Freedom to Marry

Freedom to Marry was the national bipartisan organization dedicated to ensuring marriage for same-sex couples in the United States. Freedom to Marry was founded in New York City in 2003 by Evan Wolfson. Wolfson was president of the organization through the June 2015 decision of the Supreme Court until the organization's official closing in February 2016.

Freedom to Marry drove the strategy, what Freedom to Marry called the "Roadmap to Victory", that led to the nationwide victory. The strategy aimed at a Supreme Court win bringing the country to national resolution, once advocates had succeeded in creating the climate for the court by working on three tracks: winning marriage in a critical mass of states, growing national majority support for marriage, and ending marriage discrimination by the federal government.

In 1983, at a time when same-sex couples had no country- or state-level recognition anywhere in the world, Evan Wolfson wrote his Harvard Law School thesis on the constitutional right to marriage for same-sex couples. He believed that by claiming the vocabulary of marriage, same-sex couples could transform the country's understanding of who gay people are and, as a result, why exclusion and discrimination are wrong. The thesis outlined the arguments that ultimately became a national conversation and a legal and political set of battles that led to a transformation of public understanding and a triumph in the Supreme Court.

Wolfson went on to serve full-time as the marriage director of Lambda Legal throughout the 1990s. He worked as co-counsel in Hawaii's landmark Baehr case, which launched the ongoing international freedom to marry movement. The Hawaii case foreshadowed the pattern ahead: a legal breakthrough followed by political defeat, because of insufficient progress in changing hearts and minds. When, in 2000, Wolfson was approached by leaders of the Evelyn & Walter Haas Jr. Fund, he successfully proposed that the foundation make a $2.5 million challenge grant investment in 2001 – then the largest foundation award in the history of the LGBT movement from a highly respected, non-LGBT foundation – to help Wolfson build a new campaign to win marriage. The campaign was officially launched in 2003, the birth of Freedom to Marry.

Wolfson knew from studying the history of civil rights movements that marriage for same-sex couples would become the law of the land only when one of the country's two national actors, Congress or the U.S. Supreme Court, brought national resolution to the cause. But a smart, strategic campaign was integral to creating the climate necessary to get to that point and to avoid seeing gains snatched away.

As in Hawaii (and even the earliest rounds of the marriage battle in the 1970s), litigation was central – but it wasn't enough. Wolfson called for the creation of a campaign that reflected what he called the "4 multi's": it would be multi-year (not expected to win overnight), multi-state (not watching as victories were picked off one by one), multi-partner (no one organization could do it all), and multi-methodology (it would combine litigation, lobbying, public education, organization, direct action, fund-raising, and even, eventually, electoral). Wolfson knew that marriage advocates didn't have to win every state, but they had to win enough states – and not every American had to be persuaded to support the freedom to marry, but enough Americans needed to be supportive - before elected officials and judges, including the justices of the Supreme Court, would do the right thing.

Over two decades, the marriage movement built from only 27% support among the American people in 1993 to 59% in 2015; and from 0 states issuing marriage licenses in 2002 to 37 states and the District of Columbia in 2015, when the victories created the powerful momentum and energy that enabled the Supreme Court Justices to finish the job and strike down marriage discrimination once and for all.

Beginning in 2010, Freedom to Marry created and coordinated a research collaborative, dubbed the Marriage Research Consortium, drawing together state and national partners such as the Movement Advancement Project, Basic Rights Oregon, and Third Way to "crack the code" on how to reach the next segment of the American public who were not yet part of the majority the campaign had achieved. Through cutting-edge research, focus groups, collaboration with the partners, and compilation of the experience gained in multiple campaigns (and losses), Freedom to Marry pioneered a new messaging playbook for the marriage movement called "Why Marriage Matters". The playbook shifted from a previous focus on the rights and benefits that come with marriage towards values-based frames of love, commitment, freedom, family, and the Golden Rule. These were the messages that caused "middle" voters – those who Wolfson called the "reachable but not yet reached"—to move towards support, and helped contribute to the historic first victories for marriage at the ballot in 2012, to winning a majority of Americans in support of marriage, and to the movement's ultimate victory in 2015.