by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Marc Solomon
Genius, the
great inventor Thomas A. Edison was fond of saying, is “two percent inspiration
and 98 percent perspiration.” The same could be said of political and social
activism. That’s the lesson vividly brought home in Marc Solomon’s new book Winning
Marriage. A 20-year veteran of the struggle
for marriage equality for same-sex couples and currently the national campaign
director for Freedom to Marry, Solomon has seen such a rapid growth of support
for the cause that people who used to tell him it was “impossible” are now
convinced it’s “inevitable.” But, as Solomon explained both in his book and his
December 5, 2014 appearance at the San Diego Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,
Transgender Community Center to promote it, “impossible” and “inevitable” are
both dangerous words to use about a movement because they discourage people
from doing the hard work needed to change a lost cause into a winning one.
“I wanted to
show that campaign work — and civil rights work, ultimately — is hard work,”
Solomon said at the Center. “It’s sort of a slog. We need visionaries, we need
a big principle to be fighting for, but when it comes down to it it’s going out
and talking to people whom you’d rather not be talking to. It’s having these
difficult conversations with people. It’s not holding rallies in Hillcrest;
it’s going out to Riverside and San Bernardino Counties and having tough
conversations with voters and talking about why marriage is important to you.
Here in California, it was picking up after the most devastating loss that we all
felt” — the passage of Proposition 8 in November 2008, which canceled marriage
equality in this state for nearly five years — “and people like Jacqueline
Palmer with Equality California, who started organizing volunteers in San Diego
to go out to those suburban and rural communities, and having those
conversations, engaging people at the door and building ongoing popular
support.”
Solomon divided
his book into five major sections: the campaign to preserve the Massachusetts
court decision for marriage equality, announced November 18, 2003, from four
years’ worth of efforts by opponents to reverse it either in the legislature or
at the ballot box; the effort to get the New York state legislature, including
a Republican-dominated State Senate, to pass a marriage equality bill in 2011;
the steady triumph of anti-marriage initiatives at the polls in 2004 and 2008
until hard work by activists in four states — Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and
Washington — reversed the trend and won marriage rights at the polls; the
lobbying campaign to get President Obama to “evolve” on the issue and support
marriage equality; and the U.S. Supreme Court rulings in 2013 declaring part of
the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” unconstitutional and throwing out
Proposition 8 on a technicality.
But the
Massachusetts section is by far the longest, the most detailed and the most
moving — largely because it was not only the campaign in which Solomon was most
deeply and intensely involved but it’s the one on which he cut his teeth as a
marriage activist and which taught him what worked and what didn’t. The
Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that not allowing same-sex couples to
marry violated the equal-protection clauses of their state’s constitution. But
opponents were confident that they could amend the constitution to restore
marriage inequality. They had two
options: they could get the state legislature to pass an anti-marriage
amendment in two successive sessions and thereby place it before voters; or
they could circulate an initiative petition. But, unlike in California, the
initiative would not go before the ballot unless at least 25 percent of the
legislators in both houses approved it.
At first, it
seemed like virtually a done deal that the constitutional amendment would be approved by the legislators and put before the
voters. Just about every major elected official in Massachusetts from both
major parties, including Republican Governor Mitt Romney and Democratic Senator
(and 2004 Presidential nominee) John Kerry, were against the Massachusetts
court decision. So was the Roman Catholic Church, a potent political force in
the state that supplied the only Catholic President in U.S. history. The
state’s Catholic hierarchy formed an unprecedented alliance with the
Protestant-dominated radical religious Right to repeal the marriage decision —
and they were strongly supported by African-American ministers who argued (as
many later would in California during the Proposition 8 campaign) that the
Queer community was “belittling” the African-American civil rights struggle by
invoking it as a model.
Meanwhile, as
Solomon recalled in his book, the grass-roots activist groups seeking to defend
the decision were underfunded and split by long-standing antagonisms. Solomon
said that when he first started going to meetings of MassEquality, the
coalition formed to protect the court decision, “I was shocked at the level of
acrimony between leaders who were all ostensibly working for the same thing.”
