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Forcing The Spring
Jo Becker
Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality
Penguin Press
May 2014
On Sale: April 22, 2014
464 pages ISBN: 1594204446 EAN: 9781594204449 Kindle: B00DMCJOZ0 Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
A tour de force of groundbreaking reportage by Pulitzer
Prize–winning journalist Jo Becker, Forcing the
Spring is the definitive account of five remarkable
years in American civil rights history: when the United
States experienced a tectonic shift on the issue of marriage
equality. Beginning with the historical legal challenge of
California’s ban on same-sex marriage, Becker expands the
scope to encompass all aspects of this momentous struggle,
offering a gripping behind-the-scenes narrative told with
the lightning pace of the greatest legal thrillers.
For nearly five years, Becker was given free rein in
the legal and political war rooms where the strategy of
marriage equality was plotted. She takes us inside the
remarkable campaign that rebranded a movement; into the Oval
Office where the president and his advisors debated how to
respond to a fast-changing political landscape; into the
chambers of the federal judges who decided that today’s bans
on same-sex marriage were no more constitutional than the
previous century’s bans on interracial marriage; and into
the mindsets of the Supreme Court judges who decided the
California case and will likely soon decide the issue for
the country at large. From the state-by state efforts to win
marriage equality at the ballot box to the landmark Supreme
Court case that struck down a law that banned legally
married gay and lesbian couples from receiving federal
benefits, Becker weaves together the political and legal
forces that reshaped a nation. Forcing the
Spring begins with California’s controversial ballot
initiative Proposition 8, which banned gay men and lesbians
from marrying the person they loved. This electoral defeat
galvanized an improbable alliance of opponents to the ban,
with political operatives and Hollywood royalty enlisting
attorneys Ted Olson and David Boies—the opposing counsels in
the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore case—to join together in a
unique bipartisan challenge to the political status quo.
Despite stiff initial opposition from the gay rights
establishment, the case against Proposition 8 would
ultimately force the issue of marriage equality all the way
to the Supreme Court, transforming same-sex marriage from a
partisan issue into a modern crisis of civil rights. Based
on singular access to the internal workings of this
momentous trial—and enlivened by original interviews with
the participants on both sides of the case, many speaking
for the first time—Forcing the Spring is at once an
emotion-packed tale of love and determination as well as an
eye-opening examination of an evidentiary record that
federal courts across the nation are now relying on to
strike down bans similar to California’s.
Shuttling between the twin American power centers of
Hollywood and Washington—and based on access to all the key
players in the Justice Department and the White House—Becker
offers insider coverage on the true story of how President
Obama “evolved” to embrace marriage equality, his surprising
role in the Supreme Court battle, and the unexpected way the
controversial issue played in the 2012 elections.
What starts out as a tale of an epic legal battle grows
into the story of the evolution of a country, a testament
and old-fashioned storytelling to move public opinion.
Becker shows how the country reexamined its opinions on
same-sex marriage, an issue that raced along with a
snowballing velocity which astounded veteran political
operatives, as public opinion on same-sex marriage flipped
and elected officials repositioned themselves to adjust to a
dramatically changed environment. Forcing the Spring
is the ringside account of this unprecedented change, the
fastest shift in public opinion ever seen in modern American
politics. Clear-eyed and even-handed, Forcing
the Spring is political and legal journalism at its
finest, offering an unvarnished perspective on the
extraordinary transformation of America and an inside look
into the fight to win the rights of marriage and full
citizenship for all.
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