THE EXPERTS Overview & Directory Same-Sex Marriage: Maggie Gallagher Robert George Mary Ann Glendon Andrew Koppelman Stanley Kurtz Rep. Marilyn Musgrave Gavin Newsom Donna Payne Tony Perkins Andrew Sullivan Evan Wolfson

By Lisa Caruso and Kellie Lunney,
National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Saturday, May 22, 2004

The emotionally charged issue of gay marriage exploded onto the national agenda last fall, when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the state's constitution gives same-sex couples the right to wed. On May 17, wedding bells started ringing in Massachusetts. But the state was not the first jurisdiction to allow marriages for gays and lesbians: San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom married thousands of gay couples earlier this year, albeit without judicial blessing. In doing so, he simultaneously gave hope to the gay community and ignited a backlash among social conservatives.

To date, 24 states have amended or are considering amending their constitutions to ban gay marriage. Nationally, President Bush belatedly voiced support for a proposed constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman, although congressional Republicans are in no rush to consider it. Sen. John Kerry opposes gay marriage, but he has taken pains to avoid offending steadfastly Democratic gay voters.

Gay marriage got its first big boost in Hawaii, a popular destination for weddings and honeymoons, in 1993 when the state opened the door to legalizing same-sex marriage. In Baehr v. Lewin, the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that the state had to show "compelling interests" for denying marriage licenses to three homosexual couples. Baehr prompted Congress to pass the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as a heterosexual union and allowed states to ignore same-sex marriages performed in other states. In 1998, Hawaiian voters approved a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, rendering Baehr moot legally but not politically.

Since the Defense of Marriage Act, about 35 states have banned same-sex marriage and do not provide spousal rights to same-sex couples. Vermont authorized civil unions, but not gay marriage, in 2000. But in June 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that a Texas law prohibiting sex acts between people of the same gender was unconstitutional, setting the stage for a fierce debate on values, constitutional law, and the role of courts in American government.

Maggie Gallagher
President, Institute for Marriage and Public Policy
(202) 216-9430
Maggie Gallagher speaks in the confident declarative sentences of someone who knows what she thinks and why she thinks it, and isn't afraid to say so. Gallagher, president of the Washington-based Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, is a longtime proponent of strengthening traditional families. She argues that marriage is society's most basic social institution for providing children with mothers and fathers and for raising the next generation.

It is in society's interest to reinforce the institution, she says, because changing the definition of marriage ultimately affects all children by creating "a culture that tells [people that] children don't need fathers." When marriage breaks down, Gallagher says, taxpayers must foot the bill for the social services single parents often need and for government programs to address the higher crime rates, drug use, child abuse, inadequate education, domestic violence, and poverty associated with divorce and unwed motherhood.

On the emotional cost to children, Gallagher speaks from personal experience: Unwed, she had a baby right out of Yale University in 1982. Her son's father dropped out of his life, a loss she knows affected her son, now 21. "Children have feelings about the fact that their father is missing. You're missing half of your birthright." Gallagher, 43, married 11 years ago; she and her husband have a 9-year-old son. Transforming marriage from a social norm predicated on raising children to an individual civil right and expression of adult desires threatens the core public purposes of marriage as an institution, she says. That's why Gallagher believes that marriage should be defined in the Constitution as the union of a man and a woman. Gay-marriage advocate and National Journal columnist Jonathan Rauch says of Gallagher, "I think she's wrong on gay marriage, but she is smart, reports the data accurately (not everyone does), and is in the debate for the good of marriage, not out of any animosity toward gay people.... She knows her stuff and lets her knowledge do the talking."

Gallagher, a native of Portland, Ore., is active in Washington and around the country, having addressed the Senate Republican Conference, testified twice before Congress, and spoken frequently on the topic. She writes a column on the Web, is the author of four books and numerous articles, and is the editor of the MarriageDebate.com Web site.

Robert George
Professor of Law, Princeton University
(609) 258-3270
A leading conservative thinker and legal scholar, Robert George is the product of humble beginnings: He was born and raised in Morgantown, W.Va., in a traditional Catholic family. Today, George, 48, is a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, has the ear of the White House, and is sought out by members of Congress and by Catholic Church and evangelical leaders for intellectually rigorous arguments opposing gay marriage, abortion, stem-cell research, and other political and cultural hot-button issues. Conservative historian and writer J. Thomas Lowry has called him "by far the most-read conservative professor in America."

