“Gay people are born to straight people. We know what social scientists call Contact Theory: people’s attitudes change when they have exposure to somebody who’s different than them.”
Sasha Issenberg is the author of "The Engagement: America's Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage" and three previous books, including "The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns". He has covered presidential elections as a national political reporter in the Washington bureau of The Boston Globe, a columnist for Slate, and a contributor to Bloomberg Politics and Businessweek. He is the Washington correspondent at Monocle, and his work has also appeared in New York, The New York Times Magazine, and George, where he served as a contributing editor. He teaches in the political-science department at UCLA.
Sasha Issenberg contrasts Donald Trump’s use of celebrity in becoming president versus Joe Biden’s status as a lifetime politician. Issenberg then explains the different variables and stakeholders involved in the fight for marriage equality and why progress moved more rapidly compared to other social movements. He discusses the role of early LGBT activist Bill Woods and the current state of activism, citing NFL player Carl Nassib’s recent coming out. He discusses how President Obama and Trump each approached marriage equality and the significance of the recent Bostock v. Clayton County Supreme Court ruling.
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MODERATOR
SPEAKER
Sasha Issenberg
Author
The Engagement
Anthony Scaramucci
Founder & Managing Partner
SkyBridge
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - Intro
3:17 - Politics around same sex marriage
4:56 - Professional background
7:49 - Joe Biden vs. celebrity presidential candidates
11:15 - Same sex marriage stakeholders
13:48 - Speed of LBGT rights advancements and acceptance
25:10 - NFL player Carl Nassib’s coming out
28:31 - Gay rights activist Bill Woods
34:58 - Obama’s same sex marriage stance
39:41 - Trump and same sex marriage
42:40 - Bostock v. Clayton County ruling
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
John Darsie: (00:07)
Hello everyone and welcome back to SALT Talks. My name is John Darsie. I'm the Managing Director of SALT which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance, technology, and public policy. SALT Talks are a digital interview series with leading investors, creators, and thinkers, and our goal on these talks is the same as our goal at our SALT conferences which we're excited to resume here in September of 2021. But that goal is to provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts, as well as provide a platform for what we think are big, important ideas that are shaping the future. And we're very excited today to welcome Sasha Issenberg to SALT Talks.
John Darsie: (00:50)
Sasha is the author of three prior books including The Victory Lab, The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns. He's covered presidential elections as a national political reporter in the Washington bureau of The Boston Globe, he's been a columnist for Slate, and a contributor to Bloomberg Politics and Bloomberg Businessweek. And he's the Washington correspondent at Monocle, and his work has also appeared in New York, The New York Times Magazine, and George, where he served as a contributing editor.
John Darsie: (01:20)
He teaches in the political-science department at UCLA and a very smart man, lives in beautiful Santa Monica out in sunny California. His most recent book is called The Engagement and it's about America's quarter century struggle over same-sex marriage. It's a fantastic, very thorough book on the subject, one that's very near and dear to our hearts and one that Anthony worked on personally along with Rob Reiner which he'll talk about more as he gets into the talk.
John Darsie: (01:49)
But hosting today's talk is Anthony Scaramucci who's the founder and managing partner of Sky Bridge Capital which is a global alternative investment firm. And with that, I'll turn it over to Anthony.
Anthony Scaramucci: (01:59)
Well, I don't have a copy of the book with me Sasha because I'm out here in sunny California with you, but I have a picture on my phone. There you go. Hold up the book for everybody.
Sasha Issenberg: (02:08)
There it is.
Anthony Scaramucci: (02:08)
So I received your book. I'm going to tell you. My history with your book is I love books. I received your book. And then I read the New York Times front page book review which I thought was a fascinating review and they gave you a great one. And when I read the book, I'd read Victory Lab prior because I have obviously an interest in politics despite my disastrous 11-day episodic event in politics, and I thought these books were conjoined.
Anthony Scaramucci: (02:37)
So we're going to get into your background in a second, but I'm going to tell you why they were conjoined, because in Victory Lab you wrote about the science of winning an election, but there was a scientific process in this book in my opinion in terms of the struggle to legalize same-sex marriage, in many respects, Sasha, I felt there was a political campaign going on at the same time apropos to the civil rights' campaign corollary to that, but also there was a political campaign and an agenda and a quorum very similar to Victory Lab. Did I get that right or did I miss something?
Sasha Issenberg: (03:16)
Yeah. Yeah. I think that there are parts of this book which are very much as you say about innovation and campaigns, figuring out how to persuade people, how to target your persuasion, how to measure your persuasion, and then how to actually make it work in what we're off in these state-level ballot measure campaigns which you've been around a lot of candidate campaigns and it's a very different beast when you have a bunch of non-profits and issue organizations coming together in a state like Minnesota to beat back a constitutional amendment.
