ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book owes its existence to Rebecca Alpert. She read every page and offered incisive suggestions that undoubtedly made the book stronger. More than that, she has been an incredible mentor from whom I have learned much about how to be a generous, kind, and productive scholar. The ideas for this book emerged while I was completing my Ph.D. in Religion at Temple University. I was extraordinarily fortunate to have a dissertation committee that included, in addition to Rebecca Alpert, Laura Levitt, David Watt, and Janet Jakobsen at Barnard College. Laura greatly influenced my thinking about the legacies of historical traumas. David introduced me to numerous debates within American religious history that I found fascinating. And Janet’s work on secularism and sexuality significantly influenced my own work. I must also thank Kathleen Biddick, Professor Emerita of History, who introduced me to a rich world of scholarship on martyrdom.
Several institutions were supportive of my work on the history of secular gay martyrdom and deserve my gratitude. The LGBT Religious Archives Network awarded me the LGBT Religious History Award for a portion of my chapter on Matthew Shepard, which gave me the encouragement to expand that research into this book. The Center for the Humanities at Temple University awarded me a fellowship so I could
have a semester dedicated to writing, for which I am grateful. The College of Wooster, where I spent two wonderful years after I completed my Ph.D., awarded me the Walter D. Foss endowed visiting faculty position, which provided funding for research trips to San Francisco and to Laramie, Wyoming. And Haverford College supported this book, among other ways, by providing me with a student research assistant, Sierra Zareck, and by providing funding for one of the images contained in the book. I would also like to thank the archivists at the Harvey Milk Archives—Scott Smith Collection at the San Francisco Public Library and the staff at the American Heritage Center—Matthew Shepard Collection for their assistance with this project. And much gratitude goes to Professor Kevin Moloney at Ball State University for donating two photographs to use in this book.
Feedback, suggestions, and general encouragement from other scholars proved helpful as I undertook this project. I would like to thank Jodi Eichler-Levine, Anthony Petro, Megan Goodwin, Heather White, Jeremy Schipper, Samira Mehta, Ronit Stahl, and Jared Vazquez for their continued support and camaraderie. I must also thank the Human Rights Campaign Summer Institute for LGBT Scholarship and Mentorship in Religious Studies for creating a network of queer scholars of religion, too many to name here, whose community has meant much to me over the years. Christa Craven, my department chair when I was at The College of Wooster, deserves tremendous gratitude for her unflagging support and friendship. And Ken Koltun-Fromm, my chair at Haverford College, has been remarkably generous with his time and supportive of this work.
I had the unique fortune to teach several courses related to the topics in this book. Unquestionably, the book benefited from discussions in those classes. I would like to thank the students at Haverford College in my seminar on Monogamy and Marriage in America, and the students in my class, Religion and U.S. Politics: Sexuality, Race, Gender, and the Regulation of American Bodies. I would also like to thank the students in Religion and Sexuality in America, as well as the students in my Queer Lives course at The College of Wooster.
I presented portions of this book to several audiences and received valuable feedback that helped strengthen the analysis. I would like to thank the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at
Washington University in St. Louis, the Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University, and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at The College of Wooster for inviting me to give papers on this project. Within the American Academy of Religion, I would like to thank the Religion and Sexuality Group, the Secularism and Secularity Group, the Study of Judaism Group, the Gay Men and Religion Group, the Death and Dying Group, and the Indigenous Religious Traditions Group for providing space to test out ideas. Additionally, I published a portion of chapter 3 in the Journal of Popular Culture and am grateful to the publishers for their permission to use that material here.
Oxford University Press has been a wonderful home for this book. I am especially grateful to my editor, Theo Calderara, who showed support for this project from the moment we met. Thanks as well to Suganya Elango and Salma Ismaiel at Oxford for their assistance with the many stages of the book’s publishing process. I am also indebted to the two anonymous reviewers whose suggestions were extraordinarily helpful.
W. H. Auden wrote that “Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator; but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.” I would like to thank several people who provided friendship and support throughout this process and who often make me laugh: Sara Klein, Alex Drake, Aileen Humphreys, Julie Cooper, Jenny Sakai, Rahim Rahemtulla, Kathy Jaucian, Stephanie Chan, Jen Chen, Katy Levitt, Ali Shaw, Katie Shaw, Laura Randolph, Laura Neilsberg, Shondrika Merritt, Sasha Gamburg, and Luzanne Otte.
