Oral History Center University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

The Freedom to Marry Oral History Project

Tyler Deaton

Tyler Deaton on the New Hampshire Campaign and Securing Republican Support for the Freedom to Marry

Interviews conducted by Martin Meeker in 2015

Copyright © 2017 by The Regents of the University of California ii

Since 1954 the Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library, formerly the Regional Oral History Office, has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

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All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Tyler Deaton dated July 6, 2016. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Excerpts up to 1000 words from this interview may be quoted for publication without seeking permission as long as the use is non-commercial and properly cited.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to The Bancroft Library, Head of Public Services, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should follow instructions available online at http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/collections/cite.html

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Tyler Deaton, “Tyler Deaton on the New Hampshire Campaign and Securing Republican Support for the Freedom to Marry: The Freedom to Marry Oral History Project” conducted by Martin Meeker in 2015, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2017.

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Tyler Deaton, May 2015 Photo courtesy Gill Foundation, Dallas, Texas

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Tyler Deaton led the successful effort to prevent the repeal of the freedom to marry in New Hampshire and then went on to lead the “Young Conservatives for the Freedom to Marry” campaign at Freedom to Marry. Deaton was born in 1986 in Georgia and raised in Georgia and then Alabama. He attended conservative Wheaton College, where he met the man he would later marry. In this interview, Deaton discusses his work organizing conservatives to support the freedom to marry, particularly in New Hampshire, a state in which Republicans joined Democrats in 2010 to fight back legislation that would have repealed marriage for same-sex couples. v

Table of Contents—Tyler Deaton

Freedom to Marry Project History by Martin Meeker vii

Freedom to Marry Oral History Project Interviews ix

Interview 1: December 9, 2015

Hour 1 1

Childhood in the South, growing up in an evangelical Christian family — Missionary trips to Chile — Attending Wheaton College near Chicago — Public primary and high school offered alternative viewpoints, beginning to question religious ideology as a teenager — Parents’ enthusiasm for math and science, dissonance with religious conservativism — Early exposure to diverse peers through Pentecostal church, magnet high school, and international travel — Early realization of gay identity, struggling with church’s condemnation — Seeing a therapist with parents’ support — Restricted internet access at home and at Wheaton — Will & Grace — Political involvement in high school, illuminating experiences with the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham — Supporting President George W. Bush in 2004 re-election campaign — Complex political identity: pro-small government on social issues, fiscally Republican — Efficacy of single-issue campaigns: “If it’s not a single issue movement then it’s not a LGBT movement” — Supporting John McCain in 2008 presidential election — Emerging tension between gay and Republican identities as Republican Party identified increasingly as anti-gay — Choosing to live in New Hampshire, a conservative yet LGBT friendly state — Meeting Marc Solomon in 2010

Hour 2 19

Joining Freedom to Marry — Initial reluctance to becoming identified as a LGBT activist, fear of being pigeonholed — Struggle to reconciling gay and Republican identities as the Republican Party endangers freedom to marry in NH — Standing Up for New Hampshire Families campaign — Liz Purdy — Freedom to Marry, GLAD, HRC and other organizations helped form Standing Up for New Hampshire Families — Praise for Liz Purdy and Marc Solomon: Democrats willing to cross partisan lines to protect LGBT people — Phone banking, Republican to Republican, to garner public support for freedom to marry — Lobbying legislators — Data collection and tracking, creating an individualized plan for each persuadable lawmaker — “Journey stories” as people became more familiar and comfortable — Framing the right to marry as a universal, rights- based issue, rather than a gay issue — Funding, consultant Jeff Cook McCormac — New Hampshire as a make or break moment for the LGBT movement — Freedom to Marry’s success: single-issue focus, empowering effect on local vi

communities — New Hampshire Republicans for Freedom and Equality super- PAC

Hour 3 34

Concerns about reelection — Working to change anti-gay language of Republican Party platform — Anti-gay groups like National Organization for Marriage changing focus to attack transgendered people and civil rights laws under the guise of religious freedom — “Culture wars are not ending. LGBT issues will end.” — Future battles for AUF: surrogacy and adoption, conversion therapy — Reflecting on legacy of Freedom to Marry — Father’s illness, passing just before the Obergefell decision — Reading the text of the Obergefell decision at their wedding — Concluding thoughts on coming out to parents: “Nobody’s immune from being happy for their LGBT family and friends.”

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Freedom to Marry Oral History Project

In the historically swift span of roughly twenty years, support for the freedom to marry for same- sex couples went from an idea a small portion of Americans agreed with to a cause supported by virtually all segments of the population. In 1996, when Gallup conducted its first poll on the question, a seemingly insurmountable 68% of Americans opposed the freedom to marry. In a historic reversal, fewer than twenty years later several polls found that over 60% of Americans had come to support the freedom to marry nationwide. The rapid increase in support mirrored the progress in securing the right to marry coast to coast. Before 2004, no state issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples. By spring 2015, thirty-seven states affirmed the freedom to marry for same-sex couples. The discriminatory federal Defense of Marriage Act, passed in 1996, denied legally married same-sex couples the federal protections and responsibilities afforded married different-sex couples—a double-standard cured when a core portion of the act was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013. Full victory came in June 2015 when, in Obergefell v. Hodges, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution’s guarantee of the fundamental right to marry applies equally to same-sex couples.

At the very center of the effort to change hearts and minds, prevail in the courts and legislatures, win at the ballot, and triumph at the Supreme Court was Freedom to Marry, the “sustained and affirmative” national campaign launched by Evan Wolfson in 2003. Freedom to Marry’s national strategy focused from the beginning on setting the stage for a nationwide victory at the Supreme Court. Working with national and state organizations and allied individuals and organizations, Freedom to Marry succeeded in building a critical mass of states where same-sex couples could marry and a critical mass of public support in favor of the freedom to marry.

This oral history project focuses on the pivotal role played by Freedom to Marry and their closest state and national organizational partners, as they drove the winning strategy and inspired, grew, and leveraged the work of a multitudinous movement.

The Oral History Center (OHC) of The Bancroft Library at the University of California Berkeley first engaged in conversations with Freedom to Marry in early 2015, anticipating the possible victory in the Supreme Court by June. Conversations with Freedom to Marry, represented by founder and president Evan Wolfson and chief operating officer Scott Davenport, resulted in a proposal by OHC to conduct a major oral history project documenting the work performed by, and the institutional history of, Freedom to Marry. From the beginning, all parties agreed the Freedom to Marry Oral History Project should document the specific history of Freedom to Marry placed within the larger, decades-long marriage movement. Some interviews delve back as far as the 1970s, when a few gay activists first went to court seeking the freedom to marry, and the 1980s, when Evan Wolfson wrote a path-breaking thesis on the freedom to marry, and “domestic partner” legislation first was introduced in a handful of American cities. Many interviews trace the beginnings of the modern freedom to marry movement to the 1990s. In 1993, the Supreme Court of Hawaii responded seriously to an ad hoc marriage lawsuit for the first time ever and suggested the potential validity of the lawsuit, arguing that the denial of marriage to same-sex couples might be sex discrimination. The world’s first-ever trial on the freedom to marry followed in 1996, with Wolfson as co-counsel, and culminated in the first-ever victory affirming same-sex couples’ freedom to marry. While Wolfson rallied the movement to work for viii the freedom to marry, anti-gay forces in Washington, D.C. successfully enacted the so-called Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. The vast majority of the interviews, however, focus on the post-2003 era and the work specific to Freedom to Marry. Moreover, OHC and Freedom to Marry agreed that the essential work undertaken by individual and institutional partners of Freedom to Marry (such as the ACLU, GLAD, Lambda Legal, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the Haas, Jr. Fund, and the Gill Foundation) should also be covered in the project. Once the U. S. Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell in June 2015, the proposal was accepted and work began on the project.