Sasha Issenberg: (03:45)
And so yeah. I mean, I think that we tend to think of great campaigns as being candidate-centric or party-centric, but I think that this sort of proves to be one of the great political campaigns of recent memory. I think it'll be really surprising if we talked to somebody 15 years ago because it seemed like such a loser of a cause and that anybody associated with it, elected officials and the like were sort of doomed to be dragged down by it.
Anthony Scaramucci: (04:12)
Well, I mean there is a scenario here in New York which I know you remember. Several hedge fund managers, Dan Loeb, et cetera gave money to Republican state senators in New York to flip the marriage proposal, same-sex marriage. Those four Republican senators decided to vote for it. They all lost their elections, okay, and that's only I guess 10 or 12 short years ago.
Anthony Scaramucci: (04:39)
Before we go completely into the book though, I think your background is also fascinating. What was it like to work at George? Tell us a little bit about how you grew up, why didn't you become a journalist, and then we'll delve more into the book which I'm obviously fascinated by.
Sasha Issenberg: (04:56)
So I grew up in New York, in Westchester County, and I went to a high school in the Bronx at the Horace Mann School. And I got lucky enough to end up at George magazine when I was 15 years old as a basically unofficial summer intern. The magazine was in its ... It launched in September of 1995 and early that summer I got in. One of the things about magazines pre-launch is there's a lot of work to do and nobody really knows who's supposed to do any of it, and it's quite possible they didn't understand child labor laws either. And so an editor told me that if I kept on coming in every day that summer, they couldn't pay me or give me anything official, they'd already hired their official ivy league interns, but I could make myself useful, and then, I guess, like the common cold or herpes or whatever I never went away.
Anthony Scaramucci: (05:50)
Toe fungus. It's toe fungus, Sasha. I see myself as toe fungus. Once I'm in the toe, you can't get rid of me. So you were 15 when you started?
Sasha Issenberg: (05:59)
I was 15 when I started and then I gradually got more responsibility doing some my own reporting, a little bit of my own writing and all sorts of things that were less glamorous. And I ended up being the only person who was with the magazine for its whole life. So it lasted about five and a half years until it folded and by the end I was writing for the magazine and while I was in college.
Sasha Issenberg: (06:20)
And it was, I think a lot about this as we look back on what's happened with politics in the last 25 years since John Kennedy launched the magazine, but I think he was incredibly perceptive at noticing the ways that politics and popular culture were not just intersecting but sort of becoming indifferentiable from one another, and the way in which the sort of political media sphere and the entertainment sphere were one and the same.
Sasha Issenberg: (06:48)
That was a pretty radical proposition to build a magazine around in the 1990s, and like the advertising environment didn't quite understand whether it was a political magazine or a pop culture magazine, but I think often about how he would look at certainly the people who are national political figures now let's say and think that it might have been a sort of natural arc from some of the stuff that we were seeing back then.
Anthony Scaramucci: (07:14)
You think Joe Biden is the last of the political infrastructure figures to become president? What I mean by that is President Biden became a senator in 1972. He went on to become president, but he was 49 years in the establishment infrastructure of the American political system. Do you think or do you think that we'll have celebrity presidents, apropos to Donald Trump or The Rock, or where do you think that that's going from a genre perspective?
Sasha Issenberg: (07:50)
Yeah. I mean, I think Trump shows that there are far more shortcuts to the presidency than there used to be. I guess we could talk about whether Eisenhower took a shortcut or not, but I think that that's clearly an example that you can build your profile, your sort of base of support outside of the political establishment and international politics at the highest level and have a foundation for it. The Rock, Will Smith, you'll talk about Tom Brokaw running for president 20 years ago, it's all basically the same proposition. That said, I think we can look back at Biden's success as, and I think we've talked for years about how senators or lifelong politicians have a tougher job running for president because they have all this baggage and all these votes and 49 years of clips of things they've said.
Sasha Issenberg: (08:42)
You can also look at Biden's success last year is very much a testament to the fact that he had paid his dues with almost every part of the Democratic coalition. He might not have been beloved by any part of the Democratic coalition, but was liked and trusted enough by just about all of them, and that was a testament to his longevity. I don't know if there's ever like a Democratic fan base for Joe Biden, but you know what? When it came time to run for president, African-Americans he had sort of built a long record of labor unions but he could raise money, the LGBT community and that was like accumulated over years. And I think that there is ... wouldn't surprise me if we see other situations where parties turn to people like that because other candidates are flawed in their way.
Sasha Issenberg: (09:35)
I think the question is how many people are going to be in politics for 49 years? I mean, that's the other thing, is we just don't see that many career politicians. We see people sort of skedaddle when they can make more money or they get frustrated in the senate or whatever else. I'm not sure if we'll see many more lifers.
Anthony Scaramucci: (09:53)
Sasha, I wanted your perspective because I think you've had your hand on the pulse of this for a quarter of a century. So back to the book, again, a fascinating book, The Engagement about America's quarter-century struggle over same-sex marriage. I saw the book as a layered cake. It had three tiers to it in my opinion. I'd like to get your reaction to it.
