Democrats shouldn’t congratulate themselves on gay marriage

A gay marriage rights advocate waves an equality flag outside the Supreme Court before the start of oral arguments on marriage equality on April 28. (Photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Getty)

If you had asked me 10 or 15 years ago, I would have told you the society wasn’t ready for two little plastic guys atop a wedding cake. I’d have said that government didn’t need to go expanding the cultural confines of marriage and that civil unions seemed like a pretty good compromise measure for my friends who were gay.

I was wrong, and I’m not especially proud of it. But so was the entire political establishment in Washington, including a generation of leaders whose careers were inspired by the fight for civil rights.

The inescapable fact is that the story of gay marriage in America — which will, now or later, be recognized as a fundamental right — is mostly the story of failure in our political leadership. And we should probably pause to ask ourselves why.

Regardless of what the Supreme Court decides after this week’s landmark arguments, the debate over gay marriage is bound to surface in the coming primary campaigns. Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor, will point out to activists that he was among the first governors to sign the right to marry into law, while Hillary Clinton demurred.

Clinton, of course, found herself painfully flummoxed over this issue in an interview with public radio’s Terry Gross last year, mainly because she couldn’t bring herself to utter the simple truth: “I changed my mind.” To which she might have added, “And by the way, Terry, so did everybody else in my party.”

Because, really, before Democrats go hoarse as they toast themselves for being on the right side of history, they ought to remember that history had to overtake them first. And if they want to say that Republicans are wrong on the defining civil rights issue of the moment (which they are), then Democrats will have to acknowledge that their record on gay marriage bears little comparison to their proud legacy on racial and gender equality.

Consider the principled example of Hubert Humphrey, who prompted a walkout by Southern Democrats at the 1948 convention and opened a permanent rift in the party, all because he wasn’t willing to stand down on desegregation — seven years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, igniting the Civil Rights movement. “To those who say we are rushing this issue of civil rights,” Humphrey told the crowd in Philadelphia, “I say to them that we are 172 years too late.”

Humphrey’s fiery stand was prompted by Harry Truman’s decision that summer to desegregate the armed forces, long before anyone in the South considered doing away with whites-only entrances and luncheonettes.

Then-Mayor Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis addresses the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in 1948. Humphrey advocated the strengthening of the civil rights plank of the party platform. A sign on the podium reads, “Don’t be unbrotherly, Brother.” (Photo: AP)

By contrast, gay rights entered the presidential discussion in a big way in 1992, when Democrats Jerry Brown and Paul Tsongas championed the cause. (Brown, who is now the nation’s oldest governor, may also be the only elected Democrat who can reasonably claim to have pioneered the issue of gay marriage.) It was Bill Clinton, though, who ultimately captured the energy of the emerging gay rights movement and the nomination.

You’d have to say that Clinton was the strongest champion of gay rights the White House had seen to that point. But he also signed into law the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, making states free to invalidate gay marriages performed in other states.

Barack Obama refused to countenance gay marriage until his vice president, Joe Biden, went ahead and did it for him on national TV in 2012 — a so-called gaffe that so infuriated the White House that Biden felt obliged to apologize. The official line was that Obama was going to go public in favor of gay marriage anyway, but then Biden went and ruined the dramatic rollout.

Well, maybe.

Some Democrats on the local level got there sooner. As mayor of San Francisco, where gay rights is a winning issue, Gavin Newsom started handing out marriage licenses in 2004, at exactly the moment when George W. Bush was pushing an anti-gay agenda. (The state later invalidated them.)

During Obama’s first term, there were strong Democratic governors, most notably Andrew Cuomo in New York and then O’Malley, who devoted considerable political capital to passing gay marriage laws. But even national polls had begun to turn in their favor by that time. These younger governors were out ahead of their timid party establishment, but the voters were well ahead of them.

If there were any true heroes in the march toward inclusivity in marriage, they were lawyers, not politicians. The legal powerhouses David Boies and Ted Olson made history when they confronted and ultimately overturned the constitutional amendment in California that banned gay marriage. As a celebrated conservative theorist, Olson, in particular, will be remembered as having stood up for equality when just about every elected leader stood down.

You could argue that this is precisely how the system is constructed to work. Democracy is, by definition, responsive to the electorate, rather than disconnected from it. And because of this, as I’ve written many times, politics is almost always the last large institution in America to reflect larger changes churning in the culture.

But there are times when the job of our elected leaders is to persuade the public to support something a lot of voters might initially resist — either because bedrock principles are at stake (as is the case here), or because the long-term interests of the country may require some short-term pain (such as investing in infrastructure or restructuring entitlement programs). And this is the aspect of political leadership that’s all but impossible to find these days.

By and large, our candidates don’t argue now for any principle that isn’t already demonstrably popular or that isn’t sufficiently vague to not offend any sizable segment of the electorate. (Soak the rich! Keep America safe!) Maybe it’s because we’ve gotten so good now at polling and focus-grouping, so refined in slicing the electorate into Soccer Moms and Office Park Dads and whatever other specious label somebody just came up with to market themselves, that politicians are perpetually paralyzed with fear.

When Humphrey stood up to denounce racial intolerance, he surely knew it was a divisive stance, but he probably had no earthly idea whether it would doom his aspirations. Today, he’d have a roomful of consultants telling him precisely how many percentage points he stood to drop and why he needed to lose the whole “civil rights” phrase for something less contentious, like maybe “American togetherness.”

Plaintiffs in Hollingsworth v. Perry react on the steps of the Supreme Court in 2013 after justices cleared the way for the resumption of same-sex marriage in California. From left: Jeff Zarrillo and his partner, Paul Katami; attorney David Boies; and Sandy Stier and her partner, Kris Perry. (Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

All of this is made worse by the partisan and reductive nature of social media, which instantly distorts every argument to make it sound crass or nonsensical. Someone, I guarantee you, will tweet this column as a broadside against religious liberty or a sexist attack on Hillary (because I just referred to her as “Hillary”). No wonder politicians have lost all confidence in their abilities to shape public opinion.

But if there’s a lesson our political class can take away from the gay marriage debate, it’s that the society — to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr. — always bends toward enlightenment. And history remembers those who exert some pressure along the way.

Make no mistake: The final resolution of this marriage issue, perhaps a couple of months from now, will mark a legal and societal triumph for equality under the law. But it will not be a political one, and that legacy should haunt leaders who came here, decades ago, promising exactly that.