A graduate of Swarthmore College and of Harvard Law School, George earned a doctorate in legal philosophy from Oxford University. In his most recent book, The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis, George, arguing as a natural-law theorist, says that the state should not be neutral about the nature and value of marriage and other matters of "public morality."

Calling marriage and the family "the basic units of society" responsible for protecting the interests of children and "transmitting ... the virtues that make possible a healthy civic life," George says that "society has a profound interest" in preserving them. He adds, "The social interest in preserving marriage as the union of a man and a woman is identical to the social interest in preserving marriage as the union of two people. If we accept that it can be something other than the union of sexually complementary partners, then we have no principled basis for assuming it is a union of two people, or five, or seven." Responding to the argument that gay couples are discriminated against because they do not have access to the legal benefits of marriage, George says that perhaps many of those benefits ought to be extended to other unmarried people, and that the question should be considered "regardless of whether they are in a sexual relationship."

Mary Ann Glendon
Professor of Law, Harvard University
(617) 495-4769
Mary Ann Glendon -- a Harvard law professor, an expert on human rights and constitutional law, the author of nine books, and a devout Catholic -- has emerged as one of the most prominent, and influential, opponents of same-sex marriage. She has advised Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney on drafting a bill that defines marriage as a heterosexual union, has met with gay-marriage opponents, and has written some incendiary commentary in newspapers on why she opposes gay marriage.

Mark Chopko, general counsel of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, calls Glendon "extraordinarily gifted." But it's her widespread influence, in academia, law, religion, bioethics, and human rights, that has drawn attention to her ideas on gay marriage and on abortion, which she opposes. Besides Romney, she has the ear of President Bush, who appointed her to his Council on Bioethics, and of Pope John Paul II, who in March made her the highest-ranking female adviser in the Catholic Church. As president of the church's Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, the 65-year-old Glendon advises the pope on the church's position on social policies, including gay marriage and abortion.

In a February 25 opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, Glendon called the push for gay marriage "really a bid for special preferences of the type our society gives to married couples for the very good reason that most of them are raising or have raised children." Journalist and author Andrew Sullivan, who is a gay-marriage advocate, said he was a "little shocked at the extremity" of Glendon's Wall Street Journal piece. "Some people keep thinking of this in terms of a zero-sum game; in other words, if gays get married, straight people will somehow lose marriage," says Sullivan.

Glendon, who has undergraduate, juris doctor, and master's degrees from the University of Chicago, brings a varied background to her positions. She declined an interview for this profile, but in 1995 the Los Angeles Times reported that she had been married twice and was a single mother for a few years before she met her current husband. In the same story, Glendon also showed some flexibility in her abortion views, saying that she generally opposed the criminalization of abortion because of its "punitiveness toward women." A native of Dalton, Mass., Glendon also served as a volunteer civil-rights attorney early in her career.

Andrew Koppelman
Professor of Law and Political Science, Northwestern University
(312) 503-3100
Constitutional law professor Andrew Koppelman is one of only a handful of experts around the country on the "full faith and credit clause" of the Constitution. That expertise, along with his decade of scholarship on discrimination against gays and lesbians, has made him a prominent voice on the pivotal question of whether states are legally required to recognize gay marriages performed in other states.

Koppelman, 46, first got interested in the subject of gay rights and discrimination against gays in the late 1980s while a student at Yale University, where he earned a master's degree, a law degree, and a doctorate (he earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago). "It seemed to me that discrimination against gay people was outrageous, but I was dissatisfied with the constitutional arguments against it," that it violates an individual's right to privacy, Koppelman says, because the Constitution doesn't specifically protect the right to privacy. "Nor," he added, "is the debate over gay rights about privacy and the right to be let alone, but about equal dignity and status in society."

Koppelman, who grew up in Nyack, N.Y., says that discrimination against gays is a form of sex discrimination. "It is well settled in the law," Koppelman says, "that laws that treat people differently on the basis of their sex were unconstitutional." In his latest book, The Gay Rights Question in Contemporary American Law, Koppelman presents a legal and moral case for the equal legal treatment of gays. When the Hawaii Supreme Court's 1996 decision legalizing gay marriage raised the question of whether other states would be legally obligated to recognize such marriages, a curious Koppelman started researching how the courts had treated interracial marriages when they were illegal in many states. He found that, regardless of how the cases were decided or the particular circumstances of the marriage, "not a single case even mentioned [the] full faith and credit" clause, which requires states to honor court judgments from other states. Because he believes the full faith and credit clause doesn't apply to recognition of gay marriages, he called the constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman "a solution in search of a problem."