Anthony Scaramucci: (10:16)
The first tier was the sentiment on the ground and people in our society, and obviously the biblical society, the Christian society and others that was tier one. The second tier was politicians, and to your point in the book, most of them as recently as 10 or 15 years ago didn't want to touch it with a hot ... anything. It was hot stove to those people. Joe Biden interestingly enough was the first person on the national stage to really open up about it ahead of Barack Obama which is interesting.
Anthony Scaramucci: (10:50)
But the top of the cake to me were the court cases, because you had a series of court cases that had to frankly break your way or our way. I'm a same-sex marriage proponent so I'll say our way. And I thought that was fascinating as well. And then of course you brought up the state legislature. I think that's at the top of that cake. What's your reaction to my analysis of the book?
Sasha Issenberg: (11:15)
Yeah. I mean, I'm not much of a baker, so my sense of cake architecture is a little wobbly, but I think one ... I think you have the elements right. I think one thing is that the sort of causal chain, in a lot of cases it was courts forcing politicians to address this issue. My book starts in Hawaii in 1990. At that point there's not a single gay rights organization in the United States that has endorsed marriage as an objective. There's barely a politician in the United States who's been asked his or her opinion on marriage. And there's obviously through '80s a lot of anti-gay activism on the religious right, but they're not trying to stop gay people from marrying because they're trying to stop sometimes gay people from working as teachers, serving in the military, having employment non-discrimination protections.
Sasha Issenberg: (12:03)
And it's a court case in Hawaii that ends up forcing just in Hawaii the legislature and the governor to have to stake out a position on this. And we see versions of that in Vermont and Massachusetts, and eventually part of what's driving senators who are changing their position in 2013 is it's going to the Supreme Court. So I think that the legal ... You're right that I think politicians were sort of followers of public opinion, but the thing that was driving this to the top of the agenda was often lawsuits, sometimes accidental like in Hawaii, and sometimes sort of well plotted civil rights test cases. But those are the elements, yeah. I think that there's a ground level social change that took place, and then I think the legal stuff was sort of the direct engine and then the political class had to respond to this.
Sasha Issenberg: (12:57)
And for a long time what same-sex marriage activists were trying to do was keep politicians out of this, because their feeling was if we won in court, the only thing that could be bad if the state legislature or a governor decided to amend the constitution or try by statute or something to undo a court victory.
Anthony Scaramucci: (13:16)
When you go back in your intellectual journey on this idea of same-sex marriage, let's start with Bill Clinton in 1996 in the Defense of Marriage Act, and then let's fast forward to 2012. To me that's a pretty short period of time. If you think about the Civil Rights struggle from say 1865 to the introduction of Jackie Robinson in American baseball in 1947, it seems like this moved very fast. Why?
Sasha Issenberg: (13:48)
Yeah. And suffrage would be the other thing. We're looking for 75 years from Seneca Falls to women getting the vote nationwide. I think the biggest difference between the marriage, and I would separate here marriage as opposed to sort of the whole bundle of LGBT related issues, which has been a longer arc and still not won or settled. I think the big thing was that whether the majority or the people with power didn't have to give anything up. I think one way we often talk about sort of civil rights or social movements as these sort of contests over public ideals, justice, freedom, liberty, equality, stuff like that.
Sasha Issenberg: (14:40)
It's also a way to look at where they're basically contests over scarce resources. When women decided to seek property rights, husbands and fathers appropriately recognized that they were going to lose wealth. When men saw that women getting the vote would dilute their own political power, white people saw that black people getting the vote would dilute their own political power. Every push for immigrants rights, native-born population see it as a threat to their jobs. Desegregation was a threat to landlords who didn't want somebody to tell them who they had to rent their buildings to. The disability rights, the ADA burdened landlords with having to spend money on repairs and adjustments. Every time to be more accepting or open, people had to give something up often with a real material value to them.
Sasha Issenberg: (15:38)
And the thing, the sort of counterfactuals I like to play with is like what if there were a limited number of marriage licenses in the state. Would somebody like you or some of those straight hedge fund guys we mentioned, other sort of the moderate straight who came around and supported this? If you knew that you or your child would have to wait six or nine months in line for a marriage license because a gay person was now getting in front of them, would your views have changed? It might. And the other way of asking is sort of like what if the defining LGBT rights issue of the last generation were affirmative action for gays and lesbians in areas where they thought they'd been discriminated against.
Sasha Issenberg: (16:24)
This didn't really create a competition. And almost every other form of increased rights for a minority group creates a form of competition that's a threat to people who have wealth and power.
Anthony Scaramucci: (16:35)
It doesn't create a competition, but for some reason, Sasha, and you correctly write about this in the book, there is a threat there for some reason. I don't know. It's a threat to someone's sexuality? Is it a threat to what people perceive normalcy, which I find ridiculous? But I'm just letting you know that's a lot of people see it that way. How did we break down those ideas? I mean, we went from 30% of the people supporting gay marriage eight years later 70% of the people, and we went from gay men and women being reluctant to admit that they're gay to an openly gay presidential candidate like Pete Buttigieg in 2020.
