Jim Obergefell said those involved in last year’s successful U.S. Supreme Court case for marriage equality knew there would be a backlash.
“We certainly never expected it would be so vicious,” he told a roomful of nearly 150 people June 16 at the National Constitution Center in Old City.
“This horrible massacre in Orlando is clear evidence that there’s still so much animus toward our community,” Obergefell added, acknowledging the 49 people who were killed and 53 who were injured by a gunman this month at Pulse nightclub. “We are targeted.”
“Gay clubs are where we can go and feel safe, be around people who are like us, be around people who aren’t going to judge us,” he said. “Then this horrible atrocity has destroyed that sense of safety.”
Obergefell spoke on an hour-long panel with Debbie Cenziper, a Washington Post journalist, who co-wrote a new book with him about his case for marriage equality. The book is called “Love Wins: The Lovers and Lawyers Who Fought the Landmark Case for Marriage Equality.” Carrie Johnson, justice correspondent for NPR, moderated.
“It really surprised me,” Obergefell said, “how frequently after the decision, going around the country, people would say, ‘Well, the gay-rights movement is done. You have marriage. What more is there to do?’ There is so much education that needs to be done.”
He said the transgender community has become a target of discrimination as the lesbian, gay and bisexual community has gained more legal protections.
Quoting from “Love Wins,” Johnson noted it took women 80 years to gain the right to vote; legal analysts wondered if it would take longer for LGBT people to have their rights fully realized.
“You can’t wait on hearts and minds of voters,” Cenziper said. “If there’s a constitutional right at stake, you can’t wait for the Democratic process. You have to move forward.”
Obergefell and Cenziper spent time dissecting the details that led to the case for marriage equality reaching the Supreme Court.
Cenziper said there were lawyers in different states all working toward this effort. She remembered a lawyer from the Ohio Attorney General’s office, Bridget Coontz, who was told to argue for that state’s marriage ban against Obergefell and his husband John Arthur. Ohio also banned recognition of marriages between same-sex couples that were legally performed in other states.
Coontz supported marriage equality although she had to argue against it in federal court.
“One of my favorite scenes in the book,” Cenziper said, “is Bridget saying she went into court and wanted to say, ‘Bridget Coontz on behalf of the wrong side of this courtroom.’ But she had a duty to defend the law, and she did it, and it was a very difficult thing.”
Obergefell shared one of his personal difficulties that made him and Arthur decide to pursue the case for marriage equality. Arthur’s grandparents had purchased cemetery plots for the family in the 1930s in Cincinnati.
When Arthur’s mother died, he picked a space for her and asked for the one next to her to be reserved for her boyfriend of 18 years. But the cemetery said it could not accommodate the request. Arthur’s grandparents had included a provision that only direct descendants or legally married spouses could be buried or memorialized on the plots.
This happened shortly after Arthur received a fatal ALS diagnosis.
“That was a very real thing for us,” Obergefell said. “If we wanted to be memorialized together … we weren’t able to do it, not in his family plot where he wanted to be memorialized.”
The couple eventually met Al Gerhardstein, a lawyer who thought the story of Obergefell and Arthur would resonate with the American public in the push for marriage equality.
“For him, saying, ‘Yes, let’s do this and let’s put our lives in the public arena,’ it was his way of living up to his promises to love, honor and protect me,” Obergefell said. “For me, the most amazing thing was to have been able to create the legacy in honor and memory of my husband and to help make our country a better place.”