My mom, Cherry Cassell, has always been the person I most admire, and someone who has regularly made me laugh. When I came out to her in college, she replied, “Oh thank God! I did not think this day was ever going to come!” I am profoundly grateful for her unconditional love and encouragement.
Finally, I dedicate this book to Kevin Williams, my person. He read drafts, offered suggestions, and patiently listened to me talk about this book for years. But more importantly, his love, humor, and unmatched exuberance have made for a remarkably happy life together.
Introduction: Memorialization, Gay Assimilation, and American Religion
On the night of October 14, 1998, a crowd of five thousand people gathered on the steps of the United States Capitol to mourn the death of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student who had been tied to a fence and violently murdered eight days earlier.1 Hundreds of those present clutched memorial candles, others raised pictures of Shepard above their heads, and many more held hands with people they did not know. Parents stood with their children, couples embraced each other, and strangers supported those who openly wept. The gathering, though, was not simply a memorial; it was a protest. Activists, politicians, and celebrities addressed the crowd and the televised national audience to share their anger with the American public. Actress Ellen DeGeneres, who had come out as gay one year earlier, wiped away tears when she told the crowd, “This is what I was trying to stop.”2 Several speakers voiced their rage, fear, and disgust. Others echoed President Bill Clinton’s words from several days earlier. Speaking from the White House, Clinton had said, “I hope that in the grief of this moment for Matthew Shepard’s family, and in the shared outrage across America, Americans will once again search their hearts and do what they can to reduce their own fear and anxiety and anger at people who are different.”3 As Clinton noted, Shepard’s death had induced “outrage across America.” For the first time in the country’s history, thousands of straight Americans came together to mourn a gay person’s murder. Although Shepard had been unknown to the public before he died, he
quickly became the first gay citizen whose murder seemed to matter to the nation.
Five months after Shepard’s death, Vanity Fair published a fifteenpage essay entitled, “The Crucifixion of Matthew Shepard.”4 The article depicted Shepard’s death as similar to Jesus’s crucifixion, a motif gay activists had advanced since Shepard first became a household name. For both gay activists and Vanity Fair, though, the similarities went beyond how Shepard and Jesus died. Shepard, activists argued, epitomized Jesus’s teachings. He had joined his university’s Episcopal student club, he had been baptized and had served as an acolyte, and his friends made such declarations as, “If anyone lived the Christian ideal of turn the other cheek, it was Matt.”5 The article’s accompanying pictures showed Shepard in preppy, middle-class attire, and often with his family. As gay activists had insisted since he’d died, Shepard looked like a respectable Christian college student. In this way, Shepard countered the image of gays as godless adults, an idea the politically conservative Christian right had promulgated for decades. In contrast, Vanity Fair’s portrayal of Shepard reinforced his public image as a pious gay Protestant who suffered and died as Jesus had. Gay activists were therefore able to present Shepard as the model gay citizen—and martyr.
Dying to Be Normal examines how gay activists memorialized particular deaths, like Matthew Shepard’s, as part of a political strategy to promote greater acceptance of gay Americans. In particular, the book highlights how, through the process of commemoration, secular gay activists deployed Protestant Christian ideals to present gays as similar to upstanding heterosexuals and, therefore, as deserving of equal rights. As this book makes clear, secular gay activists repeatedly used Christian values and rhetoric to depict gays as good, “normal” Americans. Consequently, where other scholarship has focused on how race, class, and gender normativity shaped gay assimilation in the United States, Dying to Be Normal illuminates how religion also contributed to the mainstreaming of gays.6 As this book establishes, the progression toward gay social inclusion at the end of the twentieth and start of the twenty-first centuries was, in reality, a process of exclusion—of shoring up a white Protestant vision of proper American citizenship—that
regularly left out people of color, gender-variant individuals, nonChristians, and those who did not adhere to Protestant Christianity’s sexual standards.
