[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Welcome to The Takeaway. On Tuesday, in a rare bipartisan vote, the US Senate passed the Respect for Marriage Act.

Speaker 2: Sir, 61. The nays are 36. The bill, as amended, has passed.

Melissa: The bill was supported by all members of the Democratic Caucus and 12 Republicans. The House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed an earlier version of the bill and is expected to advance the Senate version swiftly. President Biden has indicated that when the bill comes to his desk, he will promptly and proudly sign it into law. What does the Respect for Marriage Act do? Here's Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio in mid-November explaining it as he urged his colleagues to support the measure.

Rob Portman: This bill simply allows interracial or same-sex couples who were validly married under the laws of one state to know that their marriage will be recognized by the federal government and by other states if they move in accordance with established Supreme Court precedent.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, maybe you're a little confused. After all, same-sex couples have been getting legally married in all 50 states since 2015. That was the year the Supreme Court decided Obergefell v. Hodges, striking down the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, and establishing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the opinion for the 5-4 majority, asserting, "marriage is fundamental under the Constitution" and must "apply with equal force to same-sex couples". During a 2018 conversation at the University of Virginia School of Law, the retired justice spoke about the decision.

Anthony Kennedy: The nature of injustice is you can't see it in your own time. As we thought about this, and I thought about it more and more, it seemed to me that it's just wrong under the Constitution to say that over 100,000 adopted children of gay parents could not have their parents married that time. I just thought that this was wrong.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Why is the US Senate passing a Respect for Marriage Act more than seven years after Obergefell? To answer that, we've got to go back to June of this year, when the Supreme Court abandoned almost five decades of precedent by overturning Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health decision.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a concurring opinion, reading in part "in future cases, we should reconsider all of this court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell". In other words, the Dobbs decision not only ended the right to abortion, it also endangered the right to marry for same-sex couples. I sat down with Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ rights organization in the country.

Kelley Robinson: What the Respect for Marriage Act does is it ensures that any same-sex or interracial marriage was legal in the state that it was conducted, that your marriage is valid no matter where you are, no matter what the Supreme Court does. What a lot of folks forget sometimes is that wedding is a lot more than just a party. Marriage actually guarantees you to over 1,100 federal benefits from being safe and secure in your retirement, to be able to build the family of your dreams, to getting disability access if your partner becomes sick or falls ill. Look for me, this is really personal. My wife and I, we got married in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic.

Yes, it was about love. She did a great little proposal for me, and we were so excited, but what we actually did was get married because it was in a moment where we felt like if one of us got sick, I couldn't be guaranteed to be able to see her in the hospital. We were thinking about starting our family and so much of adoption, and child-rearing is also caught up in whether or not you are legally married in the state that you live. It was serious for us and urgent. We decided to make that decision. I think what happened this week around marriage is so important because it's also happening in this broader context where our community is literally being threatened. Our lives are being stolen. We saw that at Club Q.

Melissa Harris-Perry: As Kelley points out, love is only part of the equation of marriage. Healthcare, survivor benefits, child rearing, tax law, all are bound up with marriage. For queer folk, asserting love is critical to resisting hate. The kind of hate manifested in the brutal murders at Club Q in Colorado Springs.

Speaker 5: Kelly, Daniel, Ashley, Raymond, and Derek, don't forget those names.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The kind of discursive hate Kelley Robinson sees on display throughout the country.

Kelley Robinson: You see Herschel Walker doubling down in Georgia on his attacks against trans people. You see so many folks from Tucker Carlson to Matt Walsh trying to take our humanity and our dignity away as LGBTQ people trying to dehumanize us. What Congress did was show us that our love is valid.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It's been nearly six months since the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs gutted the right to abortion leaving America as a fragmented patchwork where more than a quarter of American states severely limit or outright ban abortion. In response, Congress is now active swiftly and with meaningful bipartisan cooperation, but not to shore up reproductive rights. Rather, Congress has acted to ensure access to marriage for same-sex couples. While this is a victory in the long battle for LGBTQ equality, it's not a simple moment of celebration.

Kelley Robinson: Taking away a constitutional right that we have had to abortion access to be able to make decisions about our own bodies for the last 50 years. That's what happened. When that took place, Justice Clarence Thomas said in his concurring dissent that the Supreme Court should also revisit the landmark pieces that guaranteed our right to marry who we love. That's why this has become urgent because we're concerned that this extremist Supreme Court that's so out of touch with where regular people are, could take an action that invalidates our marriages and our love.

Over 70% of the country supports same-sex marriage. That's regardless of what political party you are in or where you live. This is an issue of policy actually catching up to where the people already are. I was at Planned Parenthood Action Fund when Roe fell, and I was sitting in a room with clinicians and providers all across the country. When that happened, they started making phone calls to tell people that the appointments that they had planned could no longer move forward. They were out here catching tears left and right.

Now, I see Planned Parenthood and so many other reproductive rights organizations and healthcare providers fundamentally reshaping the healthcare system to try to adjust to the world as it is to ensure that they can still get people health care and health care to people. As you said, the devastating reality is that is not where the American people are. People want access to care, they support it. The numbers show us that and also the results of the 2022 election showed us that definitively. I remember in 2004, not even 20 years ago, when our opponents actually introduced the congressional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Kelley is referring here to February 2004, when President George W. Bush kicked off his reelection year agenda by pressing Congress to send to the states for ratification, a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

President George W. Bush: America is a free society, which limits the role of government in the lives of our citizens. This commitment of freedom, however, does not require the redefinition of one of our most basic social institutions.