Solomon demanded that MassEquality hire a paid coordinator and concentrate on
lobbying the legislators. They got one lucky break; some legislators who
opposed the marriage decision were willing to compromise and create a separate
“civil union” status for Queer couples, while other opponents — including the
Catholic church — weren’t willing to give same-sex couples any legal recognition.
But the biggest
thing the Massachusetts activists did was to recruit same-sex couples
themselves to meet with legislators and put a personal face on the marriage
issues. If Solomon’s book has any true heroes — and it has several — the most
heart-wrenching and moving ones are Deb Grzyb and Sharon Murphy, who lived in
the rural town of Charlton. They’d been a couple for 24 years when they married
almost immediately after the Massachusetts courts allowed them to, but
according to Solomon, until then “they’d told next to no one they were Lesbians
or a couple. In fact, a few days after they applied for their wedding license,
they each raced around the state coming out to family members … because they’d
learned the local paper was going to print the names of all those who had
applied. They were glad there were activists who fought for equality for Gay
people. But that just wasn’t who they were.”
That changed
dramatically when officials from MassEquality realized that Gryzb and Murphy
were just about the only married Lesbians or Gays in the district of state
senator Steve Brewer, whose vote the group’s political strategists thought
would be crucial. They got a meeting with a member of Brewer’s staff, which
went well but didn’t give them any indication of how Brewer would vote. Then
they were asked by MassEquality officials to set up a meeting with Brewer
himself. Though they were terrified, Solomon said, “the middle-aged senator
welcomed them into his office. He’d served in the Senate for 16 years …
“Sharon took the
lead,” Solomon wrote. “She told the senator that the two of them were regular
people who lived in Charlton, both working for one employer … for nearly their
whole careers. They’d met in Boston 25 years before; it was love at first
sight, and two months later Sharon had moved in with Deb at her home in Dudley,
where they lived today. In a million years, they never expected to be able to
get married. But now that they were married, Sharon explained, they recognized
how important marriage was for their relationship.” Brewer listened patiently,
occasionally interjected, told them he’d attended the wedding of a close friend
to her same-sex partner, and finally told them that though he didn’t want them
to release the information publicly, he was going to vote against amending the
constitution to ban same-sex marriages.
The California Debacle
Though there
were other decisive elements — including MassEquality’s hiring of Gay Republican
organizer Patrick Guerriero to lobby GOP representatives on the issue and help
build the three-quarters legislative majority that would keep the anti-marriage
initiative off the Massachusetts ballot, and a largely successful electoral
campaign to target the legislature’s most vehement marriage opponents and
replace them with Queer or Queer-friendly candidates — Solomon came away from
the Massachusetts campaign convinced that the best advocates for marriage
equality for same-sex couples were same-sex couples themselves and their
families. It was a lesson lost on the activists in California who tried to
defeat Proposition 8 in 2008. Though Solomon didn’t come to California until
the closing weeks of the Proposition 8 campaign, he viewed the No on 8 TV commercials
from afar in Boston — and he didn’t like what he saw.
“Most of our
side’s ads looked like typical political spots,” Solomon recalled. “Our side
needed to make the most emotionally compelling case we could. However, that’s
not what I thought we were doing. The arguments we were using in the ads
appealed to the head: protecting the Constitution, highlighting the support of
key elected [officials], and protecting fundamental rights in the abstract.
They didn’t elicit emotions. Our opponents were masterful at conjuring up fears
about what would happen to society, to the institution of marriage, and to the
family if Gays were allowed to marry. The only antidote to fear was love,
empathy, connection, and an appeal to people’s better angels. That required using
real people talking poignantly about why marriage was important to their family
— their parents, their children, and themselves. If we didn’t evoke those
emotions in a powerful way, I felt, we’d be in serious trouble.”
