Obama v Doma: How Gay Americans Marched Towards Equality

By Charles Kaiser, Guardian UK

02 June 19

From Joe Biden’s unplanned endorsement to a White House lit by the rainbow flag, LGBTQ Americans lived through three extraordinary years

n 6 May 2012, Joe Biden went on Meet the Press to endorse marriage equality – and credited an NBC sitcom for his decision: “I think Will and Grace probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody has done so far.”

Three days later, in the middle of his re-election campaign, Barack Obama followed the lead of his vice-president. In 1996, Bill Clinton had signed the Defense of Marriage Act (Doma) in the middle of the night because he thought that was necessary to ensure his re-election. Now a new Democratic president had embraced the push for equality as a political plus, especially with the younger voters who were so important to his success.

Obama said that even the Republican college students he had met were “very clear” about sexual orientation: “They believe in equality.” He also suggested the benefits of a presidential unit that included a brilliant wife and two precocious children. His daughters, Malia and Sasha, had friends who were the children of same-sex couples, and it had never occurred to them that their friends’ parents would be treated differently.

“It doesn’t make sense to them,” Obama said, adding: “That’s the kind of thing that prompts a change in perspective.”

The tidal wave of change continued. On 6 June, barely a month after the president’s announcement, Judge Barbara Jones of the southern district of New York ruled in favor of Edith Windsor, whose case against Doma focused on the estate taxes she was forced to pay after the death of her wife, Thea Spyer, a burden a straight widow would have avoided. The judge found that Doma was unconstitutional under the due process guarantees of the fifth amendment and ordered the federal government to issue Windsor a tax refund, including interest. Jones was the fifth federal judge to find the law unconstitutional.

The political wisdom of Obama’s position was confirmed in November when he was re-elected with 332 electoral votes and 51.1% of the popular vote. Voters in Maine, Maryland and Washington state approved marriage equality initiatives – and Minnesota voters rejected a state constitutional amendment that would have banned it.

On 20 January 2013, in his second inaugural address, the president declared: “Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.”

Six months later, Edith Windsor was sitting at her lawyer’s dining room table, along with the rest of her legal team. The New Yorker reported what happened next. Suddenly news of the supreme court’s decision flashed across a computer screen: “Doma Is Unconstitutional.”

There were whoops and hollers and then the telephone rang.

“Who am I talking to?” Windsor asked.

The call was coming from Air Force One.

“Oh! Barack Obama?” she exclaimed. Composing herself, she said: “I want to thank you.” And then she added: “I think your coming out for us made such a difference throughout the country.”

As in Romer v Evans in 1996, which held that government cannot legitimately base its decisions on animus toward gay people, and Lawrence v Texas, which made gay sex legal, Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority decision. For the third time, he catapulted the gay cause forward.

Back in Manhattan, Windsor was taken on an impromptu victory lap around the island. People burst into tears and shouted: “Thank you, Edie!” At the LGBT Community Center in Greenwich Village, Windsor’s lawyer compared her to “Susan B Anthony, or Rosa Parks, or Harvey Milk”; James Esseks of the ACLU echoed the earlier words of the attorney Ted Olson, declaring Windsor to have “made the country more free and more fair and more equal today. In fact, she has made it more American.”

The Windsor decision was only the first piece of good news. California governor Jerry Brown and the rest of the state’s officials had declined to defend Proposition 8, a ban on same-sex marriage. At the supreme court, chief justice John Roberts and four of his colleagues decided unelected proponents of the ban did not have standing to appeal a district court victory for two same-sex couples who had sought to marry. That meant the case was not properly before the supreme court.

Two days later, the ninth circuit court of appeals lifted its stay of the district decision. Hours after that, cheers erupted amid camera flashes as California attorney general Kamala Harris presided at the marriage of Kristin Perry and Sandra Stier at San Francisco’s city hall. They were one of the couples who had sued to prevent Proposition 8 from taking effect.

***

Two years later, our decades-long battle for justice reached a thundering climax.

Barack and Michelle Obama were the first great black leaders to treat the gay movement with the full respect earned by the civil rights movement. Their willingness to link the two movements had a special power. The inspiration we drew from the courage and the blood and the joyfulness of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, James Baldwin, Rosa Parks, John Lewis, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder and Martin Luther King Jr had made the gay movement possible.

Thus it felt uncannily right that the arc of history had bent so dramatically toward liberty and justice for all during Obama’s presidency. And it made a kind of cosmic sense that a black man was president on 27 June 2015, a crescendo of a day in American history – a day of bottomless sorrow, a day of unparalleled joy.

