How does an idea get into a president’s head? Trace back the story of President Obama’s big idea this week — that two people of the same sex ought to be able to marry — and you end up someplace unexpected.
Like Oklahoma. About 1966.
Gay marriage: The ‘unthinkable’ became reality, for some
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That was before the Stonewall riots in New York City. Long before homosexuality was removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of “mental disorders.”
In the college town of Norman, a young Air Force veteran named Jack Baker asked a librarian named Michael McConnell to form a committed relationship. McConnell said yes.
With one condition.
“He made me promise that we would wed legally,” Baker recounted recently.
That promise helped start a slow, shuddering change in American politics: 46 years later, a president said on television what McConnell and Baker were once ridiculed for saying to each other. Not just that gay couples might want to marry — but that such a thing might be legally possible.
It was not just a wish, in other words. It was a goal. In 1970, in a case that made national news, Baker and McConnell applied for a marriage license in Minnesota.
“Most marriage laws across the country — state laws — did not specify the gender of the parties getting married, because it was unthinkable” in 1970 that anybody but a man and a woman would apply, said George Chauncey, a history professor at Yale University.
After Baker and McConnell and a few other couples tried, he said, “the idea had suddenly become thinkable.”
Now, same-sex marriage seems likely to be one of the dominant social issues of the 2012 campaign season. On Tuesday, voters in North Carolina passed a constitutional amendment to ban it. This fall, bills relating to same-sex marriage will also be on the ballot in Minnesota and Maine. In Maryland, opponents of a new law allowing same-sex marriage are hoping to force a public vote on it.
The shift in this debate — from the fringe of the gay-rights movement to the center of American politics — was clear this week, both in Obama’s endorsement and the reaction of presumed opponent Mitt Romney.
Obama presented his views not as cutting-edge but as slightly overdue. He said he began to support same-sex marriage after hearing from military personnel and others who supported it.
“It is important for me personally to go ahead and affirm that same-sex couples should be able to get married,” Obama said in an interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts.
Romney, the likely GOP nominee, said he still believes that marriage should be only between a man and a woman. But he said he did not object to gay couples adopting children and said he would be open to states providing some rights to same-sex couples.
Numerous defeats
Before now, the biography of this big idea has been dominated by its defeats.
Baker and McConnell were denied when they applied to marry in Minnesota in 1970. They challenged that decision in court. They lost.
“The institution of marriage as a union [of] man and woman, uniquely involving the procreation and rearing of children within a family, is as old as the book of Genesis,” wrote the Minnesota Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to step in.
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