After an initial period of further planning and discussions regarding who should be interviewed and for roughly how long, an initial list of interviewees was drafted and agreed upon. By December 2016, 23 interviews had been completed, totaling roughly 95 hours of recordings. Interviews lasted from two hours up to fourteen hours each. All interviews were recorded on video (except for one, which was audio-only) and all were transcribed in their entirety. Draft transcripts were reviewed first by OHC staff and then given to the interviewees for their review and approval. Most interviewees made only minimal edits to their transcripts and just a few seals or deletions of sensitive information were requested. Interviewee-approved transcripts were then reviewed by former Freedom to Marry staff to ensure that no sensitive information (about personnel matters or anonymous donors, for example) was revealed inadvertently. OHC next prepared final transcripts. Approved interview transcripts along with audio/video files have been cataloged and placed on deposit with The Bancroft Library. In addition, raw audio-files and completed transcripts have been placed on deposit with the Yale University Library Manuscripts and Archives, the official repository for the Freedom to Marry organizational records.

The collected interviews tell a remarkable story of social change, the rate of which was rapid (although spanning more than four decades), and the reach profound. Historians of social justice and social movements, politics and policy, and law and jurisprudence will surely pore over the freedom to marry movement and Freedom to Marry’s role in that for explanations of how and why this change occurred, and how it could happen so rapidly and completely. Future generations will ask: What explains such a profound transformation of public opinion and law, particularly in an era where opinions seem more calcified than malleable? What strategies and mechanisms, people and organizations played the most important roles in changing the minds of so many people so profoundly in the span of less than a generation? Having witnessed and participated in this change, we—our generation—had an obligation to record the thoughts, ideas, debates, actions, strategies, setbacks, and successes of this movement in the most complete, thoughtful, and serious manner possible. Alongside the archived written documents and the media of the freedom to marry movement, this oral history project preserves those personal accounts so that future generations might gain insight into the true nature of change.

Martin Meeker Charles B. Faulhaber Director Oral History Center The Bancroft Library

December 2016

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Freedom to Marry Oral History Project Interviews

Richard Carlbom, “Richard Carlbom on the Minnesota Campaign and Field Organizing at Freedom to Marry.”

Barbara Cox, “Barbara Cox on Marriage Law and the Governance of Freedom to Marry.”

Michael Crawford, “Michael Crawford on the Digital Campaign at Freedom to Marry.”

Scott Davenport, “Scott Davenport on Administration and Operations at Freedom to Marry.”

Tyler Deaton, “Tyler Deaton on the New Hampshire Campaign and Securing Republican Support for the Freedom to Marry.”

Jo Deutsch, “Jo Deutsch and the Federal Campaign.”

Sean Eldridge, “Sean Eldridge on Politics, Communications, and the Freedom to Marry.”

James Esseks, “James Esseks on the Legal Strategy, the ACLU, and LGBT Legal Organizations.”

Kate Kendell, “Kate Kendell on the Legal Strategy, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and LGBT Legal Organizations.”

Harry Knox, “Harry Knox on the Early Years of Freedom to Marry.”

Amanda McLain-Snipes, “Amanda McLain-Snipes on Bringing the Freedom to Marry to Oklahoma, Texas, and the Deep South.”

Matt McTighe, “Matt McTighe on the Marriage Campaigns in Massachusetts and Maine.”

Amy Mello, “Amy Mello and Field Organizing in Freedom to Marry.”

John Newsome, “John Newsome on And Marriage for All.”

Kevin Nix, “Kevin Nix on Media and Public Relations in the Freedom to Marry Movement.”

Bill Smith, “Bill Smith on Political Operations in the Fight to Win the Freedom to Marry.”

Marc Solomon, “Marc Solomon on Politics and Political Organizing in the Freedom to Marry Movement.”

Anne Stanback, “Anne Stanback on the Connecticut Campaign and Freedom to Marry’s Board of Directors.”

Tim Sweeney, “Tim Sweeney on Foundations and the Freedom to Marry Movement.”

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Cameron Tolle, “Cameron Tolle on the Digital Campaign at Freedom to Marry.”

Thomas Wheatley, “Thomas Wheatley on Field Organizing with Freedom to Marry.”

Evan Wolfson, “Evan Wolfson on the Leadership of the Freedom to Marry Movement.”

Thalia Zepatos, “Thalia Zepatos on Research and Messaging in Freedom to Marry.”

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Interview 1: December 9, 2015

01-00:00:09 Meeker: Today is the 9th of December 2015. This is Martin Meeker interviewing Tyler Deaton for the Freedom to Marry Oral History Project and we are here at the offices of Allegiance Strategies, LLC, in Washington, DC. This is interview session number one. Let’s get started. The way we start all these interviews is you begin by telling me your name and date and place of birth.

01-00:00:39 Deaton: Okay. My full name is Tyler Hatton Deaton and I was born February 24, 1986. I’m twenty-nine years old. And I was born at Kennestone Hospital in Kennesaw, Georgia, which is a northwest Atlanta suburb.

01-00:00:55 Meeker: Tell me a little bit about the family that you were born into. What were the circumstances, what kind of work did your parents do?

01-00:01:01 Deaton: Yeah. I’m the youngest child. My parents were a little older whenever I was born. They were in their early forties. My family, going back for generations, has been in Kentucky. My parents, they both grew up in a very small town called Jackson, Kentucky in Bracken County, which is in eastern Kentucky. So if you know eastern Kentucky that’s just code for like the mountains through Appalachia, which is where they grew up. And they were high school sweethearts. In my dad’s case and in my mom’s case, both of them managed to get out and go to Lexington, Kentucky to go to the University of Kentucky and both get a college education. My dad joined the Air Force, was in the Air Force during Vietnam, so that moved them around from Kentucky to a few other stations down on the Gulf of Mexico. That’s why my oldest brother was born in Mississippi. When they were in Pascagoula, like down there, Biloxi area. Then they moved back to Kentucky. My older sister was born in Lexington. And by the time that I was born they had moved to Atlanta because after the Air Force my father was a successful engineer and developer and was working at a firm in Atlanta. They moved really just before I was born. So I was born and came home to like a little condo that they had bought just as they’d arrived and then shortly thereafter, I guess the first year I was alive, we moved to Acworth, Georgia, which is where I, I guess, went till second grade. Went to Acworth Elementary School. Then we had a farm down in Cobb County. So then I went to Hightower Trail Elementary School from third through fifth grade. Then my dad’s work took us over to Birmingham, Alabama. So in a lot of ways I actually consider myself an Alabamian because it’s kind of where you went to high school, is more I think where you connect to. So I grew up in Georgia and Alabama, went to Clay- Chalkville Middle School in sixth through eighth grade, and then I went to Jefferson County International Baccalaureate High School in Irondale, Alabama, for all of my high school. So southern family, grew up in a very conservative Christian family, evangelical family.

