Q&A With Evan Wolfson
Evan Wolfson's Freedom to Marry foundation works toward legalizing wedlock for gays and lesbians. His new book, Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality and Gay People's Right to Marry, is now out on Simon & Schuster.
In the book you draw parallels between the struggle of African-Americans in the 60s and the current struggles of gays and lesbians. Some are offended by that. No one group has a monopoly on the need to be treated equally and the entitlement to civil rights. Civil rights belong to everybody, and America's story is the story of trying to enlarge that circle and bring everyone in. Beyond that, there are lessons we can each learn from the differing parallel civil rights movements of our country. The kinds of attacks and arguments made against equality are very often the same, even if the experience of discrimination differs from group to group
The Senate has blocked an initiative to ban same-sex unions with the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment. You call the amendment's language "vague and sweeping." The constitutional amendment has two sentences. Sentence one flatly ties the hand of all states and all future generations when it comes to marriage equality. It will cement discrimination into the constitution for all time. Sentence two goes on to say that no state can make its own decisions in terms of how its constitution will be interpreted, and how the law will be applied for what they call the "legal incidents" of marriage. In other words, they deny not only marriage rights to gay couples, but they also deny the "legal incidents" of marriage to gay couples and to unmarried heterosexual couples.
Now what are the legal incidents of marriage? Does it include civil unions? Does it include domestic partnership? Does it include suing an employer for failure to cover a partner? The constitutional text will be vague and deliberately sweeping and deliberately ominous in a way that will have a chilling effect as it goes forward. On the one hand, there's the thing that's literally legally forbidden, but because it's vague, there's this additional area that chills what might otherwise be legal conduct. People don't want to risk being arrested under some kind of vague thing, so there's a chilling effect that goes beyond the direct legal prohibition.
You're very optimistic, even when you discuss people who vehemently oppose you. I believe in redemption. You have to be ready to welcome people in. In 1948, when the first court in the country ever to strike down race discrimination ruled, the polls showed 90 percent of the American people were against interracial marriage. Do you know when it was that the American people first showed a majority of acceptance for interracial marriage? Nineteen ninety-one. It took a long time. So you can't begin these things by just writing off everybody who disagrees with you.
Karen Iris Tucker