Married to the Cause,
One State at a Time
By ROBIN FINN, Public
Lives, NYTimes on the Web, February 16, 2007
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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Evan
Wolfson |
WHEN he was 13 and growing up in
Pittsburgh with his gayness under the radar, his own radar included, Evan
Wolfson aggravated his parents by deciding to invite President Richard M. Nixon
to his bar mitzvah.
Theirs was not only a Jewish household, but also a Democratic one. Mr.
Wolfson, the unmarried powerhouse behind the hyper-vocal Freedom to Marry
coalition since 2001, was willing to overlook Mr. Nixon’s partisan flaws in
favor of a presidential presence for this very special, very personal occasion,
and defiantly mailed the invitation.
The commander in chief did not attend the festivities, but he did send a formal
note of congratulations topped by the presidential seal. Even Mr.
Wolfson’s parents, whose dream for him involved Ivy League smarts (he obliged
with degrees from Yale College and Harvard Law), getting married to a woman
(sorry, not in the cards), and becoming the first Jewish president (would being
the first gay Jewish president suffice?), found it impressive.
They saved the Nixon note, along with sheaves of patriotic poetry he churned out
as a teenager, like a halfhearted homage to Lyndon B. Johnson in 1969, from
which Mr. Wolfson, sitting in his Chelsea office beneath portraits of two
high-caliber role models, Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr., merrily recites his favorite lines:
He fought for what he thought is
the right thing for you,
And so we should realize some credit is due.
Ever the rationalist and moralist,
even as a youth.
Mr. Wolfson, who celebrated his 50th birthday and the 10th anniversary of
Freedom to Marry Day with a politically charged fund-raiser on Monday night
(Lincoln’s birthday), still has the Nixon note, not to mention the Impeach Nixon
button he wore a few years later, among his impressive assemblage of
memorabilia. His is a well-documented life, imminently memoir-ready even
if he fears seeing himself “played by Danny DeVito” should his role in the legal
fight for gays to marry — from 1994 to 2001 he ran the Marriage Project while
working as a senior staff lawyer for the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund
— be reprised on film someday.
“The classic pattern for civil rights advancement in America is patchwork,” he
says, “but I see equal marriage rights for gays becoming a nationwide reality
over the next 15 to 20 years. I really believe it will happen in my
lifetime.”
And he really believes it will happen in New York in the next three years.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer could not attend Mr. Wolfson’s party, but he and his wife,
Silda Wall Spitzer, Harvard classmates of Mr. Wolfson’s, sent a letter of
support for Freedom to Marry. Helping to turn the cause into a state law
is on the governor’s agenda this year; nagging the governor about it, Mr.
Wolfson hopes, is not going to be necessary.
“But nagging people to do the right thing is not a problem,” he says, “and
giving all people the freedom to marry is the right thing.”
Mr. Wolfson read Mr. Spitzer’s letter at the party. The key line?
“The bonds of marriage are built upon the affirmed love, trust and commitment of
couples and should be a personal choice for all New Yorkers.”
Although several countries, Canada among them, permit gay marriage, in the
United States only Massachusetts allows gays to marry. The civil unions
approved by Vermont, Connecticut (where a marriage bill was introduced this
week) and New Jersey are, in Mr. Wolfson’s opinion, preliminary exercises in a
civil rights crusade that has gripped him since he wrote his third-year paper at
Harvard on gays and the right to marry.
IN 2004, he wrote a book, “Why Marriage Matters,” in an attempt to generate
dialogue with (mainly) heterosexual Americans who don’t realize that civil
unions are a parallel alternative, not on an equal footing with marriage.
“One state down, 49 to go,” Mr. Wolfson says of Freedom to Marry’s success rate.
“Gay marriage is not what we’re looking for. We’re looking for the legal
right for gays to marry. You don’t ask for half a loaf. We don’t
need two lines at the clerk’s office when there’s already an institution that
works in this country, and it’s called marriage. One of the main
protections that come with marriage is inherent in the word: certainly in
times of crisis any other word than marriage would not bring the same clarity or
impart the same dignity.”
Not that this is about Mr. Wolfson getting hitched. He is ring-less, not
even engaged. “Why get engaged,” he says, “if you aren’t allowed to get
married?”
Before Harvard, he spent two years with the Peace Corps in Togo in West Africa,
and had his first gay relationship. After law school, he was recruited by
the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, then run by Elizabeth Holtzman.
He worked as a prosecutor from 1983 to 1988 (and wrote amicus briefs arguing for
a ban on racial discrimination in jury selection and the abolition of the
marital rape exemption) and, with Ms. Holtzman’s blessing, moonlighted free at
Lambda from 1984 to 1988. Which meant he had to “come out” professionally.
With Lambda, he represented James Dale, the ousted Eagle Scout, against the Boy
Scouts of America, and participated in Baker v. State, which led to civil
unions in Vermont.
Portly, short and baldish are Mr. Wolfson’s physical self-descriptors; banana
pudding from the Magnolia Bakery is his vice.
No, he and his significant other for the last five years, Cheng He, a Canadian
whose field is molecular biology, are not married, he says, “but we would love
the opportunity to have that choice.” So he’s earning it.
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