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01-00:03:25 Meeker: Were they part of a mainline denomination or—

01-00:03:28 Deaton: We went to a few different churches. I think that they’re just evangelicals. So the specific denomination I don’t think ever really cared as much. Like my parents didn’t care as much. We weren’t like Southern Baptists or anything. So I think growing up we went to an Assembly of God Church two times, like when we were living in Conyers. That was an AG church. And then it was an AG church when we first moved to Alabama but then I went through high school to a Christian and missionary alliance church, which is a really small denomination that’s basically a Presbyterian church that’s really focused on missions. That’s like their thing. The whole point of the church is to do missionary work. That’s why it’s called the Christian Missionary Alliance. So did a lot of missions trips. The whole idea of the congregation is that you’re supporting different missionaries around the world. That was kind of interesting because we always had people coming from just all over the planet. The whole idea is like they come back on sabbatical but while they’re back in America statewide they go around and are visiting the churches that are supporting them financially and telling them the story of the work that they’re doing and why they need the money and I think it’s helping to raise more money. The mission trips that I did outside of the country were all to Chile and I went there four times.

01-00:04:56 Meeker: And this was during high school or after?

01-00:04:58 Deaton: Yeah. Yeah.

01-00:04:59 Meeker: Wow. When you were engaged in these missionary trips—I imagine the base was spreading the gospel but were there particular values that you were trying to communicate that were central?

01-00:05:13 Deaton: Yeah. You’re trying to teach people about Jesus. But mostly what I was doing was construction. We were building churches. And there was one church in particular in a small town in Northern Chile called La Serena, which is actually one of the oldest cities in Chile. It was founded by the Spaniards as they were colonizing Chile. And it was interesting. It’s a very historical city and there’s not a lot of evangelical churches. At least at that time there weren’t. I think it’s growing a lot down there. But that was the goal. Just convert people, teach them about Jesus. Evangelical means evangelized. Like the whole idea is just teach people about Jesus, have them get saved. But a lot of the work that I was doing, it was really the construction. Building roofs, putting up drywall for a few weeks at a time. Which I really enjoy. Otherwise I would have never done any of that work in my life.

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01-00:06:10 Meeker: Right. So I wonder if you can tell me a little bit about the religious education or the values education that came along with the religious education that you were getting at the church in those communities. What were some of the main values that were communicated to you?

01-00:06:27 Deaton: So where I went to college was Wheaton College, which is a very conservative evangelical Christian college.

01-00:06:36 Meeker: Where is that located?

01-00:06:38 Deaton: It’s in suburban Chicago. It’s where Billy Graham went. It’s also where Dennis Hastert went, which is embarrassing. But a lot of other Republican politicos have come out of Wheaton College. Like a lot of the evangelical leadership has gone through Wheaton because it has a very political bent. It’s extremely politically engaged.

First off, I went through public schools. So everything that I learned as far as religious education was just through church, which I’m so grateful that I got to go to public schools and didn’t go to like a private Christian school, because I think that my friends who did go through private Christian school, between that and church, you just never are exposed to anything else. But I was raised, being taught the Bible is the literal word of God, so it’s literalism. Biblical creationism and all the way through the things that are taught are as conservative and as strict as I think people hear that they are. It is that strict, it is that conservative, it is that literal. So I think it wasn’t probably until I was in middle school or high school that I even started to question any of that. Because you’re also taught that you’re not supposed to question. That’s kind of the key to all of it, is that this is the truth and you’re not even allowed to doubt it. So by middle school and high school is when I started to kind of figure out that there were other ideas and other teachings and other science. Because I was fortunate to get to go to really good public schools and my high school was really good. I mentioned it was an international baccalaureate program. It was a magnet program. Kind of hard to believe that it’s in metro Birmingham, Alabama, but it’s one of the top public high schools in the country. And it’s a small school. It’s like fifty students in a graduating class. I was really fortunate to be able to have that education kind of balancing out what I was being taught at church.

01-00:08:50 Meeker: Was there a point at which you were trying to come to terms with the discrepancy between creationism in the Bible and perhaps—

01-00:08:55 Deaton: Oh, yeah, in high school. I remember it vividly in high school. I think it’s about ninth or tenth grade, whenever you really start to get into the science of

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biology, zoology, anatomy. At my school we actually took an entire zoology course. Basically the zoology course, and the division, and the taxa and everything that you go through, it’s all—the first chapter is Darwin, Lamarck, all of the different—because Darwin wasn’t even the first. You go through the entire evolution of evolutionary theory. Since it is Alabama, even though it’s public schools, they also do teach intelligent design. So I remember that they put all the ideas in front of you. But I also remember thinking that my parents—my dad being scientifically minded as an engineer, my mom—and I think this is really remarkable about my mom. She went to college at UK in the sixties and double majored in math and physics. I think she told me, and I don’t know if it’s true, she told me she was like the only women in her classes, which probably was true. I mean, she said she was the only woman in her classes. And I believe that. I think it was shocking that a woman was double majoring in math and physics at the time. And so she’s scientifically minded. And I think it’s interesting that as conservative and as evangelical as the household was, they loved that I was in public school and loved that I was in a very rigorous school and that the science and the teachings there were the best education that I could get. So I think there is an inherent dissonance there that I never really talked to them about but I find that interesting. That they were very conservative but they weren’t so conservative that they wanted us to be homeschooled or in a Christian school. Because once I got to Wheaton College, a full tenth of the student population there is homeschooled and then a whole big chunk goes to Christian private schools. There are not a lot of public school kids at Wheaton.

01-00:11:08 Meeker: Did your mom work outside of the home?

01-00:11:10 Deaton: She was mostly a stay-at-home mom. The only thing she ever did was she taught. She was a substitute teacher off and on. I think it wasn’t until I got my driver’s license that she finally—her youngest kid could drive himself, then she started to teach full-time at a private Catholic school in the inner city in Birmingham, which was interesting. I think she kind of viewed it as like her own ministry. She taught middle school. And it was in a rough part of town.

01-00:11:41 Meeker: Probably a lot of African American kids, I would guess.

01-00:11:43 Deaton: Basically exclusively.

01-00:11:46 Meeker: When and how did you start to come to terms with your sexuality?

01-00:11:51 Deaton: Oh, man.

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01-00:11:58 Meeker: Is there a date you can actually—

01-00:11:56 Deaton: No, I do know. I’m just trying to think. It’s because I was super young. I also want to say one other thing because you mentioned my mom teaching African American kids. And I should mention this, because this is also interesting. Because we went to Assemblies of God churches, which is a more Pentecostal denomination—there’s no reason to be familiar with any of this. But the Pentecostal churches are way more integrated. Like Southern Baptist churches in the south and all the other Protestant churches are just pure white and then you have the black church. AME [African Methodist Episcopal Church] and whatnot. And those are pure African American. No white people. And then there’s no black people in a Southern Baptist congregation. The Pentecostal churches are much more diversified and so that was another interesting thing of I think growing up. Even at a very young age we had family friends that were black and were Hispanic and were Asian. And also, because of my dad’s work, we were also very international. Like one of my best friends in elementary school was a German kid, from Germany. So that was another interesting thing. That I think a lot of southern kids, you do grow up if you are in the suburbs, you are in a pure white—like you never know anybody black. And then the same is true if you grow up in the city. It’s just pure black. You don’t know any white people.

But I was fortunate to be able to have that. And in my high school, because it was a magnet program that drew from across the whole metro area, it was the most diverse high school, as well. Like we had everybody. We had white and black and everything else. Otherwise my high school wouldn’t have. And it’s not because the schools are still segregated but it’s because we self-segregate in the south. And so then you’re zoned by zip code and these towns are all still segregated. The segregation, it would look like to an alien like it’s intentional. That somebody’s actually drawn a line and said, “You have to live here and you have to live here.” And that was I think a big part of also starting to question things from a young age because I did have the opportunity to know a lot of people from different backgrounds. Like I remember having a friend in elementary school who was Jewish and I got to go over for a sleepover. It’s Hanukkah right now and it was winter and it was Hanukkah then. As a second grader I was able to learn about what Hanukkah meant. And I remember and I even had a conversation and my parents were like, “Now, you know, your friend, he’s Jewish, which is different but you should go over there and you should learn about it.” So I’m pretty fortunate because I don’t think there were a lot of second graders coming from a very conservative white person family who knew as many people outside of that bubble as I was able to get to know.