Solomon said he
tried to share some of these concerns with the people running No on 8, but he
was circumspect about his advice. Having been successful at keeping the
marriage issue off the ballot in
Massachusetts, he’d never actually worked on an initiative campaign, while the
No on 8 campaign’s consultants “had multiple victories on thorny social issues
in California. … I was wary of ‘armchair quarterbacking’ — asserting based on
my own different experiences that I knew what to do to win and that those in
charge were getting it wrong.” Also, though both sides on Proposition 8 raised
and spent about the same amount of money — $40 million each — according to
Solomon, the No on 8 money didn’t really start coming in until the last two
weeks of the campaign, once polls showed the original 15-point poll margin
against it had disappeared and Queer and Queer-friendly activists and
contributors in California realized they would quite possibly lose.
“Unpredictable
last-minute money is difficult to put to good use,” Solomon warned. “Television
buys need to be placed at least a few days in advance, ideally as part of a
well thought-out sequencing plan. So the No on 8 campaign was scurrying to put
in place last-minute paid phone-calling programs until the night before the
vote, trying desperately to spend as much as they were taking in.” Solomon
recalled that after Proposition 8 won — ironically, in the same election as
Barack Obama’s election as President, in which California gave him the
electoral-vote majority that put him over the top — “I was devastated and knew
the spirit of the Gay community — in California and nationally — would be
broken until Proposition 8 was lifted. That meant we had to figure out how to
win at the ballot.”
Getting It Right
According to
Solomon’s account, the turning point that showed marriage equality activists
how to win at the polls was the involvement of one of his book’s most
interesting characters: Thalia Zepatos, a straight ally from Portland, Oregon
and an experienced community organizer who in 2010, at age 54, took on the task
of figuring out a winning strategy. Hired by Freedom to Marry as director of
public engagement, Zepatos “spent much of 2010 culling through literally
hundreds of polls and focus group reports from multiple marriage campaigns. In
her second-floor home office, Thalia had stacks of yellow legal pads with her
notes, the pages folded back on the sheets that had the most interesting
tidbits. ‘I know this sounds silly,’ a middle-aged woman in northern California
had said, ‘but I never thought about it — that Gay people could get old!’ Another, a man from Oregon, said, ‘I just don’t get
it — why would a Gay person want to get married?’”
Drawing from her
experience not only with No on 8 but a similarly unsuccessful attempt to defeat
an anti-marriage initiative in her native Oregon in 2004, Zepatos came to the
conclusion that one reason marriage equality campaigners kept losing at the
ballot box was they were making their motives seem too mercenary. According to
Solomon, she recalled that in the 2004 Oregon campaign, organizers went
door-to-door with a leaflet “listing the rights and benefits that came with
marriage and arguing that it was wrong to deny same-sex couples those rights.
The reports back from the organizers were that voters seemed really uninterested.
Instead they wanted to talk about the Lesbian physician on the popular
television show ER. The character’s
partner — a firefighter — died in the line of duty, and the physician faced a
painful custody battle with the deceased partner’s parents. To Thalia, it was
as if the campaign and voters were speaking two different languages: one, a
list of benefits; and the other, a powerful human story about a committed
couple and their family.”
One striking
result from a poll in Oregon convinced Zepatos that the marriage equality
movement had to change its messaging. The poll had asked Oregon voters, “Why do
people like me get married?” An overwhelming majority — 72 percent — replied,
“For love and commitment.” Only 18 percent said, “For rights and benefits.” When
the same poll asked why same-sex couples got married, 42 percent of the
respondents said “rights and benefits,” 36 percent said “love and commitment,”
and 22 percent said they didn’t know. “What a huge disconnect this was,”
Solomon recalled. “Straight people thought Gay couples had completely different
reasons for wanting to get married than they did.”
Zepatos’
analysis suggested that the Queer community had focused too much on the
material benefits straight couples got from marriage and they didn’t, and not
enough on the values committed straight and Queer couples shared: what Solomon
called a “deep and abiding love and commitment and a desire to profess that
love and commitment in front of their family and friends and have it respected
by the state.” It also argued that the best spokespeople for marriage equality
were straight people who were close to same-sex couples — “parents,
grandparents, clergy and neighbors” — who could talk about their own struggles
to overcome their traditional notions of what “marriage” meant and accept their
Queer children, grandchildren, parishioners and neighbors as equally entitled
to the freedom to marry.