Dying to Be Normal explores the often overlooked roles of Christian rhetoric and values within secular gay activism and their place in promoting assimilation. In so doing, the book adds to the growing body of scholarship that shows how the “secular” is hardly devoid of religion.7 But where other scholars have noted how religion influenced secular institutions like the American legal system, this books turns to secular gay activism, an area commonly assumed in both scholarly and popular writings to have worked against religion.8 The recurrent view of gay activism as oppositional to religion overlooks how religion shaped sexual politics in the United States. Dying to Be Normal demonstrates how the parameters of sexual social acceptance in America at the end of the twentieth and start of the twenty-first centuries were delimited by Protestant Christianity and, even more, that secular gay activists promoted Protestant values as necessary for entrée into full American citizenship.
To explore how religion shaped the process of gay assimilation, Dying to Be Normal examines the gay deaths that captured the nation’s attention from 1995 to 2015, a twenty-year period that witnessed rapid changes for gay Americans. Those two decades were bookended by the ostensible ending of the American AIDS crisis in 1995 and the countrywide legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015.9 Although the AIDS crisis brought increased attention to gays in the 1980s, much of that attention was negative and focused on the sex lives of non-monogamous gay men.10 In the 1990s and early 2000s, though, positive gay cultural visibility rose in mainstream media and national politics.11 This book considers how activists used memorialization to shift the image of gays in the popular imagination. Once seen as promiscuous harbingers of a deadly plague, gays were gradually seen as having embraced lifelong monogamous matrimony.
To investigate how gay activists used death to promote assimilation, Dying to Be Normal analyzes mainstream journalism; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) publications; films; plays; and archival documents to make sense of why some gay deaths evoked an empathetic response from heterosexuals that gays could use to their
political advantage.12 By analyzing an array of cultural sources, Dying to Be Normal reveals how memorialization influenced national debates over LGBT rights, and it makes clear how secular gay activists used Christian rhetoric as a legitimating political tool. Religion, this book emphasizes, functions in the United States as an authorizing discourse, especially in debates over the politics of gender and sexuality.
The presence of religion within U.S. gay activism at the turn of the twenty-first century was neither a new nor a novel phenomenon. Starting in the 1960s, gay activists partnered with liberal Protestant clergy to form organizations such as the Council on Religion and the Homosexual.13 One goal of these alliances was to present gays as respectable citizens, an image that was enhanced when Christian clergy joined in solidarity with gay men and lesbians. Similarly, participation in gay religious groups, like the Metropolitan Community of Churches (MCC), exploded during the “gay liberation” period of the 1970s.14 The MCC, like many gay religious organizations, regularly engaged in activism.15 But rather than focus on relationships between explicit religious institutions and gay activists, Dying to Be Normal turns to how secular activists with no connections to religious organizations used Protestant ideals to promote greater acceptance of gay Americans.
Memorialization and Martyrdom
Public memorialization offers valuable insight into which lives Americans believe have value. In other words, “memorialization” is not simply about grieving the dead or remembering the past. Rather, acts of commemoration inculcate ideas about who matters and why.16 Historian Edward Linenthal describes memorialization as a way for groups “to stake one’s claim to a visible presence in the culture.”17 Through public memorialization, those in marginalized communities can claim legitimacy as full citizens worthy of attention. Likewise, American studies scholar Erika Doss notes that public mourning can “mobilize social and political action.”18 As Doss makes clear, activists can use the deaths of particular people to advance their political agendas.19
Gay political memorialization became an increasingly prominent strategy in the 1980s during the AIDS crisis.20 For example, numerous AIDS activists staged “die ins,” in which large groups of people fell
to the ground in front of government buildings to bring attention to the AIDS death toll.21 Others participated in the construction of the AIDS Quilt, where coffin-sized quilt panels symbolized the vast number of AIDS deaths. Although these acts of political memorialization generated some media attention, AIDS activists insisted that most elected officials, journalists, and heterosexual citizens did not care that gay and bisexual men were dying by the thousands.22 For many activists, mass gay death during the AIDS crisis revealed how little the country cared about gay Americans.23
Another way gay activists used death to promote their political agendas was through the creation of venerable gay “martyrs” whose deaths were unconnected to the sexual stigma of AIDS. As political symbols, martyrs perform several functions.24 For one, martyrs can unite a community around a shared sense of persecution and victimization. In this way, a martyr is meant to stand in for the masses who have suffered similar horrors.25 Additionally, martyrs serve as emblems for those outside the community, as representative ideals who might change the attitudes of those who had never supported the martyr’s group.26 From this perspective, a martyr is a model member of a community. For these reasons, one can examine those labeled as martyrs to make sense of who appeared to matter most to a community and to the broader public.
