It was ass early for this philosophy major to be awake and presentable on a Saturday, but nevertheless, there I was. It might well have been the same collared shirt I wore for high school graduation. Even with the small pool of conspirators that I joined, it showed. There were maybe - maybe - a dozen of us, gathered to walk a quarter mile down the main drag of that tiny college town, bearing signs with messages one just did not carry in that part of Real America. Half of the tiny, subversive venture were old hippies, children of the sixties whose eyes were likely as bright as when they were 18 and in free love with every drug they could buy with the Washingtons scraped from the bottom of their El Caminos. I remember they looked like my grandparents when they watched a Police Academy movie or my calc professor when someone started with an excuse for not showing up with the problem set. "Oh my, we haven't done this in ages," their eyes twinkled, three of them even finding some crazy tweed gear patched from toe to tip with peace signs.
The rest of this motley crew was filled out with the miscreants from my college's Young Democrats. We were probably the only fifteen registered in the entire private Presbyterian school. In what would portend the future of our struggle, only five very straight, very white, very counter-cultural pupils were present on the big day. The responsible ones in our chapter - those who would become magistrates and noblemen - were either previously engaged or preoccupied with their future vetting for Vice President or Secretary of Something-or-Other and didn't want a protest picture in that file.
Our leader was an honest-to-goodness, out-of-the-closet, talked-to-his-parents and definite-fabulous homosexual. There weren't many with those credentials in the little town of Hastings, Nebraska, and more than one person expressed relief he was there to lead the effort. The old hippies wanted to fill their sticky lungs with righteous indignation one more time and scream at the first nose wrinkled at our suggestion gay people share the singular straight misery of marriage. Having him - a real gay! the luck! - to rein them in was crucial for our plot's credibility and assurance of we allies lacking the first clue how a protest should be properly conducted.
We were coming up on the 2000 election and our plan was to march in protest through the streets of our little Nebraska town against Proposition 416, the very first Defense of Marriage Act in America targeting a state constitution. We figured out what the scheme was as soon as the television advertisements clamoring for true Christians to show up at the polls to protect marriage. Prop 416 was the pilot of an insidious new approach to prescribing the state's involvement in our romantic lives. Having tried and died a number of times at the federal level to pass constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, the fundamentalist subsection of the Republican party banded together to wage their war against gay state by state. The new DOMA blueprint was to propose the ban as amendments to individual state constitutions instead of continuing to lose the same fights over and over on Capitol Hill.
The benefits of this new strategy were obvious to those who were paying attention, though sadly the numbers at that time were few. Going state by state limited the spend each election required for victory. They were playing the long game, building competency in easy states and leveraging those best practices as the number and size of states increased every cycle. It also rendered the legislation passed impervious to any executive veto - no President or Governor could touch a state's constitution. But most importantly, it exploited the utter ground game incompetency of a gay rights movement organized entirely for combat at the national level. The infrastructure for marriage equality was geared to taking the fight to the Sunday talk shows, Congressional hearings and public relations brinkmanship that is essential to winning professional politics. These people didn't have the slightest damn clue how to canvass or caucus or competently execute any of the fundamentals of state-level electioneering.
Which is why they chose Nebraska first. It is the only state in the union with only one house in its legislative branch of government. The unicameral Nebraska Congress meant that if passage for a gay marriage ban could be secured by popular vote, they would only have to win a simple majority among one assembly instead of both a House and a Senate. It was the perfect pilot for killing gay marriage in one-fiftieth of the United States - win a popular vote, then win a single congressional vote. It was a simple, brilliant scheme made all the more sickening by its effectiveness. Getting Nebraskans to vote on a state measure was just not something the gay rights movement (or, hell, the Democratic Party) knew how to do in 2000. But that was the Religious Right's wheelhouse. And they handed our asses to us that November.
We marched that day. And a few more. And made some phone calls. And ran some ads at 11:55pm of laughable production value. Ultimately, it became clear that the twelve people who showed up on Saturday morning for that first march was a leading indicator of what would happen at the polls. 70% of Nebraskans don't agree on anything, but they did one one thing that decade. That thing was what we finally saw the Supreme Court of the United States rule unconstitutional this morning.
When my social graph exploded in joy this morning with the news, my thoughts immediately turned to that autumn morning in the middle of nowhere. It seems so long ago I think mostly because, it is. Stunningly, I've been an entirely minor participant in the marriage equality movement for 13 years now. And if I'm honest about what that 13 years was like, there were way, way more downs than ups. Any sense of inevitability that might have crept into this work was only in the last year or so. 2006, 2008, even 2010 - we were still losing every election that came up and every court case that mattered.
It felt like every time we suited up, we'd get stomped by greater numbers, greater organization and several decimal points greater spend. Will and Grace and Queer Eye and Modern Family were all on TV, prominent gay rights activists were getting biopics and touching stories about coming out were a constant presence in every Facebook timeline, but when it really mattered, when the rubber met the electoral road, we were getting beat. Every. Damn. Time.
I'd done fundraisers in Boston and canvassing in Modesto and cocktail parties in San Francisco and twenty-person rallies in Omaha and signature drives during New York Pride for thirteen years and my ability to marry was still perversely predicated only on the dumb genetic luck of being born straight. There were many pint-filled nights when I would declare I just don't think we cared enough to get this done. After logging a decade of being a foot soldier for an army that perpetually got its teeth kicked in, I thought we'd just have to wait until every baby boomer died before we could get anything done on this issue. Even last week, it felt like we were nowhere.
And this morning, a link in that chain finally broke. And every American is more free than when they awoke.
For those who remember the hanging chads in Florida or the stain on an intern's dress, this is the first witness to real change in our time. There are still many details to be worked out and we'll still be walking back the state amendments until well into our retirements, but this moment represents the first time we moved the tectonics of our culture on our own. We didn't have a billion dollar Obama campaign. We didn't have a 24/7 cable news station. We didn't even - if we're honest with ourselves - really know what we were doing.
But today, the deceptively brilliant engineering of this democracy finally tilted the last fundamental human right yet reined by our government to something that seemed out of reach a week ago. Marriage equality now feels inevitable.
And that inevitability suggests something that folks my age have not yet felt. We were told that America's greatest strength was that it could change. We were force fed the Freedom Flakes washed down with a half-pint of Captialist Kool-Aid that said America was the most free nation of the world.
But we never knew it. Not my generation. Not really.
We finally saw this morning that this republic is yet malleable; our union is not yet the most free expression of itself. We know today our work is not done. And we know that work takes far longer and is far harder than we ever imagined. That we can build the America we want from within the America in which we were born.
But we also finally know that work will effect real change in our time. And that knowledge is mighty.