Sasha Issenberg: (17:26)
So I think on the marriage front in particular, May 17, 2004 is the day that same-sex couples are able to first legally marry in the United States in Massachusetts. And the rhetoric shifts after that day in a really significant way. Before then, people who were opposed to same-sex marriage, and as you said, at that point it's probably 65% of the population was opposed or such. And the things you heard from people I think were, "This is going to be the end of the American family. This is going to be the end of western civilization." Rick Santorum said that, compared the Massachusetts court decision to 9/11, said it's a homeland security crisis.
Sasha Issenberg: (18:17)
Look, I think some of that was like natural hyperbole-
Anthony Scaramucci: (18:20)
He's my spiritual advisor, Sasha. I just wanted you to know that-
Sasha Issenberg: (18:23)
Okay.
Anthony Scaramucci: (18:23)
No. He's not my spiritual advisor. You didn't catch the sarcasm.
Sasha Issenberg: (18:30)
I've seen your list of bundling. I'm pretty sure that I didn't see you max out to Santorum. Look, some of that's hyperbole, like conscious hyperbole, and some of that I think people were really afraid of something that was new. And before 1999 there wasn't a society on earth that allowed gay couples to marry. And it was a radical proposal. Everybody has ... Unlike a lot of political issues, I don't think there are a lot of people in the United States who are more than one or two degrees of separation from somebody who's married. This isn't abstract. It's real. And people had seen only one type of family structure that was acknowledged under the law, and I think people were really honestly afraid of what would happen.
Sasha Issenberg: (19:18)
What happens after Massachusetts, there are these incredible warnings of like societal decay. And what happens afterwards is nothing. People are ... There's obviously no outward. Schools function the same way. Businesses function the same way the day afterwards. This question of that we sort of heard over the years from a gay or lesbian person, how would my marriage affect yours becomes like a real challenge and there's like nothing, and people are pouring over statistics. Gay couples are not getting divorced at a higher rate. Their kids are not having worse outcomes. Their communities are no weaker or less strong. And if anything, what you start to see is that communities around gays and lesbians were able to build a family on the same terms as straight people or stronger and better off.
Sasha Issenberg: (20:09)
And you know what? Guess what? Their employers like it because they get predictability over who's going to get what benefits and what they get from the government and what they don't. Labor unions like it because now they can negotiate for benefits without having to come up with something crazy. Communities like it because they want full stable families.
Sasha Issenberg: (20:26)
So part of what changes I think with time is that the coalition of people who are opposed to this starts to shrink because nobody is actually feeling any sense of harm. I mean one of the major challenges for maintaining a political coalition on any issue is getting people who are actually invested in an outcome. And the group of people who are invested in stopping this shrinks. There's still people who believe that biblical declarations of what's appropriate and godly, they haven't changed their views of this. But I think people who fear that somehow this would damage society don't have anything to lean on. And at the same time, you have the community of people who are invested in this spreading.
Sasha Issenberg: (21:20)
One thing that's different between, we talked about the sort of efforts at equality over race and sex. Unlike with race and sex, people control the conditions under which they acknowledge and disclose and announce their sexual orientation, and for that matter gender identity. So people can come out, and almost by definition gay people are born to straight people. And that means that there are not a lot of ... Social scientists call it contact theory. We know that people's political attitudes change when they have exposure to somebody who's different than them, whether or not-
Anthony Scaramucci: (22:02)
Senator Rob Portman's son came out.
Sasha Issenberg: (22:04)
Right.
Anthony Scaramucci: (22:05)
And Vice President Cheney's daughter came out, and all of a sudden their views started to shift.
Sasha Issenberg: (22:11)
And one thing that's important to realize there's like that's something that can happen because of how heredity and sexual orientation work. There are not a lot of Latino kids being born to Jewish parents. There are not a lot of immigrant kids being born to native born parents. It's really important just to realize as best we understand the odds of a gay kid ending up in any household in the country are pretty evenly distributed, whereas racial segregation means that you're not likely to find out that your next-door neighbor has been raising an African-American child all these years. And that just exposes far more people to gays and lesbians, and I think probably transgendered people as well than they would get exposed to people of a different race or religion for example.
Anthony Scaramucci: (22:58)
This is an opinion question but I'm curious because you have an informed opinion. Is there a stigma to being gay?
Sasha Issenberg: (23:07)
I mean I think it's ... I mean there certainly was in American society. I think it is greatly receding. And I think some of it's local. I'm a straight guy. If you told me I was a gay man and I had to decide where to start my life, there are probably certain places in the country and certain occupations or certain types of schools where I would feel more welcome than others, and I think that's a result of stigma.
Anthony Scaramucci: (23:32)
But the good news is it's receding. The good news is that we're getting past it.
