Evan Wolfson On Winning Marriage Equality

Evan is an attorney and gay rights pioneer. He founded and led Freedom to Marry — the campaign to win marriage until victory at the Supreme Court in 2015, after which he then wound down the organization. During those days he wrote the book Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People’s Right to Marry. Today he “advises and assists diverse organizations, movements, and countries in adapting the lessons on how to win to other important causes.” We became friends very soon after my 1989 essay, “Here Comes The Groom,” and dedicated our lives and careers in the coming quarter century to change the law.

For two clips of our convo — on the early, fierce resistance to gay marriage by gay activists, and the “tectonic” breakthrough in Hawaii — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: raised in Pittsburgh by a pediatrician and a social worker; being a natural leader in high school; his awakening as a gay kid; the huge influence of John Boswell on both of us; working at Lambda Legal; Peace Corps in West Africa; a prosecutor in Brooklyn; the AIDS crisis; coalition building; engaging hostile critics; Peter Tatchell; lesbian support over kids; the ACLU’s Dan Foley; Judge Chang in Hawaii; Clinton and DOMA; Bush and the Federal Marriage Amendment; the federalist approach and Barney Frank; Prop 8; the LDS self-correcting on gays; the huge swing in public support; Obama not endorsing marriage in 2008; Obergefell and Kennedy’s dignitas; Trump removing the GOP’s anti-marriage plank; Bostock; dissent demonized within the gay community; the Respect for Marriage Act; and Evan and me debating the transqueer backlash.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Claire Lehmann on the success of Quillette, Francis Collins on faith and science and Covid, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee on Covid’s political fallout, Sam Tanenhaus on Bill Buckley, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson on the Biden years, and Paul Elie on his book The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s debate with Douglas Murray:

I’m a paid subscriber and have greatly enjoyed the conversations you’ve had since starting the podcast, and your debate with Murray compelled me to write in for the first time. It was a challenging episode, and I had to pause it at several points to catch my breath (I’m not one for confrontation). But I think you struck the right balance overall — fairly interrogating his claims and assertions without being disrespectful or hostile. You demonstrated both an attention to detail and a modesty while facing the awful moral questions raised by the unfolding tragedy in Gaza and Trump’s deportations in the US. (It’s a modesty that, to be frank, seemed largely absent from your interlocutor.)

Anyway, this is exactly the sort of tough conversation that makes me a happy subscriber to the Dish. Best wishes from England.

Most grateful. It’s a difficult balance: I want to push to get answers and clarity but I don’t want to derail a civil conversation. Here’s a “Belfast man living and teaching in London”:

Thanks for pushing Douglas Murray hard on the free speech issue. You are the first interviewer ever to expose his double standards on free speech regarding the Khalil part of the episode:

By the way, being a Belfast man permits me to express a disagreement with you when you mentioned that two democratic states were created after partition. That was definitely not the case in the experience of my grandparents, parents, brothers, and sisters growing up in West Belfast — or indeed Catholics across the six counties. Anyway, that is a minor quibble in your otherwise brilliant pod.

Here’s another take on the “superbly robust conversation”:

Your Christian-based empathy providing the resolve to resist Douglas’ withering pragmatism on the Israel/Gaza matter. Generally I’m in lockstep with everything he opines on the issue, but you did an excellent job in making him earn his points in the debate.

A dissenter fully sides with Douglas:

There was a lot that I found head-scratching about your debate with Douglas Murray, but perhaps the most obvious example was your claim that, if anyone but Israel carried out strikes that killed civilians as Israel did, it would be met with outrage to the nth degree. This is so clearly the reverse of reality that it’s mind-boggling that you can make this claim.

The US has regularly carried out strikes that inadvertently kill children. Just a week or two before your recording, a US strike in Yemen targeting one bomb-maker reportedly killed six children, including a newborn baby. Yet this was barely mentioned in the media, even as the mission itself was held under a microscope because of Signal-gate.

The US war on ISIS is estimated to have killed 8,221–13,301 civilians, but there was virtually no coverage or criticism, and certainly no student encampments. It’s only Israel whose every strike is scrutinized to the nth degree, and it was surprising to see you casually claim the reverse. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in Iraq; and your e-book I Was Wrong seems to make little to no mention of the babies and children killed by US forces.

