By The People | Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
About this episode
The episode explores the history and impact of the equal marriage movement leading up to the Obergefell ruling, featuring insights from campaign architect Marc Solomon.
Long before the Supreme Court handed down the landmark Obergefell ruling on equal marriage in 2015, activists were canvassing door-to-door, courting any lawmaker who would listen, and losing at the local level—a lot. Their scrappy determination helped convince family members, neighbors and eventually the rest of the country that the Constitution's guarantees of liberty and equality applied to same-sex couples. In Episode 3 of By the People , equal marriage campaign architect Marc Solomon joins Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern to trace the movement’s "quixotic" beginnings in 2001. As this series continues to explore how ordinary Americans—not just nine justices—can interpret and enforce the Constitution, the campaign for equal marriage offers examples and tools that dedicated citizens can use to make constitutional meaning. The episode also confronts an uncomfortable question: If popular pressure can produce a ruling you love, like Obergefell , it can produce one you might not, like the court’s decision to enshrine an individual right to bear arms in 2008’s D.C. v. Heller . Dahlia and Mark discuss what happens when popular constitutionalism is retrofitted as…
People in this episode
Host: Dahlia Lithwick
Guest: Marc Solomon
Topics covered
- equal marriage
- constitutional interpretation
- popular constitutionalism
- activism
- Supreme Court
- civil rights
Keywords
- equal marriage
- Obergefell
- constitutional rights
- activism
- Supreme Court
- popular pressure
- civil rights movement
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Slate
Books & works: Obergefell, D.C. v. Heller
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