“There was no
higher priority for me when joining Freedom to Marry than reversing our streak
of losses at the polls,” Solomon recalled in his book. “It was the one talking
point our opponents had that we couldn’t rebut: that every time this issue went
to a popular vote, our side lost. And after shuttering the California ballot
effort” — an attempt to put an initiative to repeal Proposition 8 on the 2010
ballot, abandoned when a group unaffiliated with California’s Queer
establishment filed a federal lawsuit challenging it instead — “I was doubly
hungry to help bring about a win at the ballot.” Solomon personally worked on the
initiative in Maine, where a previous marriage-equality ballot measure had
failed in 2009 with a namby-pamby campaign similar to No on 8’s. In November
2012, aided not only by the new messaging strategy but the higher voter turnout
in a Presidential election year, marriage equality won at the polls in Maine —
and in Maryland, Minnesota and Washington.
The “Inevitability” Myth
Marc Solomon
told his audience at the Center December 5 that he started thinking about a
book on the marriage struggle right after the 2007 victory in Massachusetts,
but as the community got more sophisticated on how to fight for marriage and
public support grew, the story he had to tell also grew and changed. His final
book included the struggle to get the New York legislature to pass a marriage
equality bill — an often sordid tale of political egomania which can’t help but
remind the reader of the old adage that laws are like sausages: you don’t want
to watch either being made. It also includes the story of how an old friend of
Michelle Obama’s became the key figure in lobbying her husband to “evolve” on
the issue from opposing to supporting marriage equality.
“We’ve had so
many victories over the course of the last five or six years,” Solomon told his
audience at the Center. “A lot of people are now saying that we’re done. I want
to caution against that notion. People say it’s ‘inevitable’ that we’re going
to win. I think that in some ways it is
inevitable, but the question of whether we’re going to win in 10 years or five
years or two years or one year makes a big difference in the lives of same-sex
couples in places like Texas, where it’s very difficult to adopt if you’re not
married; or in Florida, where we’ve been working with a woman who got married
in New York, moved back to Florida, and her partner passed away. She is now
moving out of her house because of Social Security survivor’s benefits that
don’t apply to married couples if you didn’t get married in the state where you
reside. Then there are the human costs, including parents who are getting older
and want to be able to go to their children’s weddings. There really is truth
to the notion that justice delayed is justice denied.”
Solomon said he
and a lot of other marriage-equality activists got “heartburn” when U.S.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who’s in her 80’s and who refused to
retire despite calls for her to do so while the Democrats still controlled the
Presidency and the Senate, got a heart attack and was hospitalized late last
year. He reminded his audience that the Supreme Court’s 2013 Windsor decision invalidating the part of the 1996 Defense
of Marriage Act that denied federal recognition of same-sex marriages was
decided by a 5-4 vote — and if Ginsburg dies or retires while a Republican
President is in office and the GOP controls the Senate, her replacement is
likely to swing the next marriage equality decision 5-4 against us.
“When people
talk about ‘inevitability,’ I think back to where we started about a decade ago
when so many people said, ‘It’s impossible,’” Solomon said at the Center.
“‘Impossible’ and ‘inevitable’ have a lot in common. They both allow you not to
work. If something is ‘impossible,’ you don’t have to do anything because it’s
impossible. And if something is ‘inevitable,’ then of course you don’t have to
do anything because it’s going to happen anyway. The sweet spot of this
movement, and the sweet spot of any real
movement, is between ‘impossible’ and ‘inevitable,’ and doing the work to make
what many people think of as ‘impossible’ happen and make it inevitable. So let’s not let up. We have great
momentum, but we still have one-third of the country where same-sex couples
can’t marry. Let’s finish the job, and then we can have a big party and celebrate the
‘inevitability’ of it being done. But we shouldn’t move on or rest and say,
‘It’s going to happen on its own,’ because even with powerful momentum, this
stuff really doesn’t happen on its own.”