Murray was clearly right when he boiled all your criticism of Israel down to “war is bad.” When he pointed out that John Spencer, a pre-eminent war scholar, concluded that Israel did more to protect civilians than any other army in history, you refused to even engage his ideas or scrutinize his arguments; you just sneeringly wrote him off as a propagandist. Whenever challenged, you went back to the well of “So you’re okay with babies dying?” This kind of unintellectual moralizing is such a departure from your usual thoughtfulness that it was frankly jarring.

I would have enjoyed a thoughtful and honest scrutinization of Murray’s defense of Israel, but I thought your interview fell short of that.

I have observed John Spencer’s work, his fanatical devotion to the state of Israel, his fawning interview with Netanyahu, and his description of a war with thousands of dead children as the most moral urban war ever fought … and let’s just say I have not found him a disinterested expert. A reader with more insight confirms my skepticism:

Your response to Murray bringing up the charlatan John Spencer was quite weak. You had the right instinct about Spencer’s obvious biases, but you didn’t have the facts to refute him. As a military historian (well, in training; I’m a PhD student, but on the verge of finishing), I do.

In short, Spencer spreads misinformation about military history — and the standards to which modern militaries hold themselves — to try to make Israel look better in comparison. A couple of examples:

One of Spencer’s core premises is the claim that the average civilian to combatant casualty ratio in war is 9:1 — the point being to make Israel look better by comparison with the supposed “average”. This is a bogus pop myth, repeated by bureaucrats at the UN and EU, but immediately refuted by any serious student of military history. The economist Mike Spagat — one of the world’s foremost experts on civilian-casualty counting in war (and a co-author of mine) — debunks it here, noting that the average is actually about 1:1, and between 1:1 and 2.5:1 in urban warfare (depending on type).

Another Spencer meme (repeated here in an interview with Sam Harris) is that the United States Coalition against ISIS (Western nations, Arab states, Kurdish militias, etc) killed 10,000 civilians in Mosul. Again, he invokes this bogus figure to try to make Israel look better in comparison. But Spencer is relying on an AP study that says 10,000 civilians in total were killed in Mosul — a third by ISIS, a third of underdetermined attribution, and a third by the US.

A more recent fantasy of Spencer is the claim that the Ministry of Health in Gaza is intentionally and systematically counting natural deaths to inflate their death toll. (This is part of how he concocts his bogus estimate of a 1:1 ratio of civilian to combatants killed in Gaza, which Murray cited in his debate with you.) Yet this is contradicted by the fact that the Ministry has periodically removed hundreds if not thousands of natural deaths from their publicly released lists of fatalities, once they realized they had been miscounted as violent fatalities. It is also contradicted by the demographics of the dead: certain demographics (very elderly people, and children aged 0) would be overrepresented in the death toll relative to their percentage in the population if natural deaths were included, but this isn’t the case.

To my dissenter: I was agonized by the appalling civilian deaths in the Iraq War — caused overwhelmingly by the chaos the US unleashed — and do not appreciate the insinuation that I wasn’t. And the deaths of children in wartime have always been regarded as especially grave. The Brits evacuated children from cities to the countryside to spare them from Hitler’s bombs. (It happened to both my parents, and my father’s grandmother was killed directly by a bomb on her London house.) Or recall the national day of mourning Ukraine just held for nine dead kids. Imagine for a second if a foreign military killed a thousand American children. How would you respond? That war is bad, so suck it up?

And what makes Gaza obviously different is that it is a sealed-off urban enclave, densely populated with a disproportionately young population, with no possibility of evacuation, and incapable of mounting any serious defense against a ground and aerial campaign of relentless, unimaginable terror and destruction. It’s about ten Goliaths to one David. And you’re with the Goliaths.

Yes, Hamas put Israel in a terrible dilemma: do we murder tens of thousands of innocents to secure a temporary lull or do we find another path forward? But it remains a fact that they chose the former in what was clearly initially a war of anger and revenge. There is no just war theory ever imagined that can defend that.

