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It’s been almost six years since the U.S. Supreme Court, on June 26, 2015, ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that state prohibitions on marriage for same-sex couples were unconstitutional, thus making it the law of the land.

“Love is love,” President Barack Obama said shortly afterward, even though it was just three years earlier that he dinged Vice President Joe Biden for saying he was in favor of such unions. Biden “probably got out a little bit over his skis,” said POTUS of his VPOTUS.

Turns out that Obama was on the beginner’s slope while Uncle Joe was ahead of his time. But what can easily be forgotten was just how much a near run thing the legal and legislative battles were, even though the just outcome seems inevitable in retrospect.

a new book (Pantheon; 2021) from , is an essential account of just how complicated the conflict was and how fierce was the opposition. Subtitled “America’s Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage,” Issenberg’s book is also an invaluable reminder of just how crucial was Hawaii’s role in making it happen.

“It is a story that begins in Hawaii in 1990, when a rivalry among local activists triggered a sequence of events that forced the state to justify excluding gay couples from marriage,” a promo for the book explains.

What elevates “The Engagement” over other recent histories is that it manages to balance a deep attention to detail, a mastery of the facts and a smooth narration that takes the reader from Hawaii to other battleground states such as California and Vermont and to D.C. and back again. Issenberg also has an ability to make the lead characters in the book come alive on the page.

They include Ninia Baehr and Genora Dancel, the Hawaii couple at the center of the 1990 Baehr v. Lewin case (later Baehr v. Miike and Baehr v. Anderson, taking the names of the state health directors at the time) that challenged the constitutionality of denying gay couples the right to wed.

The book also profiles Dan Foley, the Honolulu attorney that represented Baehr and Dancel and two other same-sex couples. That case led, two and a half years later, to the first-ever court decision to validate a claim for same-sex marriage and — as Issenberg puts it — to begin “to align individual aspirations with tools of civil-rights law.”

In its 1993 Baehr v. Lewin decision, the Hawaii Supreme Court — through Associate Justice Steven Levinson — vacated the judgment that the Circuit Court had entered against the three same sex couples and in favor of the state and remanded the couples’ claim to the Circuit Court. The ruling held that Hawaii’s marriage laws  presumptively violated the couples’ right to equal protection of the law under the Hawaii constitution and that, at trial, the state would have the burden of demonstrating a compelling interest in the sex discrimination.

A Social Movement

My guess is that “The Engagement,” due out June 1, will garner lots of attention and be assigned in college classrooms.

“I see this book as comparable to ‘Simple Justice’ by Richard Kluger — the road to Brown v. Board of Education — which was a finalist for the National Book Award,” Foley told me. “It is not only instructive as to how marriage equality came about, but also how a successful social movement happens against what appears to be impossible odds.”

Indeed, Foley reminded me that from 1990 to 2015 — in just 25 years — the world went from zero same-sex marriages to all 50 states and 30 countries permitting them.

“Compare that to other civil rights struggles — African Americans and women,” he said.

“The Engagement” is 928 pages in length, which may seem off-putting. But there is a reason that The New York Times includes it on for summer reads.

Issenberg, an accomplished author, editor, journalist and teacher, can sometimes be playful in his language. Part one of the book, which is about what happened in Hawaii from 1990 to 1996, is titled “The Love That Ate An Island.”

Subsequent chapters often have inviting titles, such as “Dave & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” which refers to Bush v. Gore adversaries Ted Olson and David Boies. The powerful legal eagles joined forces in Perry v. Schwarzenegger to challenge California’s Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage.

The index and endnotes alone make for entertaining and illuminating reading. The many names and organizations from Hawaii alone include Neil Abercrombie, Ben Cayetano, John Waihee, ACLU Hawaii, First Unitarian Church of Honolulu, the Honolulu Advertiser, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Kamehameha V, Miss Gay Molokai Pageant, Jim Hochberg, Linda Rosehill, the Sodomy Roundtable, Blake Oshiro, Hula’s Bar & Lei Stand and Mike, Carol and Tulsi Gabbard.

