In a piece marking marriage equality's "sweep" of New England—Rhode Island, the last holdout, approved marriage equality last week—E.J. Graff reminds us that the marriage equality movement was a grassroots effort launched by rogue same-sex couples:
It is worth taking a moment to look back on how we got here. It was a rogue Hawaii lawsuit, opposed by all the major LGBT advocacy groups, that launched the marriage-equality movement: Baehr v. Lewin was brought by a few couples and a non-gay lawyer, all on their own. As expected, they lost at the trial court and then on appeal. But in 1993, the Hawaii Supreme Court remanded the case back down for trial on a stricter standard, asking: If Jane could marry Mark but not Mary, why wasn’t that sex discrimination? The odd sound you heard was thousands of lesbians and gay men gasping in shock at the brand-new idea that marriage was possible in our lifetime. In the end, Hawaii wasn’t the breakthrough state. But it gave Mary Bonauto, civil-rights director at New England’s Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD)—and the woman generally considered to be the Thurgood Marshall of the marriage-equality movement—the opening she needed....
