In the final push of 2010 to repeal the ban on lesbian and gay service in the U.S. military, the pro-repeal advocacy group Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN) rolled out a pressure campaign featuring one letter a day from someone discharged under the policy addressed to President Barack Obama.
"I have remained faithful to my country; please be faithful to me," former LCpl Danny Hernandez wrote to Obama in April 2010, playing off the Marine motto "Semper Fidelis," or “Always Faithful.”
The gay ban, known as Don't Ask, Don't Tell, was repealed on December 18, 2010. But the personal appeals shared daily by SLDN for roughly a month were just one example of the wealth of individual stories the LGBTQ movement drew on to both secure the policy's demise and ultimately win same-sex marriage rights nationwide in 2015.
In this post-Roe era, the reproductive rights movement is now similarly armed with personal accounts that transform an issue in real time. Abortion-related stories—once relatively scarce and often shrouded in shame—are now prolific and wrapped in righteousness.
A 10-year-old Ohio rape victim who was forced to cross state lines to terminate her pregnancy. A teenaged Florida orphan deemed not “sufficiently mature” by state courts to initiate an abortion, but apparently well positioned to singlehandedly raise a child. A Texas woman forced to continue carrying an unviable pregnancy for weeks until she could find a doctor willing to perform a procedure to extricate the dead fetus.
These are the makings of an unstoppable force. Every person of childbearing age—not to mention their mothers and fathers—can look at these stories and imagine, That could be me or my loved one, regardless of the circumstances by which they became pregnant and how badly they may or may not want to carry to term.
While researching my 2015 book Don't Tell Me To Wait: How the Fight for Gay Rights Changed America and Transformed Obama's Presidency, I became convinced that the stories of gay and transgender Americans shared readily in the media and at kitchen tables across the country helped set the LGBTQ movement apart from the reproductive rights movement during Obama's presidency.
Indeed, at the end of Obama’s tenure, queer rights had advanced further faster than most activists ever dreamed possible while pro-choice accomplishments languished. Not only did Obama fail to pass the Freedom of Choice Act—which he promised to do “first thing” during a 2008 campaign event at Planned Parenthood—he also signed an order reinforcing the ban on using federal funds for abortions in an effort to win votes from anti-abortion Democrats (who still existed in those days) for his signature health care law.
But today, the reproductive rights movement possesses both the poignant anecdotes and a similar sense of urgency that animated LGBTQ activists heading into President Obama’s tenure. Following the Supreme Court's sudden gutting of Roe v. Wade in June, pro-choice organizers are now moved by the imperative of self-determination that LGBTQ activists felt in the wake of Proposition 8, the 2008 California ballot initiative that stripped same-sex couples of hard-fought marriage rights. If that right could be taken away in one of the most liberal enclaves in the nation, queer rights activists knew a whole host of state-sanctioned protections relating to relationships, employment, and more were in jeopardy across the country. Likewise, the Republican attack on reproductive freedom won't stop at abortion.
But the parallels between the LGBTQ movement and the reproductive rights movement today go back even further. Given how profoundly Republican-driven laws are now intruding on the sound medical judgment of doctors, silence about these injustices could literally result in death for pregnant women and transgender men, many of whom are also the parents of young children.
Not so coincidentally, “Silence = Death” was the iconic motto of ACT UP, the fervent and fearless HIV-AIDS activists who cajoled a negligent federal government into speeding up research, development, and access to life-saving drugs in the '80s and '90s. The HIV-AIDS epidemic propelled a generation of LGBTQ Americans to come out. After all, no one was going to advocate for their health, well-being, and freedoms unless their stories were known by family members, friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens. That wellspring of personal truths laid the groundwork for unprecedented progress on LGBTQ equality that social scientists marveled at in comparison to other social issues, abortion included. Support for marriage equality, for instance, surged roughly 20 points in the decade leading up to its legalization—from 37% in August 2005, as gay marriage bans were sweeping the country, to about 58% in the summer of 2015, when the Supreme Court overturned those bans.
Today, same-sex marriage has flipped from being a wedge issue that divided Democrats to one that unites them while driving a wedge straight through the heart of the GOP base, with pro-LGBTQ suburban dwellers largely parting ways with homophobic evangelicals.
Abortion rights are rapidly making the same transition. The big difference is that a solid majority of Americans were already with the reproductive rights movement, they simply needed a reason to prioritize the issue at the polls. An extremist Supreme Court has now handed choice activists that precipitous event along with a flood of harrowing stories to create lasting change.