So all of that, I think, then, kind of informs why I knew that I was really different from as far back as I can remember. I remember when I was like four years old and five years old knowing that I was attracted to men. And I

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remember drawing pictures of myself with another guy being married. Like I just remember that very vividly. I knew that I was different in that way before I’d ever even been taught that that was wrong. It wasn’t until later, I think at some point—I’ll say second or third grade, must have been third grade because we had by that point moved to Conyers. I knew then that what I was feeling was wrong because they taught it in church. At some point I think we were reading Leviticus or something and then you come across it. Like that’s where you start to see like there’s these passages about it. And so that was weird because I was still so young but I was young enough that I went a good couple of years knowing I was different but not knowing that that was wrong. And then finding out that it was wrong and then being horrified. So third grade I think was whenever it clicked for me that I was different and that it was sinful and that I was going to have to figure this out. I distinctly remember a night when I was in third grade, all night long, just like crying. Like finding these different sections in the Bible and just like crying. And I didn’t sleep that night and that was weird and that stuck with me for a long time, that one night. It was a revelation. And it’s also weird because I had like this blissful two or three year period or longer of knowing I was different and not knowing that that was a problem.

And then probably from third grade until tenth or eleventh grade, then it just tormented me. And very secretly. Obviously I didn’t talk about it with anybody. Until then I did finally get smart and tell my parents. And this is another credit to my parents. I told them about ninth, tenth grade. Not that I was gay but that I wanted a therapist, that I wanted to have counseling, that I wanted to be able to speak to a professional therapist. And I don’t remember exactly how I sold it, because I didn’t tell them, “And it’s because I’m gay.” I think I sold it as, “I would like therapy. I want to have somebody to talk to.” And they were total cool with it. Because it’s not cheap. Insurance doesn’t cover it. Or whatever it covers, it covers like ten sessions with a ridiculous co- pay and then after that you’re on your own. But they paid for it and supported me and never asked. They were never intrusive, like, “Why are you going to therapy? Why do you need this?” I probably lied a little bit and was like, “Oh, you know, I’m a little depressed.” Who knows what I did to like cover up why I was really there. But I was there because I wanted to talk to a professional counselor about the fact that I was attracted to men and that I didn’t think that that was really that big of a problem. So that was the other issue, is I never wanted to change and I knew I couldn’t. Basically I knew I couldn’t change, so then I spent most of my time trying to figure out how I could at least feel better about myself or trying to figure out maybe the Bible is wrong or maybe these teachings are wrong and maybe I can reconcile it on that side. I can choose or learn to believe that it’s not wrong because I don’t think I can change who I am.

01-00:18:50 Meeker: Your parents didn’t encourage you to speak with a minister instead?

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01-00:18:52 Deaton: No, they didn’t. No. I think that they did find a biblical counselor but he was a real PhD who also was a Christian. But he wasn’t a biblical counselor. He was like a psychiatrist who was a Christian, which is very different. There’s like biblical counselors who are just like quacks who didn’t go to school. This guy, he was really, really good. I can actually get a little emotional thinking about it. I can’t believe how lucky I was to be able to have a therapist, because then I was able to, from that point forward, pretty much stick with it through college. Because then I got to college and got a new therapist once I went to Chicago and my parents kept supporting it. And that was extremely helpful to have a confidential person to talk to. If I hadn’t had the outlet I have no idea what I would have done. I just don’t. Who do you talk to then and how do you figure it out? Because he was extremely helpful. I guess just as far as his integrity, that counselor was very supportive and never tried to change me, never anything like that. Never really tried to spend too much time about like, “This is what the Bible says,” but kept it very informed and it was very helpful. And would share with me the science and information behind orientation and like how do people end up gay. I think that he probably was more in that vein of you have to be celibate. I think that that’s kind of where his impact was, was like that you can be a Christian and have same-sex attraction, SSA, but you can’t act on it. That’s when it becomes a sin. So he was in that camp, which is now growing, that’s more and more being taught. That’s like the next stage, I guess. But eventually it’ll get even more affirming.

01-00:21:02 Meeker: Is that how it was talked about, SSA, in your conversations?

01-00:21:04 Deaton: Yeah, that’s the acronym, SSA, same-sex attraction.

01-00:21:07 Meeker: So you don’t have to say gay or homosexual?

01-00:21:09 Deaton: Right, right. SSA.

01-00:21:14 Meeker: Do you remember the first time that you understood that there was a gay world out there, that there were gay organizations, gay bars, gay parts of cities?

01-00:21:38 Deaton: It would have been late like high school, like that there’s gay culture. It would have had to have been high school.

01-00:21:45 Meeker: Did you engage with that?

01-00:21:46 Deaton: No. I think it had to be high school and I think it had to be something very cliché from TV. It must have been. Like Will & Grace or something like—I

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think otherwise I don’t think that I knew that there was a gay culture until high school.

01-00:22:14 Meeker: Being born in ’86 you’re one of the first generations to come of age with the internet being a presence. How did that impact your long process of coming out?

01-00:22:25 Deaton: Very little because the internet in our house was really tightly controlled. So very little.

01-00:22:35 Meeker: Tightly controlled how?

01-00:22:37 Deaton: Well, I mean, like I didn’t have just like unfettered access to the internet. If I even wanted to, I couldn’t have found a way to use the internet to like look at porn or anything like that. We were very strict in our house about the internet.

01-00:22:55 Meeker: What about at college?

01-00:22:58 Deaton: At Wheaton College you had a filter. The whole thing is censored. Seriously. Like the web at Wheaton College is absolutely censored. There’s a community covenant that you sign and all of this kind of stuff and kids would get in trouble. I had like a bunch of friends who would get in trouble. Like they would just like Google something. And not necessarily porn but just like Google anything that’s suspicious on the filters and that would trigger a report that somebody even searched for it. I’ve joked about this with my friends. I think Will & Grace did have an impact on me, because it was a way to like see something on television that you could relate to. And I feel like that was the first show that I was able to watch that had gay characters. That I can recall. It must have made an impact because I loved Will & Grace and it was really an outlet for me and a lot of my friends. I think people in my age group especially liked Will & Grace. Was a breakthrough.

So it must have been in high school that I started to learn like, “Oh, yeah, there’s a gay neighborhood,” or like San Francisco’s really known for being super gay friendly. Like that’s whenever I would have started to learn those things. But also, by the way, I would have learned a lot of that through like the political lens. Like I would have heard San Francisco’s debauched. It’s the city of sin, like that sort of stuff. So I wouldn’t have heard it in a good way. And that was always around. I think the first times I would have heard about gay culture it was in the negative. Like a gay pride parade is a bad thing, those sorts of comments.

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01-00:25:02 Meeker: Were you engaged in politics in high school?

01-00:25:06 Deaton: Oh, yeah.

01-00:25:06 Meeker: Yeah. Can you tell me about your initial engagement?

