The key lesson learned from marriage equality that’s still applicable today
Sarah McBride calls for a return to the art of persuasion.
The 10th anniversary of marriage equality is coming up on June 26. That was when the U.S. Supreme Court made marriage for gay couples the law of the land. It’s worth remembering the most important strategic lesson from that decades-long fight.
Public opinion on marriage equality shifted dramatically over about 7 years (though the struggle began in the 1960s). It completely flipped–a majority of the country went from opposing to supporting it because of a series of messaging and media campaigns. Advocacy strategists—I was one of them—needed to move people off the “ick” factor and onto shared values of any married couple: love, commitment, family, and freedom. This was a fairly traditional storyline for what was once considered a lefty issue. It’s not now but it was seen as radical then. It was about playing the long game to move the Overton Window.
It was also, critically, about private, non-political personal discussions within families of gay people coming out.
Persuasion on marriage equality meant giving people the breathing room to evolve. It’s become an awful cliche, but we met people where they were in their thinking, didn’t cancel or rip them a new one on social media (which, by the way, was still sort of a novelty back then). We weren’t perfect. But I can tell you a preachy, finger-wagging, and condescending approach was not part of the movement’s messaging strategy when it came to the millions of Americans who were “gettable”-- conservative Democrats, the moveable middle, and a slice of the center-right. The marriage victories in state legislatures, lower courts, and on the ballot in 2012 – all before the 2015 Supreme Court ruling–were made possible because of winning over Republican lawmakers and everyday people like firefighters, World War II veterans, and businesspeople. We gave people permission to grow and eventually become champions.
Today persuasion has become even more difficult in today’s toxic, mistrusted, and fragmented information environment. Part’s of far left’s decentralized, no-idea-is-bad, anti-expertise mindset also makes it more challenging. If winning is the singular goal, a centralized leadership must prioritize what works for the health of the issue over individual moral codes or opinions. Sometimes it seems like some are more interested in moral victories than winning on policy and politics.
Certain issues of the moment– democracy, immigration, and transgender equality come to mind–would benefit from a persuasion campaign. It’s what one of the smartest new people in elected politics, U.S. Congresswoman Sarah McBride from Delaware, said on Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast.
By every objective metric, support for trans rights is worse now than it was six or seven years ago…I think we’ve lost the art of persuasion… [C]learly what we’ve been doing over the last several years has not been working to stave it off or continue the progress that we were making eight, nine, 10 years ago.
I think a lot of it can be traced to a false sense of security that the L.G.B.T.Q. movement and the progressive movement writ large began to feel in the post-marriage world. There was a sense of cultural momentum that was this unending, cresting wave. There is this sense of a cultural victory that lulled us into a false sense of security and in many ways shut down needed conversations.
…We became absolutist — not just on trans rights but across the progressive movement — and we forgot that in a democracy we have to grapple with where the public authentically is and actually engage with it. We decided that we now have to say and fight for and push for every single perfect policy and cultural norm right now, regardless of whether the public is ready. And I think it misunderstands the role that politicians and, frankly, social movements have in maintaining proximity to public opinion, of walking people to a place.”
Moral of the story: Don’t discard persuasion as a strategy to get what you want. Thanks to Aristotle, persuasion’s core components of ethos, logos, and pathos are timeless. The message delivery mechanism– media channels and technology – of course have changed from 2,000 years ago. But the art of persuasion itself hasn’t.