Free The Battle Over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism Through the Media by Leigh Moscowitz Page B

states you can still be fired for being gay or lesbian.
    In 44 states you can be fired for being transgender in this country. So there are workplace issues, there are hate crimes issues, there’s access to HIV/AIDS
    prevention and treatment. It’s not that we are ever at a loss of issues to deal with. But the marriage conversation has required us to focus in more closely on relationship recognition.
    In a subsequent interview, the former president of the HRC indicated that shifting institutional priorities and resources to marriage was contentious, the center of an “unresolvable conflict” that eventually led to her departure soon after the defeats of the 2004 election. In her estimation, marriage was never a goal of the organization, at least not at the level that it should have been.
    She criticized her former organization, and the national movement more
    general y, for reacting to the Goodridge victory. In her view the unanticipated success in the legislative arena caught gay rights leaders off guard, forcing the messaging arm of the movement to play catch-up. Criticizing the defensive posture and the lack of preparedness on the part of the movement, she said the marriage win created organizational pains of having to scramble for
    resources. The leaders at her organization were “not celebrating the passage of Goodridge and embracing it; they’re saying [sighs], ‘Oh, shit, now that it’s here, I guess we better fight this good fight.’”
    Leaders of the nation’s largest gay rights organization weren’t the only ones with cold feet. As her words reflect, the resistance, fear, and hesitance over marriage that Cheryl described within her former organization was indicative of a tension felt on a larger scale within the gay and lesbian community. Evan, considered by many to be the father of the modern movement for marriage
    equality, spoke at length about the internal debates over marriage that were waged long before the victory in Massachusetts. His work on marriage began in the 1980s when he worked pro bono on behalf of gay couples wanting to marry. At that time, he described his camp of pro-marriage supporters within the LGBT activist community as a “small minority.”
    Resistance within the gay community came from those who were opposed
    to marriage based on ideological grounds and tactical grounds. The ideo-
    logical camp was opposed to fighting for marriage because they didn’t like what the institution represented, feeling marriage was too narrow in scope.
    As one activist explained, some members felt like “instead we ought to be talking about more broadly challenging family structure or . . . the way our society provides protections and benefits and so on.” The other category of resistance among activists were people who, regardless of their ideological s
    position, felt that marriage would be a strategic failure for the movement as n
    a whole. As Evan explained, some activists were concerned “that the fight for l
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    chapter two
    the freedom to marry was either premature or potentially dangerous. That it would trigger a crackdown, a greater reaction, an opposition.”
    This fear of engendering a stronger response from opponents led to internal frictions about whether to move forward with the Goodridge legal case. Many feared the case was premature and that a victory would be the “longest of shots.” The co-chair of the Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus, a lobbying group that works in the state legislature, called her organization
    “one of the last holdouts” on the marriage front. She pleaded with the GLAD
    legal team to delay the Goodridge lawsuit because “we knew that people weren’t ready for it. We knew that if they filed the lawsuit there would be an immediate backlash.”
    Leaders at GLAD were acutely aware of the risks of catapulting marriage
    into legal, political, and cultural debate. As Carisa,