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Building on 2007's Successes, Will 2008 Be the Year of Change and the Second State?

Evan Wolfson
January 15, 2008

In 2007, state legislatures considered a record number of marriage bills, while courts continued to hear cases brought by couples challenging their unfair exclusion from marriage.  Bills to create civil union or partnership as interim steps advanced in diverse states – products of the work to win marriage itself.  By year's end, couples stood before the high courts of three states seeking marriage, legislatures in two states enacted measures just short of marriage, the California legislature and one chamber in New York voted for the freedom to marry, and public opinion continued to move in the direction of embracing marriage equality (as have the policy positions of many leading presidential candidates, who have called for undoing the federal anti-marriage law passed just a decade before).

In 2007, the people with the best first-hand, lived experience of marriage equality decided overwhelmingly to keep it, in a dramatic 3/4's majority vote by the Massachusetts legislature.  The marriage conversation, and even state Supreme Court stumbles, moved the Washington legislature to enact a "first steps" partnership bill, and spurred governors and legislative leaders to pledge support for the freedom to marry in states such as New Jersey and Maryland.  Likewise, introduction of marriage bills vastly upped the ante and helped civil union progress in New Hampshire, Illinois, and other states, while underscoring that marriage itself remains the frame and the goal, as well as the engine of advance.

After fifteen years or so of the marriage debate, it remains true that the states that make the most gains for same-sex couples (and, incidentally, for unmarried different-sex couples) are those where advocates fight hardest for, and talk most about, the freedom to marry.   What's more, in 2007 the talk of marriage continued to propel advances on other fronts of importance, including passage of state and local non-discrimination measures, enactment of parenting and gender identity protections, and successes for openly gay and pro-gay elected officials.

“Do all you can, no matter what, to get people to think on your reform, and then, if the reform is good, it will come about in due season," feminist pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote.

Stanton knew the importance of perseverance – and sure enough, 2007 fell just short of yielding the crucial second marriage state that will further advance people's growing acceptance of the need to end exclusion.  But one lesson of Massachusetts is that when we give people the chance to see marriage equality for real, not just as a scary hypothetical, many embrace it as good while others remember that they don't care that much and can live with it. 

2007 demonstrated anew the power of "doing all you can, no matter what" to encourage even the reluctant to push past their discomfort; because his co-workers, friends, and family determined not to write him off, a Republican mayor and former police chief reversed himself on whether civil unions are "good enough" and added San Diego to the hundreds who now stand alongside same-sex couples before the California Supreme Court, urging it to strike down marriage discrimination in 2008.

Freedom to Marry was founded on belief in Dr. King's call to integrate all the "methodologies of social change": electoral, legislative, litigation, education, and enlistment of as many as possible, gay and non-gay, creating the space for decision-makers to rise and act.   The imperatives of ending injustice, the opportunities to engage, and the urgency of the clocks ticking on cases and battles underway don't stop on the electoral calendar.  As Bill Clinton puts it, "We give other people permission to define us if we don't even enter the conversation." 

In 1948, another election year, the California Supreme Court became the first court in the country to strike down race restrictions on who could marry whom.  It is civil rights poetry, and an urgent call to action, that in the 60th anniversary year of that pivotal decision – deeply unpopular at the time but vindicated by history – the same court now will rule on same-sex couples' claims to share in the freedom to marry.

In 2008, it is due season for the redeeming of our country, for justice for all families, and for that all-important second state.  The work of winning begins with the conversations each one of us has with those around us, as we become the change we seek.