In the early afternoon, the president and first lady arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, to pay homage to the victims of another hideous mass shooting. There they joined 6,000 other citizens inside a downtown sports arena to celebrate the lives of the Rev Clementa C Pinckney and eight other African American parishioners shot and killed by a racist murderer during a service at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church.

The emotional pinnacle came at the end of the four-hour service, when Obama reached the lectern. This was one of the magnificent moments of his presidency.

Barack Obama stood before a large black gospel choir, flanked by the purple robes of African Methodist Episcopal pastors. He said he had felt “an open heart” after learning about the catastrophe, and that, more than anything, was what was needed now, along with a “reservoir of goodness”.

He repeated: “That reservoir of goodness. If we can find that grace, anything is possible. If we can tap that grace, everything can change. Amazing grace. Amazing grace.”

For 13 long seconds he was silent. And then he sang the first verse of an 18th-century British hymn, the one that long ago had been reborn as the greatest African American spiritual of them all:

Amazing grace

How sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me

I once was lost, but now am found

Was blind, but now I see.

By the second line, all 6,000 mourners were on their feet, many with tears overflowing, singing the words with him.

When the song was over, the president raised his voice, as if chanting a dirge:

Clementa Pinckney found that grace. Cynthia Hurd found that grace. Susie Jackson found that grace. Ethel Lance found that grace. DePayne Middleton-Doctor found that grace. Tywanza Sanders found that grace. Daniel L Simmons Sr found that grace. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton found that grace. Myra Thompson found that grace.

“Through the example of their lives they’ve now passed it on to us,” he concluded, “may we find ourselves worthy of that precious and extraordinary gift as long as our lives endure. May grace now lead them home. May God continue to shed His grace on the United States of America.”

The president and his wife returned to the White House that evening. As the sun began to disappear, a completely different feeling gripped New York and Washington, Chicago and Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco. In those places, and in hundreds of other cities, towns and villages, gay people and their friends swarmed into the streets to celebrate the day’s other, opposite kind of event: the ruling of the United States supreme court that finally made marriage equality the law of the land.

For the fourth time, Anthony Kennedy, a Republican nominated by Ronald Reagan, embraced the idea of a constitution which must change as society changes. He and his four liberal allies found that “the right to marry is a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person”, and that the court had long held that “the right to marry is protected by the constitution”. Kennedy declared that “the fundamental liberties protected by the 14th amendment’s due process clause extend to certain personal choices central to individual dignity and autonomy, including intimate choices defining personal identity and beliefs”.

And just as advocates had predicted, the court cited Loving v Virginia, the decision that ended bans on interracial marriages, as a crucial precedent.

Outside the courthouse, jubilant demonstrators waved rainbow flags and chanted: “Love has won!” In the Rose Garden, the president declared: “Progress on this journey often comes in small increments, sometimes two steps forward, one step back, propelled by the persistent effort of dedicated citizens. And then sometimes, there are days like this when that slow, steady effort is rewarded with justice that arrives like a thunderbolt.”

Inside, as dusk settled, Michelle Obama spotted “a purplish glow” through a north-facing window. Then she remembered that the staff had planned a magnificent surprise: the illumination of the White House in the rainbow colors of the gay flag. In her memoir, Becoming, she described what happened next:

Looking out the window, I saw that beyond the gates on Pennsylvania Avenue, a big crowd of people had gathered in the summer dusk to see the lights. The north drive was filled with government staff who’d stayed late to see the White House transformed in celebration of marriage equality. The decision had touched so many people. From where I stood, I could see the exuberance, but I could hear nothing … The White House was a silent, sealed fortress, almost all sound blocked by the thickness of its windows and walls … Oftentimes, I was happy to withdraw into the protected hush of the residence at the end of a long day. But this night felt different, as paradoxical as the country itself. After a day spent grieving in Charleston, I was looking at a giant party starting just outside my window.

She asked her husband to come outdoors but he said he couldn’t deal with another crowd. Sasha, 13, was too focused on her iPad to move, but her 18-year-old sister, Malia, agreed to come. The two of them skipped by hovering Secret Service agents.

We were giddy now. “We’re getting out!” I said. “Yeah we are!” she said. We made our way down a marble staircase and over red carpets, around the busts of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and past the kitchen until suddenly we were outdoors.

It had taken gay Americans exactly 50 years to reach this moment: 50 years of blood, sweat, toil and tears. In 1965, this building, like the federal government itself, like the entire United States of America, had loomed as a fortress of unchallenged prejudice. But tonight the White House was the glowing mansion at the center of a great national celebration of freedom: the home at the end of our rainbow.

Outside, Michelle and Malia Obama saw “a beautiful, close-up view of the White House, lit up in pride”.

“Malia and I leaned into each other,” Michelle wrote, “happy to have found our way there.”