Foe Maggie Gallagher Abandons Gay Marriage Fight
A decade ago this month, Massachusetts became the first U.S. state to allow same-sex couples to marry. Today, conservatives have all but abandoned the fight.
In an extraordinary post on her blog Thursday, Maggie Gallagher, a founder of the National Organization for Marriage, conceded that opponents of same-sex marriage “are in shock, they are awed by the powers now shutting down the debate and by our ineffectualness at responding to these developments.”
The Massachusetts Supreme Court decision came amid two decades of ferocious legal, political and legislative battles in Congress and in statehouses, including President Bill Clinton’s signing of the now-defunct Defense of Marriage Act, former President George W. Bush’s backing of a heterosexual-only marriage amendment to the Constitution, and passage of same-sex marriage bans in roughly three dozen states, including California’s Proposition 8.
Maggie Gallagher, co-founder, National Organization for Marriage
Those bans are now under review in five federal appellate courts. Challengers have a unanimous record of victory so far in the lower courts, following last year’s Supreme Court decision remanding the Prop. 8 challenge and scuttling DOMA.
Evan Wolfson, a gay-rights advocate and founder of Freedom to Marry, said he the Supreme Court could rule on the constitutionality of same-sex marriage by June of next year.
Marriage equality has moved far faster than either side anticipated, and comes amid rapidly broadening public acceptance of gay rights. Seventeen states, including California, and the District of Columbia now permit gay and lesbian couples to marry.
In her blog post, Gallagher wrote, “Hiding or pretending is not going to help us, now. We have to face the truth. And we have to find the love at its heart. And we will have to do new things, not simply do what failed, over and over again, harder.”
Gallagher said she wrote the post in part as reaction to the news that Charles Cooper, the attorney who defended Prop. 8, will host the marriage ceremony next month of his stepdaughter, Ashley, to another woman.
Kris Perry, left, and Sandy Stier embrace at their San Francisco City Hall wedding. Josh Edelson/AFP Getty Images
According to a new book, “Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality,” by New York Times reporterJo Becker, embedded for five years with the Prop. 8 legal team of Ted Olson and David Boies, Cooper had a change of heart after coming to know lead plaintiffs Kris Perry and Sandy Stier of Berkeley. Perry and Stier were married by California Attorney General Kamala Harris at San Francisco City Hall last June.
Gallagher said she would tell Cooper, “ ‘Thank you for your hard work, and your service. I had no idea you were working this hard, for so little benefit to yourself and your career, while simultaneously managing a family crisis like this. Thank you for being faithful to the end to your client and our cause. And I wish God’s blessings on you and your family.’ ”
Although she wrote that “I do not see how someone faithful to the biblical or the natural law underlying it can host a gay wedding,” Gallagher also said, “Whatever we do, and whatever we say, we have to be willing to say it, as if to a beloved child of our own family, coming to us with a loving gay marriage.
“There is no line we can draw that pushes gay people ‘outside’ and leaves us free ‘inside’ to be angry, foot-stomping, and morally ‘pure.’ ”
“We are all tangled up in Love with sin, our own and that of those we love.”
Appellate course case map by Freedom to Marry
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