Stanley Kurtz
Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
(650) 723-1754
The French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville deserves some credit for influencing Stanley Kurtz's views on gay marriage. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville warns that excessive individualism will alienate citizens from one another. Tocqueville, writing in the 19th century, believed that America's strong emphasis on family and respect for the institution of marriage helped maintain a balance between shared values and individualism.

Kurtz, a 21st-century social anthropologist and conservative scholar, taught Tocqueville in a "Great Books" program at Harvard University earlier in his career, and says that the French philosopher's ideas on the roles of individualism and family in American democracy have influenced him. Gay marriage, Kurtz argues, reinforces an "attitude of radical libertarianism" among people when it comes to defining a family, and such libertarianism ultimately undermines traditional marriage and parenthood. From there, it's a slippery slope to the legalization of polygamy and polyamory, or group marriage, both of which would adversely affect society, and children in particular, Kurtz says. "Once the idea of marriage stops serving as a kind of shorthand for the way society expects parents to live, the pressure is off of parents to marry," he wrote in an April 28 e-mail.

Kurtz, 50, has written extensively on the subject over the last few years and has been published in National Review Online and The Weekly Standard, among other outlets. He also occasionally spars online with journalist and gay-marriage advocate Andrew Sullivan.

Kurtz's work, particularly his controversial research on gay partnerships in Scandinavia and how they have contributed to a rise in rates of out-of-wedlock births in that nation, has attracted attention from scholars, Congress, and citizens who've read his recent columns on the subject in newspapers across the country. In a May 3 article in The New Republic, New York University history professor Nathaniel Frank called Kurtz's correlations between recognized gay unions and the decline in marriage in Scandinavia "simply shoddy social science."

Kurtz was similarly lambasted in an April 22 House Judiciary Committee hearing on legal threats to traditional marriage. When Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., asked him whether he believed gay marriage would result in fewer heterosexual marriages, Kurtz said yes. Scott laughed in response.

"Americans tend to believe they are more independent of each other than they really are," Kurtz wrote in the April 28 e-mail. "That's why it's so hard for us to imagine that one couple's actions could have an impact on anyone else." Kurtz, a Pittsburgh native, has a bachelor's degree from Haverford College and a Ph.D. from Harvard.

Rep. Marilyn Musgrave
Republican, Colorado
(202) 225-4676
For someone often portrayed as a conservative firebrand, Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, R-Colo., the author of the proposed federal marriage amendment, is disarmingly low-key in person. But that doesn't mean she isn't forceful in arguing that nothing less than a constitutional amendment will do to preserve the traditional definition of marriage that she says the majority of Americans support. Musgrave is a particularly outspoken opponent of letting the courts and gay-rights activists, rather than the people and their duly elected representatives, define marriage. "I think if it is ever to be changed, that the American people and their elected representatives ought to decide, rather than activist judges. I don't think we should have to put up with court-ordered gay marriages," she says.

Like many social conservatives, Musgrave considers marriage the social institution vital to raising children, and she says it is directly threatened by the "radical redefinition" that gay marriage represents. The freshman lawmaker, a Colorado native and graduate of Colorado State University, got her start in elective politics in 1990 when she won a seat on her local school board. She was elected two years later to the Colorado House of Representatives and in 1998 to the state Senate. Musgrave, 55, acted to ban gay marriage in her first year in the state House, as legislatures across the country were responding to the Hawaii Supreme Court's 1996 decision legalizing gay marriage in Hawaii. She also testified before Congress that year in support of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, a law she now says is insufficient to defend traditional marriage from judicial fiat.

State legislatures are declining to redefine marriage, she notes; by contrast, 38 have passed their own laws defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. "This is not a problem with the legislatures. It's the courts" and gay-rights advocates, she says, who are doing an end run around the legislative process to change the definition of marriage to something that polling shows most Americans reject. But she believes that popular sentiment in favor of traditional marriage will ultimately prevail. "I think the people will speak loud and clear. People get this. If you redefine marriage, you destroy marriage."

Gavin Newsom
Mayor of San Francisco
(415) 554-6141
Before February, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was probably best-known on the national political scene -- if he was known at all -- for being rich, handsome, and a political protégé of former Mayor Willie Brown. But then Newsom, who had served on the city's Board of Supervisors for eight years before narrowly winning the mayoral election in December 2003, did something wholly unexpected. The millionaire businessman instructed San Francisco County Clerk Nancy Alfaro in a February 10 letter to provide marriage licenses to gay couples. He argued that the current state law, which defines marriage as a heterosexual union, violated a state constitutional ban prohibiting discrimination against gay people.