Sasha Issenberg: (23:37)
You mentioned Buttigieg. The fact that he was gay was not that interesting to people. People talked about he was young. He was mayor of a small city. Who did he work for at Bain. We didn't really ... It was not a defining part of his public identity, and I think that's pretty telling. A decade earlier any gay man who ran for president, that would have been the defining aspect of their candidacy at every moment I think.
Anthony Scaramucci: (24:04)
Well, he's obviously a very impressive person, and I think that that's what we have to get past, whether it's our sexual orientation, our skin color, our religious preferences, can you do the job or not, I think that's ultimately the thing that we have to look to.
Anthony Scaramucci: (24:22)
I have one last question for you before I turn it over to John Darsie, and that's, and I'm probably not going to pronounce the name right but Carl Nassib ... John, did I pronounce that right? I know you ...
John Darsie: (24:32)
Nassib, yeah.
Anthony Scaramucci: (24:35)
Nassib. He came out and he said that he was gay.
Sasha Issenberg: (24:37)
This is the Oakland Raiders player or LA Raiders?
Anthony Scaramucci: (24:40)
Yes, the LA Raiders player. And the commissioner, Roger Goodell, a good guy might add, know him reasonably well, he applauded it, released a statement from the NFL. It was very well received. A couple of years back Michael Sam came out, less so received. So is this another sign of progress in the fight for equality? How do you think race factored into the reception of these athletes? And these are opinion ... these are ...
Sasha Issenberg: (25:11)
Yeah. I mean, I do think that you look at, I don't remember how long Michael Sam was five years ago. I mean, I think there's been a significant shift in that time. Some of it is, you mentioned the NFL as an organization. And one thing we have seen Pride Month ended a few weeks ago is institutional America and that includes corporate America becoming so unreserved in its not just acceptance of LGBT people but in its sort of active support.
Sasha Issenberg: (25:48)
I think companies falling over each other to be seen as allies or supportive, in part because they recognize that their employee base and their customer base and their investor base want to see that and they're responding to sort of market incentives. But I do think that some of this might be that organizations like the NBA or the NFL in this case want to be seen as leaders on these type of social issues, and so you're getting it from the top down as opposed to just sort of from the community up.
Sasha Issenberg: (26:22)
One thing that's worth in terms of this sort of the decrease of stigma, I think it's really important to realize how our understanding of the science of sexuality has changed over this time. I went back and consumed a lot of media coverage from the '90s while researching this book, and every time you read an article from Time or Newsweek about any gay rights issue, not just marriage from the 1990s, there's like always a paragraph like: To be sure, we don't know whether it's nature or nurture that turns people gay or lesbian.
Sasha Issenberg: (26:52)
Politicians, activists, preachers, whatever, would talk about lifestyle and choice. And nobody talks that way anymore. And it's because downstream from laboratory research we now have an understanding that basically people are born with a whole lot of stuff that they don't control, and that is not just related to sexuality, but temper, addiction. We talk differently about everything, and we, I think it's now widely accepted. Even the Rick Santorums of the world aren't going to pretend that Michael Sam or Carl Nassib or whoever it is chooses to be gay.
Sasha Issenberg: (27:30)
So then the question is like, in a decent society, if people are being born this way, how do you respond to that? And denying them the opportunity to have a job or play a sport would seem like a pretty harsh response to something if we sort of accept as a society that there will be gay people. So the question is what type of society do we want to be to them?
Anthony Scaramucci: (28:05)
John Darsie.
John Darsie: (28:08)
Yeah. And Sasha, it's a pleasure to have you on. Fantastic book you wrote. A lot of what you wrote about too in the book were colorful characters and consequential characters when it comes to this fight that obviously accelerated in the most recent decades. Could you just talk our audience through some of the people that you came across that you found most interesting and the role they played in this fight for marriage equality?
Sasha Issenberg: (28:31)
Yeah, sure John. So the book starts in Hawaii in 1990 and the main character there is this guy Bill Wood who I never got the chance to meet. He passed away a few years before I started working on this, but I was able to sort of reconstruct his life and activities. He was like the gay activist in Hawaii in the 1970s and '80s. And like a lot of I think first generation activists in any sphere of community, he was incredibly entrepreneurial. He founded the gay community center. He started the gay newspaper. He had the first gay radio show in Hawaii. But not particularly good at building alliances or coalitions or working well with others. Very good about getting attention for himself, but not terribly good about playing well with others.
Sasha Issenberg: (29:20)
And he ends up in this heady rivalry within a Pride planning committee in Honolulu in 1989. He already has a kind of has it out with these two lesbian women who are running this Pride planning committee, because they have launched a magazine Island Lifestyle that competes with his gay community news for what, John, you can only imagine is the large pool of advertisers in Oahu in 1989 who want to be in gay publications. And he wants to have a parade as part of the Pride planning festivities, and they just want to have a picnic and vigil.