01-00:25:09 Deaton: Well, I’ve always loved politics and was always really involved. And so in high school I think I just started to find ways to be more involved in different things. I was really involved with the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham with a youth leadership program that they did. Again, it was across the entire metro area and the idea was to bring like top students from all the different high schools all together and go through a kind of intensive leadership building kind of a training program. And that was really cool also because it was diverse. Since you were bringing kids from across the entire metro area it was a very interesting group of people. And they tackled the issues that Birmingham faces like pretty honestly for a bunch of high school students. We got into race relations and economic inequality and things like that. And it was really interesting because I remember even then like coming at it from what you’d call a “center right” approach. I wouldn’t have known that that’s what it was but kind of like this—I knew I was from a Republican family and I knew I was more Republican. But it was interesting in those sessions, like kind of understanding that I wasn’t quite where some of the real arch conservative kids were at, because they were in this group. So as you’re talking about these issues, I saw that there was a tension between the right and the left and that I lean right but I’m not so far to the right that I can’t see like how to work with the other side. And that was really enlightening. I think that that was actually a pivotal experience for me. I’ve always looked back on that. Because then I stuck with it. I enjoyed that program so much that I stuck with the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham through the rest of my high school experience, interned there, helped them grow the youth leadership forum and program. In a lot of ways I hate that I’m not connected to it now but I don’t live in Alabama. But that was a really, I think, helpful experience and formative experience, especially in the south. That’s the kind of stuff that you really need, is to get the kids together and hopefully break the cycle of everybody being apart. But I also interned for the Republican Party of Alabama. That was in, I guess, my junior year of high school.

01-00:27:56 Meeker: What did that entail?

01-00:27:57 Deaton: A lot of data work. It was like grunt work. I think I did a good job at it, though. I did a lot of interesting number crunching. Like I helped them figure out the districts that were held by Democrats that shouldn’t be because there was post-Civil War—it wasn’t until the mid-2000s that Alabama had a Republican

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legislature. It had been held by Dixiecrats for a hundred years plus. And I helped them kind of run the numbers on federal elections, where people were trending Republican, and how that was out of step with how they were voting in their local elections, and helped them kind of prioritize different areas where they either needed to flip legislators, have them switch parties, which was a big part of the process. Like they didn’t elect a whole new generation of Republicans. They actually convinced a lot of Democrats to switch parties through the 2000s. Then you also had some districts where generational turnover was happening and they just needed to find a good younger Republican candidate to run as a Republican in that district and they would just sail though. The only reason it had been held by a Democrat is because the person had been there for thirty years. So that’s what I worked on and that was an interesting project that, by four years later, was being well implemented. And then by 2006, I think that was the year that the Alabama legislature finally, or maybe 2008, it was very recently. And that would shock people. But that realignment was happening across the South while I was in high school and then after.

01-00:29:38 Meeker: Did you continue this work in college?

01-00:29:41 Deaton: Yeah, of course.

01-00:29:41 Meeker: How so?

01-00:29:42 Deaton: College Republicans. But not as seriously. I had other priorities in college. I wasn’t as active doing things. But I went to Wisconsin in 2004. So when I was a freshman at Wheaton with College Republicans we did a deployment to Wisconsin. It’s called the seventy-two-hour push or seventy-two-hour get out the vote. Because Wisconsin was supposed to be a swing state in 2004. I actually think it did end up being very close. W [President George W. Bush] didn’t win it but it was close. And the idea was all the people coming up from Illinois knocking on doors in Wisconsin. So I helped with that. That was probably the most work that I actually did. But I was super political. Always have been since I was like five. I think I’ve had very strong political opinions since I was like a kid.

01-00:30:40 Meeker: It sounds to me like you were raised in a conservative household and this was part of your upbringing and it was something that you naturally gravitated to. So it doesn’t sound to me there was ever like a temptation to think about yourself as a member of the other side. But I’m still interested in what the issues were and what the values were that attracted you to the Republican Party or perhaps think about this 2004 campaign, the reelection of George W.

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Bush. Were there any things about him or the values that he stood for that particularly resonated with you?

01-00:31:26 Deaton: Yeah, I mean, a lot. It’s interesting because I don’t think that I ever really cared that my parents were Republicans. There’s a lot of information out there that suggests that the family impact is real and I agree with that. But I also know how much I disagree with them on so many different issues. Immigration, gay rights. There’s a lot of different issues where I deviate from my parents. So they are conservatives and I’m conservative and they’re Republican, I’m Republican. Both my siblings are Republicans. I don’t know. I just don’t know that that ever had the same impact because I just knew from my own points of view coming at it—in 2004, first time I was old enough to vote, I remember at that age—and this is how I would still feel today—just remember thinking like, “Okay, so George W. Bush—.” And by the way, this is after he’d been president for a term. So maybe some of the criticisms from the first go-around, they’ve obviously evolved, right? Like in 2000 people had been like, “He’s kind of a cowboy. Is he even smart enough to be president?” A lot of those issues had changed and now people were just concerned like, “Is he way too aggressive?” So I never really I guess was as exposed as much to those arguments from 2000 because I was a freshman in high school.

Now as a freshman in college and I thought George W. Bush was totally smart. I still think he is. I think George W. Bush is very intelligent. I think that he is one of the most emotionally intelligent people. I think he has really amazing empathy. I think that for him the compassionate conservatism was real, the desire to help poor people, the desire to reach out to minorities, the desire to reach out to the Latino community, African American. All of that was very, very real for him. So in 2004 I don’t even think that I knew what was going on with the gay marriage ballot measures. So that’s one interesting thing. I knew that all of this anti-gay marriage stuff was happening but at the time I remember also thinking like that’s the whole country. Like gees. I don’t know if we knew in 2004 how much that was being pushed by [Karl] Rove and the others. I don’t think we knew in the moment. I knew it was on the ballot in Ohio, things like that. And I remember being really distressed by that but I also remember not pinning that on Republicans. I remember just thinking like, “Oh, man. That’s rough.” But with George W. Bush, I thought very highly of him as an eighteen-year-old. I thought he was keeping the country safe and I thought that John Kerry was not going to do as good of a job of keeping the country safe. I think that that was my eighteen-year-old motivation more than anything else. I really thought George W. could be trusted to handle what was happening in the Middle East better than John Kerry.

Now, then you would have gotten other issues. Like I am very much a small government guy. I’m a little more, I’d like to think, more consistent about it, of being small government. Like with drug issues, with LGBT issues, with immigration issues I definitely lean more classical liberal or libertarian or

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whatever you want to call it. I’m just more small government. But on a lot of fiscal issues and on a lot of national security issues, I’m a Republican. The thing is, too, I love the center left. And I love working with the center left. I love me some moderate Democrats. Like my business friendly Democrats, like those are my peeps. Like all I want to do is just have like center right people in the majority and like some awesome center left people to work with. In a lot of ways, I was a kid, but like looking back at the way that [President Bill] Clinton governed, there’s so much there to love. Like his personal life was a disaster. And so I also grew up with that and thinking he was just morally depraved and that was definitely like what I would have heard.

Because I knew Rush Limbaugh, I knew all of that kind of stuff. Fox News was around. So I had all of that in the background. And my family, since I was the youngest child, my family all spoke about all this stuff very freely. Like they would have political debates constantly around me from the time I was little. So I was also engaged and getting it from that angle. But, boy, like there is a lot to love about the center left.

But I do feel like the Democratic party, the same way that there is like far right people who have taken the Republican Party, hijacked it, taken it too far, and that gets a ton of media coverage, I don’t think that what gets equal treatment by the media is the extent to which the far left has held the center left hostage and has just taken us in the direction that there’s no spending program that isn’t a sacred cow. And I see it a lot working in the LGBT movement. I’m exposed to some of the social agendas that go so, so, so far to the left. And that’s not where I am. I’m coming at the marriage and the broader LGBT issues from a very small government mindset, not a big government mindset, not a regulate the businesses mindset. And that’s probably always been the biggest challenge for me working with the LGBT community, is that you have so many people who have a tendency to try to make it not a single issue campaign but just to bring in bigger progressive concerns. And that’s hard because I feel very strongly if it’s not a single issue movement then it’s not an LGBT movement, it’s just like a progressive thing. And there are a lot of Republicans who just will never even open the door to being a part of it then. But if you keep it single issue you can build a coalition around that. And I’m as deep into the LGBT movement as you can be and I’m uncomfortable. It’s like whenever I think about Republican lawmakers I’m thinking of it in those terms of, “Well, how are they going to be comfortable?”