Mike Gabbard does not come off well in Issenberg’s telling: He had a knack for “seizing attention” but little in the way of organizational skills. Gabbard’s “supposed allies,” he says, “valued him only as a patsy.”

In 1991 Gabbard, who at the time had a radio program called “Let’s Talk Straight, Hawaii,” launched Stop Promoting Homosexuality Hawaii, although his “greater concern” at the time was the decision by Honolulu officials to award gay activist Bill Woods a permit for a second annual gay-pride parade.

While Gabbard became perhaps the most prominent face of the local opposition to marriage equality, the more effective opposition, Issenberg explains, came from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Roman Catholic church. It was the LDS that paid for a PR campaign through McNeil Wilson Communications.

By November 1998, Hawaii voters by allowed for reserving marriage to opposite-sex couples, something the Hawaii Legislature soon did so statutorily. It was not until November 2013 that the Legislature, which convened in special session, sent a marriage equality bill to Gov. Abercrombie for his signature.

Gabbard, by then a state senator, voted “no” on the bill, as did Sens. Ron Kouchi, Donna Mercado Kim and Sam Slom while Sens. Donovan Dela Cruz and Brian Taniguchi were excused . In the 51-member House, 19 representatives opposed the bill including several who are still serving today: Henry Aquino, Ty Cullen, Sharon Har, Aaron Ling Johanson, Lauren Matsumoto, Bob McDermott, Jimmy Tokioka, Gene Ward, Justin Woodson and Ryan Yamane.

‘Permissible Discrimination’

Issenberg’s reporting on Hawaii is deep. Among the nuggets he shares are that Punahou School introduced an AIDS education program in 1984 followed by similar initiatives in Hawaii’s public schools. Hawaii was also the first state to approve a legal needle exchange, and “Honolulu’s two active bathhouses carried on without much debate.”

And he notes that Levinson was a member of the ACLU yet “discretely kept his membership active even while on the bench, in violation of ethics guidelines.”

Levinson provided some context to Issenberg’s reporting. He said that “at some point” while serving on the Supreme Court (1992 to 2008) he realized he was still an ACLU member but, embarrassed, soon canceled his membership.

“And as soon as I left I renewed and even served on their board,” he said.

The book also manages to invoke real drama, though not in a sensationalized fashion. Consider the following exchange before Hawaii’s high court in October 1992, when Deputy Attorney General Sonia Faust presented the state’s defense in Baehr.

Faust made the argument that there was no precedent for Hawaii to issue marriage licenses to the three gay couples. Here’s what came next:

Burns, the son of former governor John A. Burns and at the time the chief judge of Hawaii’s Intermediate Court of Appeals, was assigned to sit in on the case to replace a recused associate justice.

‘Rainbow Town Hall’

Reached via email this week, Issenberg told me, “I knew basically nothing about Hawaii, or at least as little as I did about any state, when I started this. It was one of only a handful that I’d never visited as a political reporter, and I don’t think I’d ever read a book about or even knew anyone from Hawaii.”

Issenberg ended up making three reporting trips to Oahu, the first in early 2013. Foley said Issenberg also went through his papers at Bancroft Library’s Sexual Orientation and Social Conflict Collection at the University of California Berkeley.

On Tuesday evening, Issenberg will participate in what is being billed as

The virtual event will celebrate the 30th anniversary of marriage equality in Hawaii. Dancel, one of the original plaintiffs, will be on hand as well as Foley, House Speaker Scott Saiki and state Sen. Chris Lee. Filmmaker Dean Hamer will moderate. Partial proceeds will go toward Honolulu Pride 2021 and the .

Meanwhile, Issenberg tells me that he hopes to make it back to Hawaii sometime later this year, assuming pandemic conditions permit it, “to talk about this important period in the state’s history.”