Sasha Issenberg: (30:01)
So they give him a subcommittee to research the parade. He comes back with a report. They dismiss the report. So he decides he's going to quit their Pride planning committee and start his own Pride parade planning committee. And now Bill Woods is looking for all these ways to upstage the picnic event. So he invites the governor to be the grand marshal of this parade. He gets the royal Hawaiian jazz band. He gets a chef caterer friend of his to put on an international food festival, and he decides he's going to have a mass wedding, like a mooney style few dozen couples on stage at a rally at the end of this parade, and they're going to exchange vows. And there have been couples who've been doing this at the Metropolitan Community Church which was a local gay-friendly sort of ambiguously protestant denomination, these holy union ceremonies. But people knew it had no force of law. They were just exchanging vows.
Sasha Issenberg: (30:56)
Bill Woods was not a lawyer. It's pretty clear to me he misread the state's family law code, and he came away with the impression that these couples actually exchanged vows on stage that the state might have to recognize them as married. And he went to the Hawaii ACLU to get them to back him up in this sort of legal theory, and they also ... they wanted nothing to do with him, but they also didn't want to say no to him because they knew what's well enough to know that if you pick a fight with him, he would sort of revel in it and it wouldn't work out well. So they spent all of 1990 just sort of like pushing him off, clearly trying to get past June 1990 when Pride Month would happen, hoped that Woods would lose an interest in this marriage thing, go ahead with this parade or whatever and move on to the next thing.
Sasha Issenberg: (31:41)
And he didn't move on. The marriage ceremony didn't happen, but now he was pissed that the ACLU had basically been stringing him along and disrespecting him. So December 17th, 1990 Bill Woods decides he's going to launch this PR stunt basically to in his hopes to jam the ALCU into having to back him up, that once there's media coverage of this, there's no way that the ACLU can say no to actual gay couples who want to fight for marriage rights. So he gets like the Honolulu press corps to follow them into the public health department. These three couples request marriage licenses. They're turned down. The attorney general says that the health director was right under state law to reject them. Woods leads them to the ACLU with all these cameras. The ACLU still says no, we don't want to be part of this.
Sasha Issenberg: (32:33)
A civil rights attorney sues on these couples' behalf the next spring. And so the shock of everybody involved, this long shot lawsuit wins, and the Hawaii Supreme Court becomes the first court anywhere on earth to rule that the fundamental right to marriage could extend to same-sex couples in May of 1993.
Sasha Issenberg: (32:49)
This is what puts marriage on the map as an issue. The Defense of Marriage Act that Anthony mentioned in 1996 is Congress eventually feeling that Hawaii is very close to actually marrying same-sex couples, one trial judge away, and that you need to write it into federal law to basically insulate mainland governments, the other 49 states and the federal government from having to recognize these marriages.
Sasha Issenberg: (33:14)
So Woods ends up being the catalyst for the world we live in right now. This would not have become the issue the way it did if he hadn't launched this. He's both like just an amazing character whom I wish I had the chance to meet, but also just I think sort of telling in our understanding of history, and that once like ends at the Supreme Court and we see a landmark decision that it awards a set of rights to a new group of people, I think are natural instincts [inaudible 00:33:44] because the outcome was momentous and just and it had to be inevitable. And that's often the language we use around civil rights. And there's the fact is like nothing about this was inevitable. It wasn't inevitable it's going to end up at the Supreme Court when it did or turn out the way it did. But it also wasn't inevitable this was going to be a thing that we as a country were fighting over. So I really liked him because it shows how accidental the sort of origins of this was.
John Darsie: (34:09)
Anthony referenced Vice President, then Vice President Biden sort of taking the lead on marriage equality within the Obama Administration, President Obama himself actually for a long time being opposed to marriage equality. Certainly the Trump Administration was hard to discern exactly what their stance was, but they also enabled legislation or certain rulings that certainly didn't enhance the rights of the LGBTQ community, if you will. But can you just compare and contrast what took place in the Obama Administration setting aside maybe his early ... He was opposed to marriage equality at the beginning obviously and changed course there, but then within the Trump Administration, what kind of setbacks did we see in terms of LGBTQ rights?
Sasha Issenberg: (34:58)
Yeah. So Obama as you say, Obama actually in 1996 when he first ran for the state senate said he supported same-sex marriage rights, and then he later backed off and blamed a staffer for having filled out a questionnaire against his will. As he ran for congress, he became basically more conservative on this issue, and he became where the mainstream of Democratic politics were through the 2000s, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton which are saying some version of I think marriage is between a man and a woman, but I think that gay couples should have all the same rights and benefits through civil unions.
Sasha Issenberg: (35:33)
It became clear through 2011 ... in 2011 Obama sort of recognized he was going to be out of sync with his party on this. I tell the story of him coming to New York for some DNC fundraisers in the summer of 2011 after Cuomo has signed the marriage bill into law, and I think I quote one of Obama's advisers saying he felt like the skunk at the garden party or whatever, which is you sort of had the liberal donor class of the Democratic Party celebrating Andrew Cuomo for having sort of muscled through what they saw as courageously, muscled through this bill and Obama being berated by activists for being on the wrong side of it.