Newsom's decision, followed by news coverage of gay couples lined up outside San Francisco's City Hall, sparked a debate on the pros and cons of same-sex marriage that has resonated deeply with the American public in a way that previous political rhetoric on the issue had not. Evan Wolfson, a longtime gay-marriage advocate and the executive director of Freedom to Marry, says that by marrying so many gay couples -- about 4,000 -- Newsom "gave America the chance to see real-life people who experience discrimination."

Not everyone is happy with Newsom's boldness. President Bush said he was "troubled" by the matter, and the California Supreme Court stopped the weddings on March 11. The court will hear arguments on May 25 on whether Newsom overstepped his authority. Newsom has said that Bush's 2004 State of the Union address, in which Bush voiced his opposition to same-sex marriage, spurred him to recognize gay marriages. Newsom says he will back off the policy if the court rules against it. But for better or for worse, he has already made his mark on same-sex marriage and, to some degree, on his budding political career. Newsom is a 36-year-old Irish Catholic with close ties to billionaire oil heir Gordon Getty. He is married to Kimberly Guilfoyle Newsom, a television legal commentator, and has a bachelor's degree from Santa Clara University.

Donna Payne
Vice President, National Black Justice Coalition
(212) 330-6599
After watching African-American church leaders align themselves with conservative religious groups, Donna Payne and her colleagues intervened. "We noticed a rise of African-American ministers speaking out for the federal marriage amendment" to ban same-sex marriage, said Payne, a Christian and an African-American lesbian. "So we all began to focus and come together."

Payne feared that black Christians would abandon traditional causes and instead espouse discrimination against homosexuals -- discrimination that she likens to what she experienced as a child in Memphis, Tenn. "[I] knew what was coming down the pike. We've all grown up with it," Payne recalls. "We were like, 'No, no, not this time.' " Thus, in December 2003, she and seven friends formed the National Black Justice Coalition, with Payne as vice president. The coalition advocates the acceptance of gays and lesbians not only in society generally, but also in Christian churches specifically.

Payne says that many churches remain embarrassed about their gay members. Discrimination against homosexuals "comes in different ways," she asserts. "For instance, in the African-American church, they don't talk about it. If you say something, you're being too open. They'll tell you again: 'That's not to be talked about.' " But Payne, 40, wants it to be talked about -- so intently that she helped establish the coalition without relinquishing her responsibilities as a constituent organizer for the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group. Earl Fowlkes, president of D.C. Black Pride, calls Payne "a bridge builder," adding, "Donna's worked very hard to have the dialogue ongoing."

Payne, the daughter of a United Methodist minister active in the NAACP, seemed destined to lead a politically oriented life. She and her father "used to have long talks about what should you do as a black citizen, to help the black race," she recalls. So, after graduating from the University of Tennessee, she worked in various political arenas before turning to gay and lesbian rights: "I had to come to an understanding that I loved myself and didn't have to hide.... I felt comfortable putting the political part of me together with my sexual orientation."

Tony Perkins
President, Family Research Council
(202) 393-2100
Marriage and its role in society were on Tony Perkins's mind long before he took over as president of the Family Research Council in September 2003 -- and even before he shepherded the nation's first "covenant-marriage" law through the Louisiana Legislature in 1997, or founded the Louisiana Family Forum in 1998. It started when he was a Baton Rouge street cop in the 1980s and witnessed the fallout from "the breakdown of the family" up close. "I began to see a connection between public policy and the other side of the world I saw.... What public policy promotes, we get more of," Perkins said in decrying the last radical shift in marriage laws, the advent of no-fault divorce in the late 1960s.

Born in rural Oklahoma and a self-described product of "small-town America," Perkins moved with his family to Louisiana when he was a senior in high school. He graduated from Liberty University, the school founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell. His experience as a police officer prompted him to run for the state Legislature in 1995. After serving two terms, he ran in 2002 against Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu and lost. He was in the midst of a campaign for state insurance commissioner when the Family Research Council sought him out. Asking himself how he could most influence public policy on marriage and family, Perkins says that the decision was obvious. "I feel like I am at the right place for the right time."

The 41-year-old Perkins has established close relationships with conservative Senate Republicans, including Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, who chaired the National Republican Senatorial Committee when Perkins ran for the Senate. And as a former state legislator and founder of the FRC's state council in Louisiana, Perkins is committed to working closely with allies on the state level.

