When Gallup first asked Americans whether people in same-sex marriages should have the same legal rights as men and women in traditional marriages, 68 percent said "no." That was in 1996. But in a 2015 poll, 60 percent said "yes."
How did so many people come to change their minds on such a politically divisive issue in such a short time? How could the federal Defense of Marriage Act, passed in 1996 to block same-sex marriage, be overtaken less than 20 years later by a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2015 allowing the unions?
The Oral History Project at Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, interviewed some of the key players behind the national Freedom to Marry campaign to examine the political strategy that brought about such a huge cultural shift. The project, released this month, includes more than 100 hours of interviews with 23 individuals who were in the trenches.
"We wanted to capture individual memories and ask people to tell in their own words how this was done," said Martin Meeker, director of the Oral History Project. "Individuals who were steeped in this work are now kind of like evangelists and going out spreading the word."
The Freedom to Marry national organization was founded by Evan Wolfson, an attorney who wrote a thesis arguing that gays have the right to marry when he was a student at Harvard Law School in 1983. The oral historians interviewed Wolfson, Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and James Esseks , director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender and HIV project, among others.
Many of the principals came from political backgrounds.
"These are people who got their first jobs working for congresswomen and for senators and lobbying organizations," Meeker said. "They knew how Washington works and about the sausage-making of legislation."
Their idealism was tempered by realism.
In November 2008, Proposition 8 passed in California, a major setback. The voter initiative added a provision to the state constitution stating that "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid in California," repealing a right that had been granted by the state Supreme Court just six months earlier.
Thalia Zepatos, who joined Freedom To Marry as its "message guru" in 2009, said in her interview that it was clear that the current strategy was not working. It was time to throw out the old playbook and start from scratch.
"We decided to focus on the language that people used to talk about their own marriages and found that it was a language of love and commitment," Zepatos said. "They also said they believed in the Golden Rule."
So, she said, in focus groups the questioners asked heterosexual couples who opposed full marriage for gay people but were OK with civil unions, a series of questions that led them to see their hypocrisy.
"You're saying marriage is good enough for you, but it's not good enough for them, how does that work with the Golden Rule?" Zepatos said. "And then we've got people looking up at the ceiling, putting their heads in their hands. It's what researchers call cognitive dissonance."
Shifting the focus from equal rights under the Constitution to the language of love and commitment was key in helping win over opponents, including Republican lawmakers. Meeker said those lawmakers were critical votes in Freedom to Marry victories in New Hampshire, New York and Minnesota.
"In all three of those states, marriage likely would not have passed were it not for Republican support," Meeker said.
Those converts in turn shared their "journey narratives" and became the messengers who made others comfortable in changing their positions, if not their core beliefs, Meeker said. In 2012, President Barack Obama came out in support of full marriage for same sex couples, a reversal of his 2008 campaign position.
Freedom to Marry disbanded after the 2015 Supreme Court victory. Wolfson had always intended to shut down once gays and lesbians could marry in all 50 states. Anticipating a fight until at least 2020, the organization still had a substantial fund, which it used to fund a number of programs, including the Berkeley oral history project.
"They have specific lessons that are drawn from the movement," Meeker said. "It would be wise for anyone interested in progressive social change to take a look at how this was done."