Sasha Issenberg: (36:18)
So there was this process underway in the White House, starting in the summer of 2011 where Obama said basically I want to change my position on this but you guys, my team, need to figure out how and when I do it. I think that one of the things about being president is there's just such scrutiny of your every statement and your opinion that you can't just sort of casually change your position on something and hope no one notices the way. You might be able to if you're a member of congress or something.
Sasha Issenberg: (36:44)
There was a sort of high-level effort to figure out how to do this. There's a decision that he should do it before November 2012, before the re-election, but you don't want to do it too late in the calendar because you don't want this. They wanted to run against Mitt Romney on private equity and the economy, and he did not want to spend the debates or his convention having to explain why he had flip-flopped on marriage.
Sasha Issenberg: (37:09)
I thought it would be a net plus for him running for reelection, but they still did not want this to dominate the campaign. So there are all these plans afoot in the White House. And eventually they settled on the idea there's ... should he give a big speech like the race speech he did in Philadelphia? No, that would make it more of an event than they wanted. So he should do ... He'll do an interview. They decide he should do with female questioners because there's research that suggested that from a messaging perspective it's better that when you talk about this family stuff. So they had plans, sort of tentative plans for him. He was going to be in New York in June for fundraisers. He was going to go on The View. So I guess the only thing better than one female interviewer is four female interviewers, and that's where Obama was going to lay out that he had evolved as he liked to say.
Sasha Issenberg: (37:55)
And Biden was aware of the general contours of this, and Biden basically jumped the gun a month early, said what he did and forced Obama three days later. One of the remarkable things though that's going on for a couple years before that is that the White House counsel's office is ... There's this question of what's Barack Obama's personal position on same-sex marriage. And it's kind of irrelevant what the president's personal position on same-sex marriage is because there's never going to be a piece of legislation that comes before the president's desk about marriage to sign, like it's just not a thing that the president is going to deal with directly. But the White House and Justice Department have a lot of say in how the government especially handles the defense of marriage act but also gets involved in other cases as they move into federal courts.
Sasha Issenberg: (38:50)
So what you see is actually the White House counsel's office starting in 2009 getting ahead of Obama in his public position by, they eventually dropped their ... They say we're going to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act because we think it's unconstitutional, which is a really unusual position for the federal government to take, say we're not going to defend our own laws in court. Basically our whole system of constitutional litigation is based on governments have to defend their own laws, otherwise there's nobody there to do it. So it's one of these things, and I don't know whether Anthony you spend enough days in there to get a good perspective on this, but there are a few different levels at which the White House can operate. There's what the President says publicly, and then there's what his government is doing. And Obama's government was always sort of more aggressive on this marriage question courts than he was.
Sasha Issenberg: (39:41)
I think the Trump years, Trump was always, he was very ambiguous about this throughout the election. He criticized the Supreme Court decision when it happened, the Obergefell decision in 2015 that made same-sex marriage the law of the land, but then he was interviewed by Leslie Stahl a couple days after the election 2016 and he says, "It's settled law, I accept it." I think that there was a real disconnect between Trump's attitudes towards marriage-
John Darsie: (40:09)
His words and action.
Sasha Issenberg: (40:10)
Well, between, I think on marriage where he did not ... I was surprised that this was not a bigger issue in the 2015-2016 election season among Republicans because you had the Supreme Court striking down state bans in some of the reddest states. Bobby Jindal briefly said we should abolish the Supreme Court because of this. There was a moment where Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee went down to Kentucky where where that county clerk, Kim Davis was refusing to issue licenses.
Sasha Issenberg: (40:42)
But for all of the ways in which Donald Trump has an exceptional gift for pitting Americans against each other for his own amusement, political benefit, instinct, whatever, he did not seem interested in pitting gay couples who wanted to get married against his base. That's just not ... was not his thing. That said, I don't think that ... I think there's a real difference between how certain parts of the Republican conservative world now look at gay and lesbian concerns and transgender issues. And Rick Grenell who's probably the administration's leading voice on sort of what gay republicanism should be seems pretty intent on kind of splitting the LGBT coalition between gay men and lesbians and maybe bisexual on one side and then people deal with gender identity issues.
Sasha Issenberg: (41:35)
So the Trump Administration on a rule-making level was set back LGBT rights in a lot of areas, but there wasn't a whole lot that it chose to do or really directly could have done on marriage.
John Darsie: (41:55)
You talked about the Supreme Court, and this will be the last question before we let you go is Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion last summer in a workplace discrimination lawsuit Bostock vs Clayton County. He basically ruled that you cannot fire someone, you probably are more familiar with this case even than I am, on the basis of sexual orientation. It falls under the sex category. And that surprised a lot of people.
