moment “like it was ten minutes ago.”

“It was one of the most poignant questions I had ever been asked in my life,” Biden said. “The only other time—it ranks up there when this little girl in Afghanistan was looking at me about two weeks after the Taliban fell, and I was in Kabul, and she looked at me with those beautiful hazel eyes. And she said—I said, ‘Well, I have to leave now,’ and she said, ‘You can’t. You can’t. America can’t leave. I want to be a doctor.’

“He was standing against the wall behind the couch after I had answered all these questions with the gay leaders from the Los Angeles area, and he just looked at me and, like my mom would say, out of the mouths of babes comes gems of wisdom—it was the most innocent. He said, ‘Well, let me just ask you, Mr. Vice President. What do you think of us?’ And that comes—‘What do you think of us?’ And it was like wow, whoa.”

Biden thought back to a summer afternoon when he was in his twenties. He was sitting on the beach with his dad and some friends when an older gay couple walked over to say hello. His father, a realtor, had sold them their penthouse apartment. The elder Biden got up, gave them both a hug, and said, “Let me introduce you to my family.” One of his buddies made a derogatory remark about the couple, and his father’s reaction to it had stayed with him always.

“He says, ‘As soon as they get in the apartment, you go up to the ninth floor. You walk up and knock on the door, and you apologize to them,’” the vice president recalled. When his friend refused, his father said, “Well, goddamn it, you’re not welcome in my house anymore.”

And he thought about another day, years later, when his own son had looked up at him quizzically after seeing two men headed off to work kiss each other goodbye on a busy street corner. “I said, ‘They love each other, honey,’ and that was it. So it was never anything that was a struggle in my mind.”

The truth was that, other than being concerned as a Catholic that churches not be forced to perform ceremonies for same-sex couples, “I didn’t see a problem with it,” and never had: “It wasn’t like I had an epiphany, as we Catholics say, one day, ‘Oh my God, I guess there should be gay marriage.’” So when Chad asked the question the way he did, in the privacy of that home in Los Angeles, Biden decided to go ahead and say what he actually thought.

The encounter was still fresh in the vice president’s mind when David Gregory, the host of the Sunday talk show
Meet the Press,
asked him during a pretaped interview fifteen days later on Friday, May 4, whether his own views
on gay marriage had evolved. Biden talked about the couple he had just met in Los Angeles and, without mentioning Chad’s name, the question he had been asked, and then he gave pretty much the same answer.

“What this is all about is a simple proposition,” he told Gregory. “Who do you love? Who do you love, and will you be loyal to the person you love? And that’s what people are finding out is what all marriages at their root are about. Whether they’re marriage is of lesbians or gay men or heterosexuals.”

“Are you comfortable with same-sex marriage now?” Gregory pressed.

“I, I—look. I am vice president of the United States. The president sets the policy. I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying one another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties.”

Only this time, Biden was not speaking at a private event, closed to the press. The interview, which took place on a Friday, was embargoed, but that Sunday it would be broadcast to the nation.

“I think you may have just gotten in front of the president on gay marriage,” his communications director, Shailagh Murray, told him on the limo ride back from the studio.

Several months before his vice president spoke his mind, the president had gathered together his senior advisers. With a push by progressives to add marriage equality to the Democratic Party platform, the issue was not going away. If asked again for his position, the president said, he wanted to answer honestly.

“
For as long as I’ve known him, he has never been comfortable with his position on this,” said David Axelrod, one of Obama’s closest and longest-serving aides and a senior campaign strategist for the reelection campaign. “The politics of authenticity, not just the politics, but his own sense of authenticity, required that he finally step forward. And the president understood that.”

Obama’s opposition to same-sex marriage had always stretched credulity, and Pfeiffer’s acrobatics over that old 1996 questionnaire the previous June had caused eye rolling even inside the White House. Since then, it had become increasingly clear to the president and his team that maintaining the “evolving,”
“grappling,” “struggling” status quo had a real downside as he headed into the final lap of the presidential election.

Internal campaign polling showed that same-sex marriage was a touchstone issue for likely Obama voters under the age of thirty, right up there with climate change. The campaign needed those voters to turn out in the record numbers they had four years earlier, a difficult enough task in an economy where many were having difficulty finding jobs, and Obama’s refusal to say he favored allowing gays and lesbians to wed was one of the biggest impediments.

But Obama’s aides did not want the president answering a random question off the cuff. If he was going to endorse same-sex marriage before the election, it needed to be done right, at a time of his choosing, using language designed to minimize any political fallout.

David Plouffe, a senior adviser to the president and the manager of his 2008 campaign, reached out to AFER’s Ken Mehlman for some across-the-aisle advice. Mehlman had offered his assistance earlier in the year, when Obama had invited him to lunch after the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Obama and Mehlman had attended Harvard Law School together, and over salmon and a salad in the dining room just off the Oval Office, they had talked at length about the politics of same-sex marriage.

Mehlman strongly believed that the way voters perceive a candidate’s character is more important than where a candidate stands on issues. In 2004, he told Obama, President Bush ran a simple, character-based campaign: You may not agree with me on everything, but you know where I stand. In 2008, Obama had been elected because people viewed him as an idealist who would put politics aside and do what was right. Coming out in favor of allowing gays and lesbians to wed, Mehlman told the president, would remind people why they had elected him by reinforcing those attributes. “
The notion that politically this is going to kill you—I don’t buy it,” Mehlman recalled saying.