Kelley Robinson: Here we are today, not even 20 years later. I think a lot of it happened because we were telling our stories. People were brave enough to come out on this issue to declare who they were openly and honestly, even in the midst of places that were dangerous to do so. It mattered on the Senate floor when Senator Chuck Schumer stood up supporting this marriage equality bill, but also did it wearing the tie that he wore at his daughter's wedding.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Indeed, here's Senator Schumer on Tuesday.

Senator Schumer: As the chamber knows, this is personal to me. The first people I will call when this bill passes will be my daughter and her wife.

Melissa Harris-Perry: For all these reasons, the Respect for Marriage Act marks progress. The very need for the law indicates the profound vulnerability of marriage equality. Under current law established by the Obergefell ruling, all 50 states must allow same-sex couples to marry. If the court reverses this decision, the Respect for Marriage Act will ensure same-sex marriages are recognized in all states, but it will not require all the states to perform these marriages.

The Respect for Marriage Act carves out exemptions allowing religious organizations to legally discriminate. In other words, the Respect for Marriage Act is not so much a shiny new vehicle for equality as it is an airbag in case of disaster. It'll save the life of marriage equality. If it deploys, you can be sure LGBTQ rights have just sustained a pretty serious injury.

Kelley Robinson: I think where we are in the reproductive rights movement is similar, that they are trying to make this a culture of isolation and exclusion, when in fact so many people experience the need to make reproductive health decisions. Even bigger than that, have a strong desire to determine what they will do with their own bodies.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I live in North Carolina. Both of the Republican senators, Thom Tillis and Richard Burr supported this bill. You remember that North Carolina is also the state where the bathroom bill premiered before this second wave or maybe third wave of anti-trans legislation. I'm wondering also, not only about the question of reproductive rights, but also the entire agenda of LGBTQ civic and civil rights and equality of which marriage is one part, but also it feels to me like the fact that Tillis and Burr can support it is because, after all its marriage, it's respectable in a certain way.

Kelley Robinson: There is so much to unpack there. Even though we were able to pass the Respect for Marriage Act here in DC and get a level of federal protections that were urgent and important, when I look at the states, they have already pre-filed hundreds of anti-LGBTQ+ bills that are attacking our community. When I ask the question of why is that happen, I don't have to look much further to the lines that have been drawn in those states.

They have been gerrymandered within an inch of their own lives. The people are not really actually being represented by folks that express their opinions and their viewpoints in the state because of how the politics and states have been crafted and reconstructed. There's a real problem happening at the state level. I do think that we have to be looking there, understand the problem for what it is. It's not a problem of where the people are. It's a problem with elected officials not actually being accountable to the people that they serve.

The reality of folks at the state level may not have changed as much as we would hope. We're still going to see attacks on trans youth. We're still going to see attacks on people being able to get the gender-affirming care that they need. We're still seeing the hateful rhetoric by politicians on the ground leading to real-life violence.

Last year was the deadliest year on record for trans lives. It is not lost on me that there is a crisis happening in states and communities and counties and schools all across this country that we've got to fight back on. One thing that I know for sure is that the politicians are making these decisions are not speaking for the will of the people. It's our job to even out that dynamic to ensure that every elected official knows that they need us a lot more than we need them.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Talk to me about the stories that seem to penetrate for lawmakers, particularly queer stories versus those that they can continue to ignore as being not part of their family.

Kelley Robinson: I was in the Senate Gallery when they were doing the final vote on the Respect for Marriage Act. Although it was powerful, I was sitting there next to my wife. She's a first-generation woman of Indian descent, my son that we had together, and I was looking over the balcony. It was chilling to look at this room that actually has the most women it ever has had at 24, and still feel how overwhelmingly white it is, how overwhelmingly male, how overwhelmingly older that room was. Even to know, I think I saw that this next Senate is going to have like 10 people named John, but no Black women.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Wow.

Kelley Robinson: That's not the world that I live in. It's shaky. There's a feeling that you have when you walk into a space, and you realize that the people in one of the highest offices of the land don't reflect your community of your lives. I think the thing about storytelling is it's an incredibly powerful tool to let people know who we are, to share our dignity and our humanity. Our job is to make sure that we're not creating a world where only some stories are valid, where we're only telling the nice story of the people that got married and had 2.5 kids and moved out to the suburbs, but we're telling every story.

The ones that hurt sometimes, the ones that feel like scars that haven't healed just yet. I think part of what's been beautiful just in my time at the human rights campaign and also my time at Planned Parenthood Action Fund, is that we haven't shied away from that. We have been clear that it is important for us to share every story of our community, particularly people that live at the margins.

Folks that are rural places, folks that are living with disabilities, folks that are people of color, folks that are low income because it's those stories that help us to understand how interconnected the problems are that we're facing, and to know that the solutions that we're starving for, that the solutions that we're fighting for have to be just as intersectional because we can't get free unless we all get free together.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You say this is not the end of the fight. What is next in the fight? What is on the agenda for you going into 2023?

Kelly Robinson: We're looking ahead right away to the runoff in Atlanta, Georgia. Then, of course, moving forward, there's so much that we can do at the state level. This is one of those moments where we are facing an intersectional attack that demands an intersectional response. I'm also hopeful not optimistic because people are seeing our opposition for exactly who they are and they are fighting back. I'm excited about that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Kelley Robinson is the president of the Human Rights Campaign. Kelley, thanks for taking the time and being with us.

Kelley Robinson: Thank you.

[music]

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.