Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality (39 page)

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. Are 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.

O
ver 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.

More important, the plaintiffs’ stories had been heard. Close to a quarter million people had viewed the day-of YouTube live stream of
8,
and three-quarters of a million more had watched the taped version since. Three million had listened to an audio version of
8
on National Public Radio stations. It had been performed by community, university, and high school theater groups 186 times and counting. There were even plans for readings abroad, but at the urging of Mehlman, the team was currently focused on organizing productions in the four states where marriage would be on the ballot in November. The war room, thanks to a foundation grant, now had eight full-time staffers and consultants, and a fully realized social media machine, with 125,292 Facebook and nearly 14,890 Twitter followers, and celebrities like Hilary Duff retweeting case-related news to huge audiences. By contrast, ProtectMarriage.com’s social media presence was virtually
nonexistent, and the group’s supporters had recently sent out a plea to donors for more money, saying legal costs had topped $12 million.

“When the Southern Poverty Law Center sued the KKK, the goal wasn’t to win—it was to bankrupt them,” Chad happily told his team after reading about the opposition’s financial woes. “They’re losing the case, spending money, and more states are coming into our column. In politics and in war, when you are on the defensive, you are losing.”

That is not to say that there weren’t huge challenges ahead at the Human Rights Campaign. Richard Socarides, President Clinton’s former adviser on gay and lesbian issues and a friend of Chad’s, summed them up this way: “
Hiring Chad was like hiring the general of an opposing army. This was someone who refused to go along just because things had always been done in a certain way, who wasn’t afraid to upend the status quo and take on powerful interests. But he still has a lot of enemies who are praising him now, but looking for an excuse to take him down.”

Mehlman had plenty of advice, telling Chad that he needed to avoid becoming the master of a feckless bureaucracy, instead of its “kickass strategist.” The organization needed to be more bipartisan, with less focus on influencing Washington and more on influencing society and changing the reality on the ground, he counseled. It needed to be more welcoming to people who changed their mind on same-sex marriage or other gay rights issues. But most of all, Mehlman advised, the organization needed to learn how to wield power. To that end, he had arranged for Chad to visit with Howard Kohr, the chief executive director of what he considered to be one of the most powerful and effective groups in Washington: AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

“Obama did what politicians do, which is he followed the electorate,” Mehlman said. “So don’t say, ‘It’s brave that Obama came out in favor of marriage equality.’ That’s counterproductive. The point is it’s good policy and good politics. The pro-Israel lobby and the National Rifle Association do not go around saying, ‘Thank you, you’re brave.’ They say, ‘Damn right—what you did is in your best interest.’”

Chad was excited, but it was hard to say goodbye to his old life. The Human Rights Campaign was headquartered in Washington, D.C. “Wait a minute—you’re moving? This is sad,” Michele Reiner had said when she learned the
news. Now her husband grabbed a microphone. He was not about to let Chad move across the country without a proper send-off. Chad was standing next to Jerome, who had agreed to give up his job and move with him; he’d find another one, he said, with a serenity Chad marveled at. “Would you just stress out more?” Chad sometimes joked.

“I love Chad to death,” Rob began. “I’m gonna say this now, and he’s hearing it for the first time. If there ever is going to be—and there will be at some point—the first gay president, you’re looking at him.”

Chad grabbed Jerome’s arm so hard that he looked down at him. “Stop pinching me,” Jerome whispered.

“I don’t know what else to do with all my emotions,” Chad whispered back.

Chad arrived for his last day at the AFER office the following morning, wearing a hoodie over a pressed blue button-down. His office on Sunset Boulevard overlooking the famed Hollywood sign was bare. The photos of a far younger version of himself, sitting on Air Force One with President Clinton and looking very 1990s with more hair than he had now, had been packed away. So had his vintage “Fight Briggs” political poster; it came from a 1978 campaign in California, the first to beat back a proposed initiative to ban gays and lesbians from teaching in the state’s public schools since Anita Bryant had started the national effort with her “Save the Children” campaign in Florida. His consulting business would be taken over by Felix Schein, a former journalist turned political consultant who had taken over for Kristina when she left.

Jerome was home, supervising the movers.

“I love you,” Chad texted.

“Stay away!” Jerome wrote back.

Kris and Sandy were in the conference room, waiting for the Ninth Circuit’s ruling on whether it would rehear the case en banc with Michele Reiner, Adam, and the expanded war room team. Jeff and Paul had to work, but Jeff was keeping in touch via Facebook. “Tick, tick, tick, tick,” he wrote.

Rob was thinking about making a movie about the case, but if asked, Michele told Kris and Sandy, “Just say, ‘who knows, blah-blah.’” It was exciting,
and both could see the public education potential, but the prospect also made them a little nervous.

Things had been going well in the Perry-Stier household, with even Sandy’s mom beginning to accept her relationship. When Sandy’s dad had died, following a long bout with dementia, her mother had surprised her by listing Kris, along with the spouses of his other children, in the obit. And on a trip home to Iowa the previous Thanksgiving, her mother had opened up during a quiet moment in the kitchen.

“
She said, ‘I was listening to a talk show about gay marriage, and I think civil unions, that kind of makes sense because marriage is something that belongs in the church,’” Sandy recalled. “I said, ‘But Mom, that’s not the same. Anything that treats people differently is discrimination. Marriage doesn’t have anything to do with religion. Think about water fountains in Georgia.’ And she said, ‘That makes sense.’”

But
8
had opened up some old wounds. Both women had been with other people before they were with each other. Kris’s ex, Spencer and Elliott’s other mom, Adria-Ann McMurray, had watched the play on YouTube. To keep it simple, she had been written out of the script, and both boys had been worried about how “AA,” as they called her, would react. “I’d go into my own head and say, ‘I wonder what AA would feel about this, how she’d feel watching this scene,’” Elliott recalled afterward. And she had been upset, especially when Sandy’s character read her lines about bringing the twins to their first day in kindergarten, when in fact it had been her and Kris.

“She probably thought she did,” Elliott told her, “but that’s not really fair to you.” “
Well, that’s okay,” she’d said, but Elliott could tell it wasn’t, not really.

Tom, Sandy’s oldest boy, had gone to both the Broadway and Los Angeles productions of
8
. He was twenty-three, handsome with an unruly surfer’s mop of sun-bleached hair, and hoping to go to film school. Sandy thought he would enjoy mingling with the celebrities and watching how the play came together. And he had. But in New York, when the woman playing Sandy, reading her testimony during the dress rehearsal, said she had never loved anyone else before Kris, he had fled outside to the sidewalk.

“
It just crushed me,” he said afterward. “I was like, ‘Fuck.’ I started crying. That’s a lie. That’s a lie. And if it isn’t a lie, it’s even worse.”

He and his younger brother, Frank, had never gotten along well with Kris. It wasn’t because of the whole lesbian thing. Both had friends who were gay and believed that Cooper’s arguments against allowing them to marry were, as Tom put it, “bogus.” Theirs was the more mundane heartache of divorce. They were several years older than Spencer and Elliott, and had been going to Catholic school in Alameda when Kris and Sandy got together. Their dad, in a losing battle with his alcohol demons, had moved in with his parents, and they moved to Berkeley with their mom for high school.