Then Comes Marriage Read Online Free PDF Page B

back, forcing Clinton into a box with the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, which had been instituted in February 1994. And in midterm elections that same year, the Republican Revolution swept into Washington, with the GOP winning control of both the House and the Senate, Newt Gingrich claiming the gavel of Speaker of the House, and the Christian Right reaching new heights of power.
    The culture wars were on. In 1995, President Clinton signed an executive order declaring that gay men and lesbians could not be denied security clearances due to sexual orientation, and Hawaii’s Commission on Sexual Orientation and the Law became the first state body to recommend that gay men and lesbians be given the right to marry. That same year, a gay man named Scott Amedure was murdered after he revealed his crush on a straight man on The Jenny Jones Show , and Ralph Reed, the head of the Christian Coalition, appeared on the cover of Time magazine alongside a headline dubbing him “The Right Hand of God.”
    Amid all this crossfire, the Hawaii case marched on. Fearful that Hawaii might actually legalize marriage equality, Georgia Representative Bob Barr introduced the Defense of Marriage Act in the House in May 1996. The purpose of DOMA was to define marriage as being between a man and a woman, thereby denying federal rights to any gay married couples, regardless of what certain states might choose to do. And the House Judiciary Committee’s report made the reasoning behind DOMA clear: “to reflect and honor a collective moral judgment and to express moral disapproval of homosexuality”—a phrase that would later be used as a powerful tool to defeat DOMA .
    President Clinton signed the law in the dead of night, at 12:50 a.m. on September 21, 1996, with no fanfare or cameras present, no ceremonial handing out of pens. LGBT activists bitterly protested the law, but I was not in the United States to watch those protests play out. Instead, I was in Tokyo working on a corporate case for Paul, Weiss, having returned to the firm after finishing my clerkship with Judge Kaye.
    Martin London, a powerful Paul, Weiss litigation partner, had invited me to work on the Tokyo case, which involved a Japanese executive who had lost more than a billion dollars through rogue trading in copper. As Marty recalls, he was basically commuting to and from Tokyo at that time, and he decided that the project needed more than one-week “drop-ins” from him. It needed a full-time head of the PW-Sumitomo office. So Marty called me up at my parents’ house in Cleveland, where I was visiting my family, and asked if I could come back to the “mother ship” and work on this case. I called Judge Kaye for advice and she immediately said, “Robbie, if Marty London wants you, you go!” I ended up working interminable hours, corralling huge teams of lawyers and paralegals reading through literally rooms of documents, enduring long dinners of countless glasses of sake and still-wiggling pieces of raw fish, while dealing with the stark cultural differences between Japan and the United States in terms of the role of women, all the while jetting back and forth every six to eight weeks between New York and Tokyo. Marty himself later commented that I hadn’t just “smashed a glass ceiling”; I had “smashed a concrete cultural ceiling that had existed for thousands of years.” He said, “I never had a doubt, or I would not have asked Robbie to come.” And it all paid off in 1998 when I became a partner at Paul, Weiss at age thirty-one. Whatever was happening in the LGBT civil rights movement, my priorities were elsewhere.
    Then I met Rachel Lavine. And that changed everything.
    RACHEL AND I met when my old friend Amy Rutkin organized a group of friends to go to Rosh Hashanah services at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, New York’s gay and lesbian synagogue, in September 1999. I had recently