Here’s a mixed dissent:

I’m ardently pro-Israel, but I’ve been horrified at the civilian casualties, especially women and children. I think Douglas was right to take you to task over the Hamas casualty figures, as they have every incentive to exaggerate those figures. But I also think he’s too close to the problem — at least one side of the problem — to be objective. I know Hamas exaggerates the figures, but we cannot deny that many thousands of children have been killed. His flippant dismissal of their deaths is troubling.

The last half-hour or so was a difficult listen because I respect both of you so much. It was like listening to parents fighting. I stopped with 11 minutes to go; I just couldn’t do it anymore.

For me, Murray’s decision not to talk to a single Palestinian civilian in Gaza during his long sojourn there is as telling as Ta-Nehisi Coates’ decision to talk to no Israelis for his own book. There is not a single mention of the unimaginable suffering of Gazans in Murray’s book. It is entirely abstract for him. The ability to shut off one’s mind from what is in front of one’s nose remains remarkable.

Here’s the Hitch clip we played during the episode:

Another listener “enjoyed the lively back and forth between you and Murray, and I found myself siding with each of you on different points”:

I’m in total agreement with you about the chilling effect on speech that Trump’s crackdowns on students will have. The notion that free speech and due process rights should apply only to citizens would have all sorts of perverse implications. Wouldn’t that imply that tourists on vacation in the US could be arrested and deported simply for saying something the administration doesn’t like? Would artists and professional athletes from other countries with large public platforms have to self-censor to avoid the wrath of the government?

Many of these people are not even green card holders like Khalil, but are here on non-immigrant work visas such as P-1s or O-1s. Take, for example, two of the best players in the NBA: Nikola Jokic and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (from Serbia and Canada, respectively). If either of them said something critical of Trump or Israel in an interview or on social media, would they be subject to arrest and deportation? Would supporters of Khalil’s deportation be onboard with that? How could we credibly claim to be a free country if free speech was reserved only for citizens?

When it came to the ethics of the war in Gaza, however, I was much more in alignment with Douglas. The Bill Burr clip you played highlights a double standard from critics of Israel in which agency is given only to Israel and not to Hamas.

Can you imagine Burr doing that same bit if it was Israel that was using human shields in the same way that Hamas does? If Israel purposely put innocent civilians in the line of fire, would he do the exact same joke in reverse? Of course he wouldn’t. He would rightly recognize it as a morally reprehensible tactic for which they should be unequivocally condemned.

As Sam Harris has continually pointed out, the idea of this happening in reverse is absurd on its face, given the worldview and intentions of each side. Using human shields is an effective tactic for Hamas because Israel does not want to kill innocent civilians. The reverse is not true; Hamas would not be at all deterred by Israel using human shields, because they make no distinction between Israeli soldiers and civilians and want nothing more than to kill as many Jews as they possibly can.

This asymmetry is why body count alone is insufficient to assess the morality of this war. The intentions of each side matters. As Douglas Murray said, Hamas started this war and could easily end it by releasing the hostages and giving up on their goal of annihilating their neighbor. Shouldn’t that be the first and primary demand of every onlooker? And yet, agency is only given to Israel and not Hamas. Morally responsible behavior is only demanded and expected of Israel.

For Burr’s bit to be truly analogous to the Gaza War: the reason he’s mad at his neighbor hiding behind the baby is because that man brutally raped and murdered his wife and children and is actively trying to murder him. He’d be shooting at Burr while hiding behind the baby. Changes the scene a bit, doesn’t it?

But I was clear that both Hamas and Israel have agency and thereby moral responsibility. And the conscious killing of thousands of defenseless children remains Israel’s doing, as history will long tell. The children were not shot by Hamas and did not kill themselves.

More dissent:

In your debate regarding the deaths of innocents, Murray had the plain moral high ground and much better of the argument. In response to your shared horror at the dead children in Gaza, he asked you what Israel should do. You had no answer.

The answer can plainly not be “nothing” — because no nation or people should be asked to endure repeated October Sevenths, as Hamas has promised. In 18 months, I have not heard a single person who shares your view answer Douglas’ question, which strikes me as a strong indictment of the logic behind your view.