A clear goal in the creation of gay martyrs between 1995 and 2015 was for activists to elicit empathy from America’s dominant class of white, straight Christians through the depiction of (white) gays as similar to (white) heterosexuals. Although this book examines deaths that involved people of color, transgender Americans, and non-Christians, the most well-known and politicized LGBT deaths between 1995 and 2015 were all of white, gender-normative, middle-class, gay men. Lesbians, bisexuals, transgender Americans, and queer people of color were largely excluded from extensive political memorialization. Race, class, and gender normativity shaped who gay activists exalted as martyrs, and who the public embraced as having lives of value.
In addition to the national outpouring over Matthew Shepard’s murder in 1998, two other gay deaths prompted considerable attention between 1995 and 2015. One was Tyler Clementi’s suicide in 2010. Clementi was a first-year college student who killed himself after his
roommate tweeted that he had spied on Clementi when he was engaged in a sexual act with another man. Not only did Clementi’s suicide provoke widespread outrage, it also contributed to the enormously successful It Gets Better Project. The It Gets Better Project provided a platform for adults to offer LGBT youth hope, advice, and reasons to live. Within weeks after Clementi’s suicide, tens of thousands of Americans, including politicians and celebrities, uploaded It Gets Better video testimonials to the Internet.27 In turn, the high suicide rate and vulnerability of LGBT adolescents became national conversations.
The third gay death that received substantial attention between 1995 and 2015 actually had occurred years earlier. On November 27, 1978, an elected official on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors assassinated openly gay politician Harvey Milk. Although activists commemorated Milk in a few different ways throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, gay activists at the time were mostly focused on the AIDS epidemic. Starting in 1995 though, Milk, more visibly than ever before, slowly emerged as an icon for national gay politics.28 In 1995 an opera about Milk toured the country. In subsequent years, Milk became the focus of a major Hollywood film, the face on a U.S. postage stamp, and in 2008 the national LGBT magazine The Advocate named him the “Gay M.L.K.”29 Although Milk had been a local figure of modest repute during his life, in death he became a nationally known emblem in the struggle for gay rights.
Gay Assimilation in America
The veneration of Shepard, Clementi, and Milk represented a gay activist strategy in the 1990s and early 2000s to present gays as normal Americans who were virtually identical to straights. Such a political tactic, though, did not begin in the 1990s; it had been brewing for decades. Gay activists in the 1950s who made up the “homophile movement” generally advocated for gay men and lesbians to be able to live, like heterosexuals, without fear of imprisonment, job loss, or harassment.30 These activists were responding to federal, state, and city policies that barred “homosexuals” from employment in the government and military, and that allowed police to arrest those who engaged in same-gender sexual activities.31 Homophile activists insisted
that gays did not want to alter society; rather, they merely wanted to end the criminalization and persecution of homosexuals. But as urban gay communities grew in the 1960s, some activists rejected earlier homophile goals of social inclusion. These younger activists believed it was incumbent on gay men and women to refashion a more just society. For example, the Gay Liberation Front, a group active in the late 1960s and early 1970s, repudiated the idea of gays joining the military and, instead, argued that gays should protest the military’s unnecessary use of violence around the world.32 The goal for such “gay liberation” groups was to transform a fundamentally flawed straight society, not to seek inclusion into it. Related, in 1972 the National Coalition of Gay Organizations petitioned for the “repeal of all legislative provisions that restrict the sex or number of persons entering into a marriage unit.”33
For this group, gays needed to oppose state-sanctioned marriages until those in relationships with more than two people, such as three-person lesbian partnerships, could receive the same benefits as married heterosexual couples. But not all gay activists agreed with such transgressive positions. Other activists in the 1970s took a less revolutionary approach and lobbied for an acceptance of gays within society’s preexisting structures, not for a radical upending of social norms.
Disputes between activists who wanted acceptance and those who wanted to transform the country continued, and in many ways amplified, during the AIDS crisis as many grew desperate for heterosexuals to care that gay and bisexual men were rapidly dying. In 1990, when the AIDS death toll in the United States had grown to nearly one hundred thousand, and as violent crimes against gays had increased in several cities, some activists came together to form the group Queer Nation.
