Each week on Defining Marriage, hosts Matt Baume and James Morris chat about what's happening with marriage equality, featuring frequent digressions into pop culture, silly banter, and the jokes and quibbles that have kept them together as a couple for over a decade. The first eighteen episodes of the podcast contain the complete audiobook version of the book Defining Marriage, which traces the decades-long evolution of marriage through the personal stories of those who lived through it, featuring personal insights from the lives of Evan Wolfson, Dan Savage, Ken Mehlman, Dustin Lance Black, and many more.
https://www.mattbaume.com/defining-marriage-shownotes/
Chapter 13: Well That is F***ing Bold
It seemed too improbable to be true: the lawyers who fought Bush v. Gore teaming up to fight Prop 8. And if that wasn’t strange enough, the company they were keeping was absolutely insane: lefty activist Rob Reiner; Bush Campaign Manager Ken Mehlman; screenwriter Dustin Lance Black.
Orchestrating this strange alliance was Chad Griffin, who was until recently an outsider to marriage equality. He’d been brought in to advise the Prop 8 campaign, and the cause had become his passion. Now, the political operative turned his attention to the freedom to marry, and he had a daring new strategy.
It was so daring, in fact, that the conventional wisdom at the time was that it was a terrible idea. Longtime leaders let him know in no uncertain terms that his federal lawsuit could do far more harm than good, and that there was little trust for his conservative allies. Their objections were completely reasonable, given that they’d weathered painful setbacks in the fight, from the destruction of relationships to legal roadblocks to the death of loved ones in the midst of battle.
This new strategy was wrong, they explained, and so were the people behind it. The whole thing broke all the rules.
But Chad was convinced that breaking the rules was the only way to win.
Music:
Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/