How the President Got to ‘I Do’ on Same-Sex Marriage

By presidential fund-raising standards, the dinner at the St. Regis hotel in Washington in April 2011 was an intimate one. President Obama made the rounds, moving among the dozens of people in attendance, including Chad Griffin, a 37-year-old political operative known for his ability to raise money in Hollywood and for his work on trying to legalize same-sex marriage. It was Griffin who persuaded the conservative lawyer Theodore B. Olson and the liberal attorney David Boies, adversaries in the 2000 Bush v. Gore case, to bring a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8, the amendment banning same-sex marriage that voters approved in 2008.

Griffin and a team of veteran political operatives were using the litigation to mount a campaign intended to frame same-sex marriage as a civil right. They were working to create a political climate that would make the Supreme Court, which was disinclined to get too far out in front of public opinion, comfortable enough to rule in their favor. But the president was standing in their way. His opposition to same-sex marriage had been cited repeatedly by Proposition 8’s defenders as evidence that people who wanted to retain the traditional definition of marriage were not motivated by prejudice. Though Obama had recently taken to saying that his views on the matter were “evolving,” Griffin worried that they were moving too slowly to help with his cause.

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