Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality (42 page)

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 yet 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.

And while he had lost North Carolina, fears that his support for same-sex marriage would hurt him had proven unfounded. Black voters had turned out in force, and an Edison Research exit poll found that 51 percent supported same-sex marriage. Obama won the Catholic vote and crushed Romney among Hispanic voters; exit polls showed that both groups favored same-sex marriage by sizable margins.

“It was the bomb that did not go off,” Dan Pfeiffer, Chad’s friend and a top adviser to the president, said afterward. Obama’s decision to come out in favor
of same-sex marriage so close to the election had, Pfeiffer admitted, given him “a bit of a heart attack,” but in the end, “the fact that it was a nonissue is maybe the most gratifying thing of all.

“
Society has just changed.”

Indeed, it was a net positive. It did little to motivate Romney’s base; in exit polling of religious conservatives done by Republican operative Ralph Reed, the founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, abortion showed up among their top five concerns, but same-sex marriage did not.

Obama’s endorsement did, however, motivate the president’s base. Exit polling done on behalf of the media found that three out of four Obama voters said his embrace of same-sex marriage made them “much more” likely to support him. Postelection analysis would credit large youth turnout in four crucial swing states with helping secure the president’s reelection. In Florida, for instance, Obama won 66 percent of voters under the age of thirty. Across the country, LGBT voters also turned out in numbers, comprising 5 percent of the electorate, up from under 4 percent in 2008, and they broke even more decisively for Obama this time around, giving him 77 percent of their vote.

“AP is reporting that Maine makes history for marriage equality,” a staffer announced.

“
Woohoo
,” Chad cheered. “That’s state number one.”

“The
Washington Post
is reporting that Maryland passes same-sex marriage,” said another staffer.