Olson went from loathed to lauded for opposing California's Prop 8 gay marriage ban.
Greg Owen at LGBTQ Nation:
Theodore Olson, the iconoclastic appellate lawyer behind George W. Bush’s victory before the Supreme Court in 2000, died on Wednesday. He was 84. Olson was widely condemned on the left for his role in stopping the vote count in Florida, which denied Democratic nominee Vice President Al Gore an electoral college victory to accompany his popular vote win. Bare-knuckle legal tactics from Olson plus a “Brooks Brothers riot” and infamous “hanging chads” were key to Bush’s ultimate success.
It came as a surprise, therefore, to liberals, conservatives, and the LGBTQ+ community alike, when Olson took on the effort to strike down Proposition 8, the notorious gay marriage ban passed by California voters the same night that Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. Olson invited David Boies, his former nemesis in the Bush v Gore battle, to help overturn the ballot initiative. “It is a conservative value to respect the relationship that people seek to have with one another, a stable, committed relationship that provides a backbone for our community, for our economy,” Olson later told the Los Angeles Times. “I think conservatives should value that.”
Olson said he endured the wrath of the conservative establishment as a result; conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh denounced him on talk radio and dinner invitations in Washington dried up, despite Olson’s status as a fixture in conservative social and political circles. His wife, Barbara Olson, was a firebrand conservative commentator who died in the plane that struck the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
[...] Donald Trump tried to recruit Olson twice to defend him in criminal investigations and was rebuffed on both occasions. Olson and Boies denounced Trump in an op-ed for The Washington Post over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. The pair also wrote a memoir together, Redeeming the Dream: Proposition 8 and the Struggle for Marriage Equality, published in 2014.
Ted Olson, the lawyer who helped George W. Bush win the Presidency in 2000 in front of SCOTUS, has died at 84. Olson later joined with his counterpart David Boies in the Bush v. Gore case to help overturn bans on marriage equality together in the wake of California Prop 8’s passage in 2008.
