Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality

Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality by Jo Becker Page B

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Authors: Jo Becker
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you can really talk to—a few reporters, maybe your spouse, and the lawyers on the other side. They are the only ones who are as obsessed as you are.”
    They made for an odd pair, and not just because of their politics. Boies, lanky and balding, with a beaked nose that stopped just short of looking predatory, eschewed the type of bespoke suits and Prada shoes Olson favored, instead religiously wearing to court rumpled blue Lands’ End suits, black Merrell sneakers, and a twenty-dollar Casio watch he strapped over his shirtsleeve. It was a cultivated everyman image that belied a lifestyle that afforded him private jets, a Manhattan pied-à-terre, and homes in places like the Turks and Caicos.
    But the two lawyers soon found they had much in common, starting with a love of very expensive wine; Boies owned a vineyard in Lake County, California, while Olson’s cellar was considered among the finest in the D.C. area. Both men were in their late sixties but had the energy of much younger men and, despite their wealth, showed no sign of slowing down.
    Together with their wives and friends like former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, they had begun taking annual bicycling trips through Europe. And while they generally avoided talking politics, their discussion of the legal issues of the day had convinced each that neither was the partisan they were made out to be. So when Democrats had held up Olson’s appointment to become President Bush’s solicitor general because of his role in the 2000 recount, Boies had called several senators he knew to personally vouch for his friend and lobby for his confirmation.
    Boies had long admired Olson’s ability to anticipate the questions that the justices were going to throw his way and strip the vulnerable points out of his argument before they pointed to them. Olson, for his part, was impressed with Boies’s quick-footedness in a courtroom. His ability to rapidly digest complex subject matter was remarkable, especially given that he suffered from dyslexia. And, unlike Olson, he was a virtuoso at deposing and cross-examining hostile witnesses, a skill that could prove helpful in what Olson considered the unlikely event of a full-blown trial.
    After securing Chad’s and the Reiners’ enthusiastic go-ahead—“Katie, bar the door!” Rob Reiner recalled saying of the marquee idea of having “both the winner and the loser of
Bush v. Gore
on my team”—Olson called Boies’s firm on May 10, and the two connected a few days later.
    The Democratic lawyer hadn’t given much thought to the issue of gay marriage until he saw the long lines of same-sex couples waiting for hours to get married after San Francisco’s mayor directed the city clerk to issue marriage licenses in 2004. He recalled gazing at the televised images and thinking, “Why shouldn’t they get married?”
    The case was perfect for Boies. Not only was it challenging legally, but its history-making potential and odd-couple story line was sure to garner a huge amount of press interest, and Boies “liked his column inches,” as one person at his firm put it, almost as much as he liked to win.
    “Let’s do it,” he told Olson, even agreeing to a deeply discounted fee that, at $250,000 plus expenses,represented a fraction of what Olson would be paid.

FIVE
GOING PUBLIC
    E nrique Monagas, an associate at Olson’s firm, could barely swallow as he nervously glanced over every few seconds at the clerk’s window in San Francisco’s federal courthouse, a stack of papers clutched in his hand.
    It was May 22, 2009, the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. The team of lawyers that Olson had begun assembling to work on the Proposition 8 case had just gotten word that the California Supreme Court was going to issue its ruling on the last-ditch challenge to Proposition 8 following the long weekend.
    Timing is everything, and Olson and Chad had put a lot of thought into when they should file their lawsuit. Olson, still worried about the

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