For those in Queer Nation, the government’s lack of concern about the AIDS crisis coupled with ongoing violence against gays made it clear that most heterosexuals were fine seeing gays suffer. They embraced the term “queer” as a way to repudiate what straights sanctioned as normal, and, instead, celebrated what straights deemed subversive. Queer Nation’s activism included confrontational protests where they entered ostensibly heterosexual spaces like suburban shopping malls and distributed information about safe queer sex. They also participated in public demonstrations of same-gender kissing to insist that they should feel as safe as heterosexuals who embraced in public.
While Queer Nation promoted disruptive protests, other activists in the early 1990s explicitly advocated for assimilation. Prominent white gay men like writers Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bawer, and Jonathan Rauch argued that gays were basically no different than straights, a perspective that national lesbian, gay, and bisexual political groups embraced.34 In 1995 Sullivan published the book Virtually Normal in which he argued that the majority of gays wanted to be seen as normal citizens.35 For Sullivan, most gays did not want an upheaval of society’s norms. Rather, like heterosexuals, gays wanted to get married, have children, and serve their country in the military. The only difference between straights and gays, from this perspective, was that gays represented a minority of the population who were born gay; their sexual orientation reflected an innate quality that could not change and, therefore, should not warrant discrimination.36 Critics of Sullivan’s arguments insisted that gays should not embrace a “normal” life. For such gays, and increasingly those who labeled themselves “queer,” the structures of normality like marriage and child rearing were constricting, and adhering to them would not, they contended, make society less sexually repressive. Other critics of Sullivan’s arguments maintained that his focus on marriage as a conduit to social acceptance overlooked how marriage would benefit white, middle-class gay men and lesbians to a greater degree than people of color.37 They believed gays needed to focus on, among other things, enacting non-discrimination laws so employers could not terminate people because of their sexuality or gender identity, a legal reality in most U.S. states that disproportionately impacted people of color. Yet, in spite of such criticisms, Sullivan’s views reflected the dominant focus of national gay activism in the late 1990s and early 2000s. While many activists emphasized similarities between gays and straights, the period from 1995 to 2015 also witnessed a political confluence that gave far greater visibility to gay men and lesbians than ever before in U.S. history. Of the three presidents during the time, two—Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—did more to promote “LGBT equality,” a term that grew in prominence in the early twenty-first century, than had any other American president. Clinton was the first presidential nominee in history to make campaign promises to gays when he ran for office in 1992. He was also the first to mention sexual orientation in a State of the Union address in 1999. But Clinton faced resistance
in his support for gay rights, most notably when he was unable to fulfill his campaign promise to allow gays to serve openly in the military. Yet, President Obama, who was first elected to the White House in 2008, accomplished more than Clinton did for LGBT Americans. He overturned the military’s ban on gay citizens in 2010, voiced his support for same-sex marriage during his reelection campaign in 2012, and became the first president to mention transgender Americans in a State of the Union address in 2015.
The two decades from 1995 to 2015 were also marked by the continued influence of the Christian right, a powerful coalition that, ironically, brought tremendous attention to gay men and lesbians.38 Beginning in the late 1970s with the formation of groups like Focus on the Family and the Moral Majority, the Christian right made restricting gay rights a cornerstone of their political advocacy.39 Throughout the 1980s many in the Christian right insisted gay men had brought a deadly plague to the United States through their sexual immorality and promiscuity. Numerous evangelical leaders involved in politics, like the Reverends Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham, labeled AIDS as God’s punishment for the sin of homosexuality.40 The evangelical depiction of AIDS as a symptom of sexual sin shaped American political and public health discussions about the epidemic.41 For example, in an attempt to stop the spread of AIDS, Congress passed legislation in 1987 that restricted all federal money for sex education to programs that promoted abstinence until monogamous, heterosexual marriage.42 In this instance, elected officials endorsed the Protestant sexual standard of monogamous matrimony as necessary for the health of the nation.
