Sasha Issenberg: A Chronicle of America's Quarter-Century Struggle Over Marriage Equality

On June 26, 2015, the US Supreme Court ruled that state bans on gay marriage were unconstitutional, making same-sex unions legal across the United States. But the road to that momentous decision was much longer than many know. Author Sasha Issenberg introduces a definitive account in this livestream presentation that discusses his book The Engagement: America’s Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage.

The story begins, Issenberg shares, in Hawaii in 1990, when a rivalry among local activists triggered a sequences of events that forced the state to justify excluding gay couples from marriage. Then in the White House, one president signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which elevated the matter to a national issue, and his successor tried to write it into the Constitution. Over 25 years, Issenberg tells us, the debate played out across the country, from the first legal same-sex weddings in Massachusetts to the epic face-off over California’s Prop 8, and finally, to the landmark decisions of United States v. Windsor and Obergefell v. Hodges. Across those 25 years, nearly every corner of American life was touched in some way by the debate. With insight from those who sought their own right to wed, those who fought to protect the “traditional” definition of marriage, and those who changed their minds about it, Issenberg invites us to a riveting story about a banner topic of the modern culture wars.

Sasha Issenberg is the author of three previous books, including The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns. He has covered presidential elections as a national political reporter in the Washington bureau of The Boston Globe, a columnist for Slate, and a contributor to Bloomberg Politics and Businessweek. He is the Washington correspondent at Monocle, and his work has also appeared in New York, The New York Times Magazine, and George, where he served as a contributing editor. He teaches in the political-science department at UCLA.

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