Then Comes Marriage Read Online Free PDF Page A

Jacob and Dana case took place on June 5, 1995. The next day the seven judges voted and the split was 4–3, with Judge Kaye on the losing side.
    Typically, after a vote is taken, the court hands down its opinion within a few weeks—certainly by the end of the session. As Judge Kaye’s clerk, my task was to help her write her dissent, but I refused to accept that the decision was going against the couples—and their children. I knew it was wrong, as a matter of both constitutional and family law, where the standard is the best interest of the child. So I asked the judge if she could arrange to have the case held over the summer to the following session, which is almost never done. Judge Kaye asked me why, since it seemed highly unlikely that we could convince one of the other four judges to switch sides. “It’s not about getting the fourth vote,” I told her. “We just need time to write a better dissent.”
    In fact, I did hope that Judge Kaye might be able to persuade one of the other judges to change his vote. But in order to do that, we needed more time, thanks to a judicial scandal that was playing out that summer. A prisoner released by a trial court judge on bail had committed a horrific crime, and the New York tabloids were gleefully pillorying the state’s judges and Judge Kaye in particular for being too soft on criminals. As the chief judge, the top judicial official in New York, Judge Kaye spent a lot of time responding to the media attacks, and I was the one she tapped for the time-consuming task of helping her draft her speeches.
    So Judge Kaye agreed to the unusual step of holding the case over to the next session. And then I went to work.
    One particular judge, Howard Levine, had started his career as a Family Court judge in upstate New York, and he seemed more likely than the others to switch his vote. I really believed that he wanted to vote our way, but he just hadn’t found the right way to do it. I started lobbying his clerk, a friend of mine named Alicia Ouellette, hammering on a somewhat obscure point about the interpretation of statutes that potentially raise constitutional concerns. It was a technical argument, but it did not matter how we got the vote. We had to get it.
    I became obsessed with winning Judge Levine’s vote, talking with Alicia as often as possible while opinions were being drafted and circulated among the judges. Everyone in the office knew how badly I wanted this decision, but no one knew why except for the only other lesbian who worked at the Court of Appeals, a woman who was as closeted as I was. She saw what I was doing, and one afternoon she told me she did not think it was appropriate that I was pushing so hard to win the vote. The statute was the statute, and I had no business overstepping just because I happened to be gay myself.
    We got into a very heated argument, which, as I recall, ended in my inviting her to commit an anatomically impossible act. It was definitely not my politest moment, but I really believed that she was wrong. She was, in my opinion, coming at the argument from a place of internalized self-loathing as a lesbian that blinded her to looking at the issue on the objective merits of my argument: that gays and lesbians were equally good parents and that their children needed and were entitled to the same legal protections as all other children. And that self-righteous claim to impartiality pushed all my buttons—in part because I was still struggling with self-loathing myself. But despite my lingering shame about being gay, I knew that fighting for this vote was the right thing to do, no matter what.
    In August, more than two months after the initial 4–3 vote, I received a call from Alicia Ouellette. “We’re on board,” she told me. “Congratulations. Chief Judge Kaye is now writing the majority opinion.”
    I started whooping and screaming right there in my office, a wild banshee in