Monogamy, Marriage, and Respectable Sexual Citizens
The idea of monogamy as necessary for the country’s citizenry has a long history that predates the AIDS epidemic, a history that, in part, shaped the activism surrounding “gay martyrs” like Milk, Shepard, and Clementi, and the broader acceptance of gays as legitimate citizens. One prominent example that linked monogamy with citizenship was Congress’s refusal to grant Utah statehood until the Mormon Church renounced polygamy.43 Quite simply, Mormons had to disavow one of their sexual practices, one they regarded as divinely revealed, and
comport to Protestant sexual standards in order to be accepted as fullfledged American citizens. The U.S. government similarly expected Native Americans to abandon their traditional kinship structures that included communal, polygamous, and other non-monogamous possibilities.44 Part of the federal government’s “civilizing mission” included the insistence that all Native Americans observe the Protestant sexual standard of coupled, monogamous marriage.45
Throughout U.S. history, adherence to the Protestant sexual ideal of coupled monogamy has been a marker of who counts as an acceptable American.46 Those whose sexual values fell outside these parameters faced legal consequences and social stigma. For example, the press repeatedly demonized the Oneida Perfectionists, a nineteenth-century Christian group that promoted “complex marriage,” a system that involved multi-partner sexual relations, as both heretics and as threats to the country.47 Moreover, even celibate Christians faced accusations of depravity. The Shakers, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Christian group that mandated celibacy, faced habitual allegations of perversion.48 Similarly, one way Protestants derided Catholics from the earliest days of the nation was through depictions of Catholic priests as sexual deviants.49 Although the Catholic Church promoted monogamous marriage among the laity, Protestants argued that the celibacy requirement for priests was abnormal. From a Protestant perspective, abstinence until marriage was appropriate; a vow of lifelong celibacy, however, was unnatural. Consequently, in terms of sexual social acceptance, adherence to monogamous matrimony has mattered greatly throughout the nation’s history.50
Importantly, the insistence on monogamy as central to social acceptance overlooks the ways gender and race concurrently shaped ideas about respectable sexual citizenship. Men, particularly white men, have been able to pay prostitutes and have affairs with women and often maintain their status at the top of the social hierarchy. Likewise, the country has a long history of depicting people of color, especially African Americans and Asian Americans, as sexual deviants regardless of their adherence to monogamy. In fact, the country’s investment in preventing interracial sex, and in “protecting” white women from sexual relations with black men, occupied a far greater national fixation than did concerns over same-gender sexual relations for much of the country’s history.51
Whites routinely depicted black men as hypersexual and depraved. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, white mobs lynched thousands of black men after accusing them of having sexual relations with, or of looking seductively at, white women.52 Moreover, as the gay rights movement began to pick up speed in the 1960s, interracial marriage remained illegal in sixteen states until the Supreme Court ruled in 1967 that “anti-miscegenation” laws were unconstitutional.53
Gay activists did not make monogamy or marriage an explicit political priority until the end of the twentieth century. Earlier activists lobbied to repeal sodomy laws, end employment discrimination, and win child custody cases for gay parents.54 But the AIDS epidemic dramatically shifted activists’ priorities. The homophobic depiction of gay and bisexual men as responsible for a deadly plague because of their promiscuity cast a long shadow on American gay activism.55 Some activists, like playwright Larry Kramer, began to present gays as committed to lifelong fidelity, both as a way to thwart the spread of AIDS and as a way to gain acceptance from straights.56 Other activists, however, rejected the push toward marriage, insisted that AIDS could be slowed through safer sexual practices rather than through monogamy, and argued that the benefits connected to marriage, such as health insurance coverage, should be universalized for all Americans.57
In 1993, as the AIDS crisis continued to dominate much of gay activism, the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled in Baehr v. Miike that the state’s refusal to sanction same-sex marriages constituted discrimination.58 The Hawaii Supreme Court remanded the case back to a lower court to determine whether the state had a compelling reason to restrict same-sex couples from obtaining marriages. The Baehr v. Miike case opened the possibility, although not yet realized, that individual states could grant marriage rights to gay couples. As a response, representatives from twenty Christian right groups unified to create the National Pro-Family Forum, an umbrella organization that petitioned Republican politicians to prevent same-sex marriage from becoming a federal reality. The National Pro-Family Forum asked Republican presidential candidates to sign a pledge that certified their opposition to gay marriage. Every Republican presidential candidate who participated in the 1996 Iowa caucuses cooperated. The candidates signed a pledge of opposition to same-sex marriage in front of two hundred reporters.