So I think that my views have probably not changed too much because I’ve always been very small government on the social issues and very economically conservative and kind of typical Republican on national security and defense issues.

01-00:39:09 Meeker: You have a very clearly articulated perspective and I think a logically consistent perspective as it approaches to your larger center right philosophy

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but also as it relates to LGBT rights and approaching it as a single issue. When did you start to develop this approach, kind of integrating a pro-LGBT perspective within your broader center right perspective?

01-00:39:39 Deaton: Yeah. I think that by 2008, because there were some more anti-gay ballot measures in 2008, in that presidential election.

01-00:39:54 Meeker: You graduated college in 2007, I would guess?

01-00:39:56 Deaton: No, I went to Wheaton College from 2004 to 2008. Then Jay and I, Jay’s my husband, we moved from Chicago to New York City for about a hot minute and then moved to Florida. We basically got sick of Manhattan. Moved to Florida. So that’s where we lived during the 2008 elections. That was the year that the anti-gay marriage ballot measure was on the ballot in Florida. And voted against that. And that was the first time that I actually had the chance to vote on the LGBT issues. And as a twenty-two-year old Republican in Florida—that was weird, I remember thinking, like voting for John McCain, voting against that. And also knowing that it needed 60 percent to pass, because that was the quirk about Florida. To amend their constitution it had to have 60 percent. And knowing from the polling it was on track to get that. And I remember in 2008 thinking like, “This is weird. How many other people are voting for John McCain and then voting no?” And I remember thinking that. But I was also still a kid at twenty-two. So I think that’s the first time that I started to think about the real tension. Because I also think by 2008 is whenever the lines were becoming clearer. I do think in 2004 the dam had not yet broken in the Democratic Party. By 2008 it was starting to change. Obama campaigned as anti-marriage but it was changing. We can all be honest about that. So I think that that was starting to bother me more, that the Republican Party was becoming so clearly defined as the anti-gay party. I remember thinking, too, about John McCain and thinking like why is he being so anti-LGBT?

01-00:42:18 Meeker: Well, and he also had his running mate.

01-00:42:24 Deaton: Who knows if Sarah Palin had even said anything in 2008 about gay people. I think it came up. Remember Cheney in 2004 in his vice presidential debate talked about his lesbian daughter in a televised debate with what’s his face, John Edwards. Right? Two thousand eight it was harder. I really liked John McCain. Liked him, still like him. Really wish he’d been president in 2008. Voted for him enthusiastically over Barack Obama, would do it again. Would do it non-stop. So I’ll be clear on that. Love John McCain.

01-00:43:03 Meeker: And he’s a classic center right Republican.

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01-00:43:06 Deaton: Very classic center right. And he’s also by and large been very good on LGBT issues. He voted for ENDA, which we’ll talk about more. But he still is not there today on the freedom to marry, which is surprising. I still don’t totally get it, and we’ve talked to him about it obviously a ton organizationally.

01-00:43:28 Meeker: And his daughter has been very vocal.

01-00:43:30 Deaton: And his wife. He’s the only person in his family. And this is not totally private, I guess. I’m trying to only talk about things that I’m okay talking about publicly. But I think his personal position and his public position are the same. There definitely are a lot of Republicans who—we could go down the list and name them and be like, “Oh, yeah, privately they’re good but publicly they’re bad.” I’m very much in the mindset like I don’t care what you personally believe. If you won’t say it publicly then who cares? Like I don’t care. I certainly don’t care that your private position is you’ll support my freedom but publicly you’re not able to do it. Then screw you. To John McCain’s credit, his personal position and his public position are the exact same on every single issue. There is no varnish and he believes gay people should be treated fairly. He holds on to kind of the core traditional marriage point of view. But he also supported civil unions very early and very proactively and very publicly and very aggressively compared to most other Republicans. He was way out in front on what he at least believed was legal equality.

And I still remember thinking in 2008, those people who supported civil unions in the Republican Party, and there were a lot of them, that I didn’t understand why they were then not more actively opposing these ballot measures because most of them were banning civil unions. Most of the constitutional amendments weren’t marriage only. They were mostly like everything. All legal recognition. And that nuance was obviously being lost but a lot of it was being lost because Republicans who, at the time, were more progressive and did support legal equality, legal recognition as they viewed it—I would argue it’s not quite still legal equality—but they wanted to do something. They didn’t want to see the discrimination. They wanted gay couples to have protections but they weren’t saying that out loud and they weren’t fighting back against these extreme constitutional amendments. So 2008 is probably the time that it gelled for me that I was like, “Okay, so I’m a loyal Republican but this is a real problem for me because the Republican Party, if anything, is starting to seem more anti-gay, especially since the Democratic Party is now moving and the contrast is becoming clearer.” But I would argue that while the contrast was becoming clearer, I think the party took a right turn from 2008 and then all the way to 2012. I think the Republican Party took a right turn on LGBT issues and now it’s moving back. The Republican Party platform got worse in 2012. We started to win on marriage. I think that caused Republicans to start to take a hard right turn, the fear and the blowback of the fact that we were seeing more success

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legislatively. It wasn’t just coming through the courts anymore, but we were starting to win in legislatures. Still democratic legislatures but you couldn’t just blame activist judges anymore. And the mood of the country was changing and the polling numbers were changing. Unfortunately for the Republican Party, this happens a lot on a lot of issues, is that the polling numbers change and even though the leadership can see like it’s getting more out of step, it caves to this far right base and locks in. The only good thing you can say about it is that at least it’s not unique to LGBT. They’re not just only doing that to LGBT. They’re not singling out LGBT people for cowardice. And the Republican Party is cowardly right now on a lot of issues that publicly it makes no sense. But that’s what happened from 2008 to 2012.

So that’s when I joined the movement and it was kind of in the middle of that that we have the Tea Party wave. New Hampshire Republicans took a gigantic ultra-majority in the legislature. It was three-fourths in both chambers. And by that point Jay and I had moved from South Florida to New Hampshire. We chose New Hampshire. We wanted to live there. We very, very intentionally selected New Hampshire because it was a state that was LGBT friendly, that had marriage. That was a deal maker for us.

Now, I will tell you that we had a pretty ridiculous process for when we decided where we were going to move. We mapped out essentially the entire developed world, had a spreadsheet for everything that we cared about, and crunched the numbers for every US state, every Canadian province, and every other developed country.

01-00:48:31 Meeker: What were the fields? I’m curious. What were the things that you cared about?

