Jeremy Hooper has been monitoring Maggie Gallagher more intensively than any of us over the past few years, and today he’s genuinely curious why, now that she has left NOM and ended her syndicated column, she seems so intent to repeat over and over that their war against marriage equality has been lost:
I did not … expect Ms. Gallagher to go on a de facto promotional tour in which she waved the white flag and told anyone who would listen that the marriage equality movement that she had so viciously fought for so long was going to win the whole thing any day now. Yet over the past year or so, that is exactly what she’s done, popping up on radio shows and in print with her admission that the cause to which she attached her legacy (i.e. marriage discrimination) is soon to go down in flames.
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I still don’t get why she has so fully and utterly given up every fiber of fight. At this point, there isn’t even a case headed to the Supreme Court, and there will surely be at least a few more state-level fights, be at the ballot box or in front of a judge, before a case makes its way to the high court. The organization that Maggie co-founded, NOM, is certainly still trying its best to stave off inevitability. Why is Maggie going around town making the inevitability argument for us?
Maybe Maggie’s trying to psyche out Justice Kennedy in hopes that if she gets this conventional wisdom argument to take hold, the somewhat iconoclastic justice might see standing against 50-state equality as the countercultural thing for him to do? Or perhaps she really has the sort of ill feelings for Brian Brown’s NOM leadership that some insider-y people have told me she does and is therefore fine with scuttling NOM’s current plans? Or maybe she really is just being honest about the fact that we on the side of equality will, in fact, win this fight—and soon?
Regardless of the why, as Jeremy points out, the assist is welcome. Perhaps her eyes truly have been opened up to reality and she made the decision to get out of the movement when she saw the writing on the wall. If it’s that she can’t stand Brian Brown, well, that’s kind of delicious, but whatever it is, Maggie is welcome to keep waving the white flag.
Listen to her latest:
