Read Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality for Free Online Page B

were upstarts who didn’t know what they were doing. They couldn’t get to five votes on the Supreme Court. This was going to have a terrible ending.
    “It just felt like there was a lot of disrespect for the fact that a lot of people who had been working on these issues for a very long time had a different viewpoint,” Davidson would later recall. “I was like ‘who are you?’”
    It was not that the movement lawyers disagreed with the goal. But they were old enough to remember the terrible setback that had occurred when the Supreme Court, in a 1986 case called
Bowers v. Hardwick
brought by the ACLU, upheld the constitutionality of laws criminalizing sodomy. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, citing the “ancient roots” of prohibitions against sodomy, had gone out of his way in a concurring opinion to quote Sir William Blackstone’s description of homosexual sex as an “infamous crime against nature.”
    The consensus was that the case had been brought too soon, at a time when nearly half the states still had criminal sodomy laws on their books. Supreme Court justices tend to abide by a legal principle called stare decisis, which means, in Latin, “to stand by decisions and not disturb the undisturbed.” What it means in practice is that the justices are generally reluctant to overturnprevious decisions. It had taken seventeen years, and the repeal of antisodomy laws in all but fourteen states, for the Court to reverse itself and declare laws criminalizing gay sex unconstitutional in the
Lawrence
case. In the interim, the precedent that the Court set with its biting
Bowers
opinion had been relied upon by lower courts to uphold the military’s policy of discharging gay and lesbian service members, to find laws prohibiting gays and lesbians from becoming foster or adoptive parents constitutional, and to justify denying a lesbian mother custody of her children and a requirement that a gay father’s visit with his daughter be supervised.
    How long would it take for a reversal on marriage, and what other precedents might be set, if Olson was to lose?
    “Just wait,” Rosenbaum pleaded.
    “Really?” said Boutrous, by now angry. “Should we wait until the Mitt Romney administration?” he asked, referring to the likely 2012 Republican presidential nominee.
    Davidson threw a multipage dossier on the dining room table, outlining all the conservative causes Olson had championed over the years. This, and more, would be released to the media if they went ahead with their ill-fated plan, he threatened.
    “Wonderful,” Kristina retorted. “Do it. That only helps us.”
    “We hired him because he is a conservative,” Chad added. “Someone who represented all these people”—he gestured at the dossier—“is going to be able to move public opinion.”
    The meeting abruptly ended on that angry note. “Well, that,” Michele Reiner declared in her typically blunt but indefatigable fashion, “was a disaster!”
    They were now on notice. If they proceeded, they would do so in the face of the full-throated opposition of the gay rights community. It was not the best of outcomes, but neither was it a real deterrent. They did not need the gay establishment. They had already put in place an organization with the wherewithal to go it alone. Their detractors just did not realize it yet.

    The first fund-raiser for the American Foundation for Equal Rights had taken place the previous month in a private upstairs room at Mr. Chow, a Chineserestaurant in Beverly Hills as famous for its celebrity clientele as its Peking duck.
    Chad and Kristina spent an entire night coming up with the name for the nonprofit they had formed to raise money for the lawsuit. “It has to have the word ‘American’ in it,” Chad had said. “And it shouldn’t sound like a gay rights group.”
    All told, he and Kristina estimated they would need about $3.5 million to pay Olson’s bills and build a first-class media war room to publicize their