In early August, on a bluff above the ocean in Baja California, two of my favorite people took their wedding vows at dusk.
My niece Krissa and her partner Julia had asked seven friends to offer short reflections on seven touchstones for a successful marriage. The friends spoke of authenticity, vulnerability, generosity, community, balance, humor and home. It was a lovely ceremony, and when the brides kissed, it was a peak emotional moment for all of us, and proof – as if we needed it – that same-sex marriage is every bit as romantic and meaningful as other marriages.
The glow lasted until I returned from Mexico to Los Angeles and started noticing a stream of emailed fundraising appeals from a man named Brian Brown, the homophobic founder of the National Organization for Marriage. Brown’s organization fights against same-sex unions, and his emails felt like a personal affront. Seriously? Are these people never going to give up the fight against same-sex marriage?
In December, after all, President Biden signed into law the Respect for Marriage Act, a bipartisan bill that codifies same-sex and interracial marriage. Even Pope Francis understands that marriage equality is here to stay. One of the items on the agenda of the 2023 global gathering of Catholics that starts this week in Rome is whether same-sex couples deserve the church’s blessing. (This is not at all the same as allowing gay Catholics to marry in the church, but it is a slight softening of a very hard line against it.)
However, there are a few reasons why same-sex marriage suddenly feels tenuous to some.
First, the overturning of Roe vs. Wade by the Supreme Court’s ultraconservative majority has breathed new life into not just antiabortion crusades, but other anti-equality movements as well.
Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which suggested the court might want to look at other seemingly settled issues, such as the legalization of contraception and gay marriage, might have at one time been dismissed as reactionary blather. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. had hastened to make clear in the majority opinion that Dobbs applied only to abortion. But as the court’s three most liberal justices put it in their dissent: “Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.”
Many proponents of gay rights were shaken to the core by Thomas’ claims in his Dobbs concurrence. If gay marriage were to be somehow overturned, how would the legal rights of same-sex parents be affected? What would happen to their kids? What should they do now to protect their families?
In Florida, two family-law attorneys, Ryanne Seyba and Meaghan Marro, decided to offer, for free or close to it, what are known as second-parent adoptions. So even if a marriage were suddenly deemed invalid, parental rights would be maintained.
In August 2022, Broward County Judge Mariya Weekes invited more than a dozen families to court to certify their second-parent adoptions. All of the couples were women, because, as Seyba told me, gay men who become parents together have generally both already gone through the legal adoption process, while for lesbian couples, because one of the spouses has usually given birth, there seemed to no need because “there’s no question of parenthood there.”
Until Thomas’ suggestion in Dobbs put these families’ rights into jeopardy. How unfriendly could the Supreme Court be to same-sex marriage if the current lineup of justices takes another crack at it?
Here’s a hint: In 2019, the National Organization for Marriage’s Brown made headlines after tweeting out a photo of himself posing with Alito and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, three weeks after they heard arguments in Bostock vs. Clayton County, perhaps the most important gay rights case to come before the court since it legalized gay marriage in 2015.
Alito and Kavanaugh, along with Thomas, would go on to be the three dissenters in the Bostock decision, which found that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects workers from discrimination based on being gay, lesbian or transgender.
The disturbing National Organization for Marriage campaign I came home to after my niece’s wedding jumps on the widest possible anti-progressive bandwagon. The fundraising effort is called “NOT.” As in, the union of two women is NOT a marriage, a transgender woman is NOT a woman, an embryo is NOT a choice.
I guess it’s to be expected that Brown and company would try to capitalize on fears of drag queens, librarians and gender-affirming doctors. But what was particularly offensive was the campaign’s disingenuous argument that gay marriage has weakened the institution of marriage, an outcome Brown takes credit for predicting.
As proof, Brown offers a recent Pew Research Center survey of 5,000 adults that had some “shocking” results: Only 23% of Americans now believe that being married is extremely or very important to live a fulfilling life, and only 26% believe that having children is extremely or very important.
The fact is, also according to the same Pew poll, most American adults – married, unmarried, gay, straight or trans – prioritize job satisfaction and friendship over marriage and parenthood.
That seems about right to me.
Yet Brown describes this as “a tragic collapse of public belief” in traditional marriage and parenthood in the years since same sex marriage was legalized.
I’ll give Brown this much: Even he acknowledges that a different Pew poll also found that 61% of adults believe that same-sex marriage has been good for society.
If most Americans think our country is better for allowing people to marry whomever they love, that hardly signals a collapse that is “tragic.” Perhaps the better description is “long overdue.”
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