Although he believes conservatives have a lot of work to do to preserve the traditional definition of marriage, Perkins says they have reason for optimism. He argues that gay-rights activists have overplayed their hand and gotten out ahead of public opinion, and that such aggressiveness will ultimately prompt a backlash from the American public. "Culturally, this is like Pearl Harbor. We may very well see an awakening giant in the American people" in opposition to gay marriage.

Andrew Sullivan
Senior Editor, The New Republic
(202) 508-4444
Andrew Sullivan has extolled the virtues of gay marriage for the last 15 years. But the journalist and columnist -- who at 27 became the youngest editor to run The New Republic and whose name has become synonymous with being British, Catholic, and gay -- is taken aback at how the issue has evolved over the past decade.

Sullivan, now 40, says he never would have predicted the legal "breakthroughs" in Hawaii, Vermont, or Massachusetts; his testimony before Congress on the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act; the sudden rise of the proposed federal marriage amendment; or, perhaps most poignantly for him, the "virulence of the opposition." Since 1989, when his piece "The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage" was The New Republic's cover story, Sullivan has been trying to make the argument for gay-marriage rights without allowing his emotions "to get the better" of him. Sullivan, who was born in South Godstone, England, and moved to the United States in 1984, says that his role in the gay-marriage debate from the beginning was "to provide intellectual firepower to make this a real issue, not just a goofy idea."

Even his critics agree that Sullivan frames his pro-gay-marriage argument intelligently. A past president of Oxford University's debate society, Sullivan has sparred with gay-marriage opponents in every medium -- and he has several outlets available to him. In addition to his gig at The New Republic, Sullivan is a columnist for Time and is the Washington correspondent for The Sunday Times of London. He is the author of a 1995 book, Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality, and he edited a 1997 volume (recently reprinted) containing arguments for and against gay marriage.

Sullivan also appears frequently on television and radio, and he has his own blog -- andrewsullivan.com -- in which he discusses current events, including the gay-marriage debate. The blog, which Sullivan launched in 2002, has its detractors. "Andrewsullivan.com sets a standard for narcissistic egocentricity that makes Henry Kissinger look like St. Francis of Assisi," wrote Eric Alterman in the April 8, 2002, edition of The Nation. Sullivan, who has degrees from Oxford and Harvard, acknowledges that being such an outspoken advocate for gay marriage has been at times "nerve-racking and emotionally draining," but also "an immense privilege."

Evan Wolfson
Executive Director, Freedom to Marry
(212) 851-8418
To Evan Wolfson, founder and executive director of Freedom to Marry, the issue of gay marriage is about civil rights and equality, pure and simple. Wolfson sees the struggle to win the right to marry as the logical next step in the broader civil-rights movement and its goal of attaining "full equality for all." "Is America the country where all people have the right to liberty and the right to the pursuit of happiness, or is it just for some?" he asks in laying out his position.

At 47, Wolfson, named by The National Law Journal as one of the country's 100 most influential lawyers, has compiled an impressive resume that includes arguing the landmark Boy Scouts of America v. Dale case before the Supreme Court in 2000 and serving as co-counsel for the 1996 Hawaii Supreme Court's milestone gay-marriage case, Baehr v. Anderson. Wolfson even wrote his 1983 Harvard Law thesis on the subject. After starting in the Brooklyn district attorney's office, the New York City native served during 1988 and 1989 as associate counsel to Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh, who was investigating the Iran-Contra affair. In 1989, he joined the pre-eminent gay legal advocacy group Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund. He remained there until an April 2001 grant from the progressive Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund enabled him to create Freedom to Marry.

Launched in January 2003, Freedom to Marry is a national coalition that brings together gay and nongay organizations that advocate gay marriage. In their book Courting Justice, about the Supreme Court and gay rights, authors Joyce Murdoch (an editor at National Journal) and Deb Price (the nation's only syndicated columnist writing about gay issues) call Wolfson a "dedicated gay civil-rights commando" who "leads battles that some gay-rights attorneys view as premature but that he sees as no-lose engagements because they educate the rest of the nation about gay Americans' wants and needs."

Noting the thousands of gay marriages performed so far this year, Wolfson optimistically declares, "It's clear that gay people are going to win the freedom to marry.... The only question is how long is it going to take and how many battles is it going to take before society looks back and says, 'What was the big deal?' " His latest book, to be published in July, is titled Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People's Freedom to Marry.

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