Evan Wolfson On Winning Marriage Equality
The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan
Andrew Sullivan
4.6 • 836 Ratings
🗓️ 11 April 2025
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Evan is an attorney and gay rights pioneer. He founded and led Freedom to Marry — the campaign to win marriage until victory at the Supreme Court in 2015, after which he then wound down the organization. During those days he wrote the book Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People’s Right to Marry. Today he “advises and assists diverse organizations, movements, and countries in adapting the lessons on how to win to other important causes.” We became friends in the 90s as we jointly campaigned for what was then a highly unpopular idea.
For two clips of our convo — on the early, fierce resistance to gay marriage by gay activists, and the “tectonic” breakthrough in Hawaii — pop over to our YouTube page.
Other topics: raised in Pittsburgh by a pediatrician and a social worker; being a natural leader in high school; his awakening as a gay kid; the huge influence of John Boswell on both of us; working at Lambda Legal; Peace Corps in West Africa; a prosecutor in Brooklyn; the AIDS crisis; coalition building; engaging hostile critics; Peter Tatchell; lesbian support over kids; the ACLU’s Dan Foley; Judge Chang in Hawaii; Clinton and DOMA; Bush and the Federal Marriage Amendment; the federalist approach and Barney Frank; Prop 8; the LDS self-correcting on gays; the huge swing in public support; Obama not endorsing marriage in 2008; Obergefell and Kennedy’s dignitas; Trump removing the GOP’s anti-marriage plank; Bostock; dissent demonized within the gay community; the Respect for Marriage Act; and Evan and me debating the transqueer backlash.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Claire Lehmann on the success of Quillette, Francis Collins on faith and science and Covid, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee on Covid’s political fallout, Sam Tanenhaus on Bill Buckley, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson on the Biden years, and Paul Elie on his book The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to [email protected].
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Hi everyone. Welcome to another dishcast. We're on a roll here. Please subscribe. If you haven't |
| 0:36.9 | subscribed to the weekly dish on SubSec, this conversation |
| 0:41.3 | will peter out after a while and you will be desperate to hear the rest of it. So subscribe and |
| 0:47.3 | listen to all of it. And you'll also enjoy coming up. We have some pretty amazing guests coming |
| 0:53.2 | up. This week, we have some pretty amazing guests coming up. |
| 0:58.2 | This week, we have another very old friend, actually, |
| 1:03.4 | whom I regard as somebody who really should be a household name, |
| 1:06.9 | but for all sorts of reasons, a lot of it to do with gay politics. |
| 1:09.8 | And he isn't, although he should be. |
| 1:12.2 | He's probably the man, if one had to think out any single person, who's responsible for conceiving, building, strategizing the movement |
| 1:20.6 | to bring marriage equality to America, probably, in my view, the most successful civil rights |
| 1:27.1 | movement in modern times. And he's also, |
| 1:31.6 | he ran the freedom to marry until we won and he shut that down because he's sane. He's the |
| 1:37.6 | author of Why Marriage Matters, America, Equality and Gay People's Right to Marry. And now he |
| 1:43.4 | advises and assists lots of organizations, movements, and countries in gay people's right to marry. And now he advises and assists lots of |
| 1:44.8 | organizations, movements, and countries in adapting lessons and how to win to other important |
| 1:49.4 | causes and also has been indefatigable in promoting marriage equality around the world. |
| 1:56.2 | That captures a little bit of what he's done, but I hope we will talk about his whole life here. |
| 2:00.3 | Evan, thank you so, so, so, so much for coming on. |
| 2:02.6 | It's good to be with you. |
| 2:04.2 | Tell me, tell me about your folks. |
| 2:06.7 | Where were you born? |
... |
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