01-00:48:33 Deaton: Oh, there were a ton of things. The winners were Alberta, Canada. That was the top Canadian province. New Hampshire in the US. Norway, New Zealand, Iceland, Switzerland were the foreign countries at the top of the list. They were all basically bundled together. We’re looking at quality public education, crime rates, tax rates, cost of living, LGBT friendly, like relationship recognition status for a gay couple, and overall cultural attitudes towards gay people. There’s a lot of other metrics out there. Like the Economist [Economist Magazine] intelligence unit has its thing. There’s so many different other organizations. Mercer. Mercer is like a consulting group that does it. We basically went to all of those others, all the other smart magazines and think tanks who had classified standard of living and things like that, and then just fused it all together, weighted the variables as we thought appropriately, what we cared about, and then New Hampshire came out on top in America. These other foreign countries were very appealing. I think that if we’d had unlimited resources we would have made the jump to New Zealand in 2009. But we didn’t have unlimited resources and we didn’t want to leave America. We didn’t really want to. And we didn’t want to be that far away

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from family. Just for every reason we weren’t really wanting to do that. But it was an instructive and really informative experience and it’s kind of true to form of how we behave, Jay and I, that we would do it that way. But I’m just telling you that, that we have that spreadsheet, because that is what really was going on. But it’s also looking at it pretty simply. It’s easy to explain. We went to the state that was the most gay friendly but is also the most conservative and optimized. Like you can have the huge spreadsheet but it was also, at the end of the day, essentially two variables accounted for it. X- axis, how conservative, Y-axis, how gay friendly. And it is to this day. Like New Hampshire is far and away the best state on those two variables, of being both conservative and gay friendly. Conservative I’m just loosely using. You could say libertarian, you could say whatever. But it’s the “live free or die” state. There’s no income tax. There’s no sales tax. The government’s small. They leave you alone. And it’s also gay friendly. And for a long time it was the state that had marriage that had the biggest Republican tilt. So it’s interesting. And that kind of is a simpler way of explaining why we fell in love with New Hampshire. But there was a deeper process that’s kind of ridiculous.

01-00:51:40 Meeker: What did you do when you first arrived there?

01-00:51:43 Deaton: Well, I was running a business that I had started in college. I wasn’t doing anything political. I had a business that was doing electronic retail. I had run that from 2006 until 2010. We shut that down at the end of 2010. And I was just volunteering at first, getting involved in politics. Just kept getting more and more involved and was active with young Republicans and kept volunteering on campaigns and kept wanting to be involved. And then you have the Tea Party wave in 2010. You have these ultra-majorities of Republicans elected immediately after the marriage equality law had been enacted. Now, this was a national wave election. It had nothing to do with marriage in New Hampshire. But some of the anti-gay people in New Hampshire wanted to sell this narrative, that the reason why the wave in New Hampshire had been so big and had been so historic was that it was a reaction to these crazy Democrats and their radical left-wing social agenda, da-da-da- da.-da-da. So it was early 2011, the new legislature is sworn in.

The legislature’s sworn in and openly saying, “Number one priority is repealing the marriage law.” Well, I viewed it as like a personal threat to why I wanted to be in New Hampshire. And so I was immediately taking it very personally and thinking like, okay, well, what can I do about it. But then also viewed the threat or the concern as pretty minimal because I think, like a lot of other people, just thought like, “It’s New Hampshire. They’re not actually going to do it. This is the fringe.” And we still had a Democratic governor. So it’s like he would veto it. And even though they have these huge majorities, could they actually override his veto? And I went from thinking that was a

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ludicrous proposition to, over a few months, starting to see like, oh, wait, maybe it’s not.

Now, the first conversation that I had with Freedom to Marry was that December immediately after the elections. December 2010. Marc Solomon came up from Freedom to Marry. We had dinner in Concord at the Centennial Hotel. There’s a nice restaurant there. And, of course, I’d never met Marc Solomon. God, 2010. I still feel like I was a baby. I was twenty-three or twenty-four. Such an idiot. I was so stupid.

01-00:54:48 Meeker: I think he only started at Freedom to Marry that January, the month after or something like that.

01-00:54:53 Deaton: Did he start in January ’11?

01-00:54:54 Meeker: Yeah, I think he started January ’11—

01-00:54:58 Deaton: He was starting to build it out?

01-00:54:59 Meeker: In December, obviously. He knew a few months in advance.

01-00:55:03 Deaton: He was getting oriented. That’s interesting. I remember being really impressed by Marc but I also remember thinking, based on the conversation we were having, I was like, “Well, I don’t know if they’ve got New Hampshire figured out.” Because, remember, I’m twenty-four, not really an operative at all. Just like politically enthusiastic. I was under the impression for sure you’ve got the Big Gay Inc. Like there must be just unlimited money. They roll into town and take over the place. Like military precision. I just had all of these impressions. And the media perpetrates a lot of that, left and right. I think everybody in the media thinks like this movement is so much more than it is. I don’t want to be the one to tell the secret.

01-00:56:15 Meeker: Tell the secret.

01-00:56:17 Deaton: That it’s not. It was just Marc. And he was just a guy who was asking me. This is the world that we actually live in. There isn’t this huge network. He just knew that I was an openly gay young Republican who was active in politics. That was my qualification. Because he’d heard about me from Fred Karger because Fred Karger had been up there campaigning, which is insane. Because I didn’t even really know Fred Karger but I was out and especially in 2010 there still weren’t a lot of out gay Republicans. But I was overtly out and

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very involved and that was my qualification. That’s how he knew to talk to me, was that.

01-00:57:14 Meeker: Were you married at that point?

01-00:57:15 Deaton: No, we weren’t. Jay and I just got married actually just in October on our ninth anniversary, which was the ninth anniversary of our first kiss, which was our junior year of college. So it was nine years in October. So at this point we’ve been together for years. I guess at that point four. And it’s just so funny. I’m confident in my qualifications and my skill set, but what I’m telling you is I was a twenty-four-year-old and I was openly gay and I was a Republican and I was politically enthusiastic. So I was there is really what I’m telling you. I was there. And so Marc and I spoke. And I told him, I was like, “I don’t think they’re really going to do anything with this. I think that if they do it they’re not doing it this year. They don’t have their act together. And from the looks of it, I don’t think y’all have your act together. I don’t think anybody has their act together.” Like no one has their act together. They passed the law and then they thought it was done and then all of a sudden maybe it wasn’t. And I remember distinctly telling him, too, I was like, “I’m out, proud. I am down for the revolution. I am not prepared to be an operative and certainly not an operative for LGBT issues.” I was afraid that that would pigeonhole me somehow—and this is all so stupid in hindsight. But like twenty-four-year-old me is just thinking like, “I’ll lose credibility. Everybody will think all I care about is just this gay stuff. It’s identity politics. I’m single issue. People will think that I’m really shallow, that I have no depth. Am I even really Republican?” Blah, blah, blah. Like I’m just going through all of these things that actually don’t matter, didn’t matter, but were the fears of a twenty-four- year-old who’s trying to figure out his career. And if I want to work in politics, is this what I want to do?

And also they weren’t sure what they were doing yet for Freedom to Marry. They knew they were going to defend the law. They knew they were trying to figure out how to do that. There was a lot of other drama, I think, just in the state of New Hampshire with the turmoil going on. There wasn’t a clear plan. There wasn’t a clear in-state organization. There wasn’t really a leader. So all of that would end up having to be built to protect this law. But as of December 2010, and now that’s interesting to now that Marc technically didn’t start until January ’11. As of December 2010 nobody really knew was the law in jeopardy. Like what was the risk? How real was it? And then nobody really knew like, okay, well, and if it’s a real risk how are you going to stop it because they do have a 75 percent supermajority. You could have won over thirty house Republicans. Now, this is another thing, just to be very clear. It’s a huge legislature. Biggest legislature in the country. One of the biggest democratic bodies on the planet. It is far and away the most representative legislative body per capita. Each representative is representing about 3,300

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souls, so there’s 400 of them. And so you could have won over, like you could have picked off thirty Republicans, and still not had enough to stop a veto override. And that’s what people were worried about, is like, okay, half a dozen to a dozen Republicans up to that point had voted affirmatively for civil unions and then marriage. And you had those people, there were holdovers. The legislature changes a ton, that’s another thing, because it’s so big. There’s a huge turnover regardless of the elections. Just like people retire, people don’t run again, whatever. But in the middle of all of this was the very real concern that, yeah, they’d have to override the governor.

