The Battle Over Gay Marriage

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It was in this environment that Lambda declined to represent three couples who in 1991 sued Hawaii for the right to marry. By 1993 that case had quietly made its way to the state supreme court, and in May of that year the court startled the gay-rights movement--and drew international attention--when it ruled that barring gay people from getting married amounted to discrimination based on sex. (The court sent the case back to trial, but by 1998 the state constitutional amendment had passed, and no gay couples ever wed in the Aloha State.)

After the Hawaii ruling, Lambda reversed course. One of its top attorneys, Evan Wolfson, began traveling the country to speak on gay marriage. Both gay and straight audiences needed convincing that it wasn't a distant fantasy. "I spoke in churches, gay organizations, the Federalist Society. I spoke in almost every state in the country. This went on for years. And the real thing that started to make the big difference is when we started to believe it could happen," says Wolfson, 47, who now runs his own project called Freedom to Marry. "And once that happened--after Hawaii, after this was being debated in California and Vermont--we saw a surge of people who had not been particularly active in the movement now come into it." High-profile losses in California and other states were eventually followed by a halfway win in Vermont and then, of course, a full victory last week in Massachusetts.

As Wolfson was trying to promote same-sex marriage, Matt Daniels was becoming convinced that it would damage the institution of the family. Daniels, 40, runs the Alliance for Marriage, which wrote the Federal Marriage Amendment now before Congress. Daniels comes to the issues of marriage and family breakdown from a very personal place. His father walked out when he was 2, leaving his mom to work as a secretary. One night when Daniels was in third grade, she was assaulted on her way home. "She ends up with a broken back, disabled, on welfare, depressed," says Daniels, trailing off. "So I was basically raised on welfare."

Daniels got a scholarship to Dartmouth, but after college he had to return home to care for his mother, who was dying of congestive heart failure. (She passed away in 1990.) During that period, he began volunteering in homeless shelters, where he says he saw the consequences of family breakdown, including welfare dependency and youth crime. "And it's about that time that we began to see the court activity in Vermont," he recalls. "Already we had seen it in Hawaii." Daniels was deeply troubled by the prospect of gay marriage, he says, "because of the unique combination of gifts that the two genders bring to the raising of children. The family--defined as built on the union of male and female--from my perspective is the foundation of society. The United States could survive without ideologies on left and right, without the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, but if you look at social-science data, we cannot thrive if we continue to see the disintegration of the unit of the family."