John Darsie: (42:20)
There's been various rulings from the Supreme Court when Trump's appointees have been sitting in those chairs that have surprised people and sometimes to the consternation of certain elements of the Republican community. How surprising was that decision and how important was that decision in terms of ridding ourselves of certain workplace discrimination?
Sasha Issenberg: (42:40)
I think it was really important just in the lives of people. There's still 13, 14 states that permit a company to fire somebody because they're gay or lesbian or not hire them or not promote them. And it's been, there have been efforts for almost 50 years, but in earnest for 30 years to pass a federal law that would codify making that illegal and it hasn't gotten through the senate ever.
Sasha Issenberg: (43:11)
So this is important and creates conditions for folks in a lot of those states to bring federal actions. Now it just dealt with employment. There's still a question about housing discrimination, lending discrimination. In a lot of those states you can choose not to rent something to somebody because of their sexual orientation, or you can deny them a mortgage, you can turn them away from your diner or hotel. So Bostock, the logic of Bostok could apply to those other areas, but the actual decision did not.
Sasha Issenberg: (43:44)
Now, it's important to look at how Gorsuch wrote that, the reasoning behind that. Basically he calls himself a textualist. That means that you look at the text of, in this case of a law, of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, and it says you cannot discriminate on the basis of race, sex, blah, blah, blah. And his interpretation was that, "Well, traditionally or in the past we've understood sex to mean biological sex. Sex should be understood to mean sexual orientation, and that just based on that definition of the word sex, that employment discrimination against somebody because they're a woman is the same in legal terms as discriminate against them because they're a lesbian.
Sasha Issenberg: (44:43)
It's notable that that wasn't a Civil Rights decision. It was a momentous decision but it was narrowly applied to that, which is Anthony Kennedy also who was behind four major gay rights decisions also was resistant to kind of traditional civil rights thinking. And that meant that even when he ... There was a way that he could have written the marriage decision that would have affected other areas of interest to LGBT folks under the law and didn't. And Gorsuch's ... one irony, I mean it's an irony of I don't think this is necessarily his strategic plan, but what Gorsuch did was he left it open.
Sasha Issenberg: (45:25)
It wasn't a matter of constitutional interpretation. It was just a matter of interpreting the text of that bill. And it's possible that if you had a Republican house and senate or President Mike Pence in a few years, that they could amend with a majority in the house and whatever gets you through the senate these days the Civil Rights Act to say biological sex and overrule the Supreme Court. So by not making it a matter of constitutional guarantee and just making it a matter of statutory interpretation it was flimsier than it could have been.
Sasha Issenberg: (46:05)
So I think you're right to note that that was a surprise coming from a conservative justice, but it's also that getting there was notable for what it chose not to do and made it possible to get a majority I think of votes on that.
John Darsie: (46:22)
Right. Well, the struggle is ongoing. Again, the book is The Engagement: America's quarter-century struggle over same-sex marriage. A fantastic topic to write about and extremely well-written. Sasha, thank you so much for joining us. Anthony, you have a final word for Sasha before we let him go?
Anthony Scaramucci: (46:39)
What's next Sasha? What book are we writing?
Sasha Issenberg: (46:42)
I've gotten very interested in a historic election fraud scandal that took place in Indiana over 100 years ago that I think is just a hell of a true crime yarn and also shed some light on the conversations we're having now about the nature of election fraud and to what extent it exists or has existed in American history. It'll be shorter and I promise not to spend ... It won't be 900 pages and I won't spend a decade on it. That's my guarantee to you.
Anthony Scaramucci: (47:08)
Well, we appreciate it. This has been a great conversation for us. Sasha, if you don't mind, hold up the book because mine is in New York. I want to hold it up again for everybody, The Engagement. What a great story about America's quarter-century struggle over the same-sex marriage. Thank God we're through that struggle by the way. I think it's great for our society, and I appreciate you writing that book, and hopefully we'll get you to one of our live events soon.
Sasha Issenberg: (47:37)
I'd really like that. It's great talking to you Anthony. Nice to meet you John.
John Darsie: (47:40)
You as well. And just another piece of trivia before we wrap up here. President Joe Biden spoke at the SALT Conference in 2017. He came there along with the Human Rights campaign, so it's certainly encouraging to see somebody with a very proactive view of marriage equality just general equality. So we continue to hope that arc bends towards equality for everyone. But thank you Sasha, and thank you everybody for tuning in to today's SALT Talk with Sasha Issenberg.
John Darsie: (48:09)
Just a reminder. If you missed any part of this talk or any of our previous SALT Talks, you can access them on our website at salt.org/talks or on our YouTube channel which is called salttube. We're also on social media. Twitter is where we're most active @saltconference, but we're also on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook as well. And please, spread the word about these SALT Talks if you find them interesting. On behalf of Anthony and the entire SALT team this is John Darsie signing off from SALT Talks for today. We hope to see you back here again soon.