So you seem to acquiesce to Hamas’ disgusting tactic of placing military equipment and personnel in, around, and under sensitive facilities (schools, hospitals, etc.). Hamas does so because it intends that Gazan women and children will be killed to evoke an anti-Israeli moral outcry. Why reward such disgusting tactics with the very currency they’re intended to produce? It seems clear to me that the moral imperative is on Hamas not to engage in these tactics.

What’s the resulting moral imperative for Israel? It’s to achieve its legitimate objectives while taking care to minimize civilian deaths — which it has done, by and large, given the circumstances Hamas created.

In fact, Hamas recently revised its death estimates to show that 72% of deaths in Gaza are of military-age males: “Claims that 70 per cent of the fatalities are women and children are complete nonsense, says report.” You probably recorded this episode before these revisions were made, but the new figures — admissions from Hamas — strongly support Murray’s view.

I feel as if I’ve slipped into an alternative universe when I am told that the IDF’s conscious killing of thousands of children is the “moral high ground.” But here’s my answer to the question Murray asked: Israel should have waited after 10/7. Israel should and could have marshaled international opinion to isolate Hamas, to further build alliances with Hamas-unfriendly Arab powers, and to conduct the kind of operations they have done against Hezbollah, where they effectively decapitated the organization without killing thousands of innocents.

But they were understandably enraged, as we were after 9/11. And they gave in to that rage, as we did after 9/11. And they have massively hurt themselves, as we did after 9/11. I wrote this at the time. But Netanyahu wanted to obliterate Amalek, to use the opportunity to vent a righteous rage that blinded Israelis to the moral horrors they were about to commit.

As for the figures, let’s just say that there are two contemptible kinds of arguments that Murray used — and used again on the Rogan show this week. The first is that you have no right to an opinion unless you have been there yourself. In fact, if you go there like Coates or Murray and only talk to one side, you have a more distorted perspective than someone who has never been there.

But the other one is querying the precise figures of civilian deaths in order to duck moral responsibility. Let’s take the numbers that my reader cites. It still means 14,000 deaths of women and children. Isn’t that horrifying enough for you? Or do you think you have satisfied any moral qualms by arithmetic?

This next listener recommends another episode on the subject:

During your very interesting discussion with Murray, you often made the point about the deaths of children in Gaza, and I kept thinking about Coleman Hughes’ very compelling argument on this subject that he laid out on Joe Rogan:

But I never denied that point! I agree with it. The idea that therefore Hamas is entirely responsible and Israel has no responsibility still does not follow.

Here’s the Rogan segment on Gaza this week where Murray confronts him and the comedian Dave Smith:

Another listener on my debate with Murray:

Everybody who disagrees with Israel’s strategy in Gaza feels very comfortable condemning Israel’s actions, and yet nobody (literally nobody I’m aware of; and being a recent immigrant to Israel, I’ve learned more about this issue than any other issue in my entire life) has proposed a viable solution. How to defeat Hamas? How to get back the hostages? How to de-radicalize Gaza? How to restore deterrence — not only in Gaza, but with all of Israel’s other neighbors?

Nobody knows! They only know that Israel is fucking up big time and should just quit killing kids already.

Yet, over the last 1.5 years, whenever Israel has defied international expectations of its behavior, it has racked up the most significant tactical and strategic achievements. Don’t invade Gaza! Don’t go into Rafah! Don’t escalate with Hezbollah! Don’t attack Iran directly! And yet, we see the result: Israel is now, in so many ways, in the best strategic position it’s been in for decades. It’s almost like the Israelis understand this situation better than anyone else. That doesn’t make them perfect, but it should give Israel’s critics, including you, a bit more pause before demanding an alternative strategy.

Gaza is indisputably a quagmire of epic proportions. But until you understand urban warfare, military strategy, tunnel warfare, Islamism, geopolitics, and the goals and strategies of not only the Palestinians but each of Israel’s neighbors, you cannot come up with alternative solutions.

Next up, many readers respond to last week’s Biden column, “The Man Who Brought Us Here.” The first writes:

You left out one group of folks who bear a shit-ton a responsibility for what’s happening now: the media.