At first I will tell you there was also a little concern about Governor Lynch, who was a very conservative Democrat and it had taken work to get him there in the first place. The people who were worried about that, I thought that was silly. I was never worried about Governor Lynch. Once he got there, he’s there. He’s not going to have the law he signed a year ago be rolled back. So I wasn’t concerned about that. I figured we had the veto on lock.

It was a matter of sustaining his veto, which meant getting a third plus one of one of the two chambers. But just because of the majorities it meant getting a lot of Republicans and it meant getting more Republicans to take the pro- LGBT position than had ever happened in the country’s history. And not just by a little bit but by a ton. It meant pulling of Republicans at a level and at a success rate that, until we ended up doing it, hadn’t happened. Right. And that’s what made it so scary. But I was looking at it and telling Marc and basically saying, “At least I know they don’t have their act together. They’re not going to be able to get this done this session.” They’re openly saying by this point that they’re not trying to do it in the first year. And so there was time.

I’m wanting to be very honest. I was not ready to even do the work and I was very uncomfortable. I was afraid. Not afraid of the work, afraid of what it would do to me personally. So that was the first time that I’d ever been faced with a question of how do I now work on this? How do I, as a very pro-gay Republican, as an out Republican in a party that is trending toward being what appears to be more LGBT, how do I actually do something about it and am I ready to do something about it? And the first time that I was asked I was not.

Now time passes. And the lines become a little bit clearer, the threat becomes more defined, and so by that summer—I’m kind of glossing over. But I was pretty tormented over those six months of trying to figure out how I can be helpful, because I wanted to be helpful. So how do I be helpful? How do I resolve these issues that I’m dealing with internally? And it was summertime and I don’t remember exactly when. I could look at a calendar and figure out exactly when. But it was sometime later in the year, summer-ish, that we went on a family vacation with Jay. Basically my in-laws. They weren’t yet my in- laws but they were my in-laws. We went on a vacation with my in-laws, because we’d been out to the families. This was the other thing. It wasn’t an

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issue of being out, it was an issue of like I just had this hang-up that I didn’t want to be pigeonholed. I guess that’s the right term. But that was really a big part of it, is I just didn’t want to be defined as like all I was was just like a gay Republican. That was at the time really important to me. Because I was out. I don’t even totally understand it. Maybe I need some more psychoanalysis. Because I was out and I was like, “Well, isn’t that enough?” Like, okay, I have to do more? And then it was over the course of the rest of the winter and the spring that I started to feel like, okay, actually, I do have to do more. Like if I actually care about these things, if I do care about the Republican party and being conservative and I do care about being a proud gay man and I care about my rights and the rights of other people, then I’m going to have to do something about it. I think what I was missing wasn’t the rational or the logical, it wasn’t my head space that was unresolved, it was more like my heart or my gut. It was like I didn’t have the motional click yet. And that’s really where the hang-up was. Because this wasn’t rational. It was so irrational. It was irrational even for a twenty-four-year-old. It was stupid. And I think the explanation is that it was just fear. Right? Like it was a tough time. Republicans weren’t moving very much. And I never moved quickly, so I didn’t want to move quickly.

01-01:06:01 Meeker: So you had mentioned on our phone call that Marc was in town and—

01-01:06:08 Deaton: Okay. Well, so this is what happened. So we have this family vacation and that’s where I think the emotions clicked for me, that Jay’s family has just always been so great and we had such a good time. We were down on the Cape. And it was just a lovely family experience. And I don’t know. I came out of that basically just being like, “You know, like screw it. What am I even worried about?” is kind of where I came from finally. I think I finally realized that I was being stupid and that I was just being afraid. And that I didn’t need to be and that I had a huge support network and blah, blah, blah, blah. I just finally got myself emotionally resolved. And it took a few months to get from that place, from December to the summertime. So I call Marc.

01-01:07:94 Meeker: Do you mind if I interrupt? Not to psychoanalyze too much but we’re kind of going in this direction. I wonder if part of the struggle that you were having had to do with recognizing that by joining this battle, two key parts of you would be in conflict, as well. And what if both sides didn’t win? So what if one side won and one side lost? That would be a very scary place to be in, especially if it was something that you became very invested in. So what if the Tea Party won and therefore kind of took control of your Republican party and the gay side lost? That would have been an existentially very difficult place to be in, I suppose.

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01-01:08:07 Deaton: Oh, it would have been. And, by the way, it is worth noting another factor here was that since then I’ve become just deeply ingrained and I’m part of the LGBT political community in New Hampshire and I really love the fact that the LGBT community in New Hampshire is very non-partisan. The political community I’m talking about. But at the time it was not as healthy as it is today. And at the time there were some really angry partisan LGBT activists that I did not want to work with. And I shared that concern with Marc. I was just like, “Well, first off, we’re not going to win with these people and I don’t know how to work with these.” Like they’re so rabid, they’re so vicious. And that is another thing, that I guess it’s just worth—you are right. It’s that conflict. I was afraid that some of the other LGBT activists wouldn’t accept working with a Republican. And I had plenty of evidence to suggest that that was the case, that they weren’t ready to have Republicans coming in to the LGBT tent. And so I was just afraid. And not really sure of what I could do to be helpful. And as it became clear that the situation was dire, that this repeal effort was moving forward and had momentum, that I had nothing to be afraid of, that the LGBT community in New Hampshire and outside of New Hampshire was really stepping up and wanting to have an unprecedented campaign. That was the other thing. The tides were turning, that people saw that this was a serious threat and were ready to dig in.

So I called Marc. Got back from the vacation, called Marc. And this is, I think, not to be mystical, but I think it’s awesome. And I hadn’t been in communication with Marc since we’d met for dinner at the Centennial. But I called him out of the blue. It was just like, “Hey, I’ve been thinking and I really, really do want to find a way to help.” And then Marc was like, “Oh, well, I’m in New Hampshire.” And he was back for the first time since the last time that we’d met and it was just perfect. And we met within hours. Essentially within hours I was going to be working on the campaign, which was called Standing Up for New Hampshire Families.

My role started out fairly undefined. It continued to be essentially undefined. It was just anything Republican. Lobbying, political. Like just making Standing Up for New Hampshire Families work with the Republicans. And I worked really closely with Liz Purdy. She’s like a Democratic goddess in New Hampshire. One of my best friends to this day that I made. Like so lucky to be able to have worked for her, to have learned from her. She’s amazing. And I think understood the situation, the political situation we were facing so well.

Marc was like, “Okay, we’re doing this. Now you need to meet Liz and you all got to start figuring this out.” And met Liz and she just was so great. She empowered me. She was just like, “What do we need to do? What do we have to do to stop this? What do you need? How are you going to do it?” Da, da, da, da. And we just started to figure it out. And just like every step of the way Liz was working with the Democrats to keep them strong, to have a unified effort,

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and then I was working with the Republicans to just try to get the votes. And it was just that. It was as simple as that. Like we were going to build our veto sustaining minority. We were going to build our one-third plus one in the house. And that was the goal. And that was very well-defined. Even by August that was the goal, was one-third plus one.

01-01:12:44 Meeker: So operationally and financially what was the relationship between Standing Up for New Hampshire Families and Freedom to Marry?

01-01:12:52 Deaton: Okay. So Standing Up for New Hampshire Families incorporated as its own non-profit. So it was its own 501(c)(4). There were a few organizations who helped start it. It wasn’t just Freedom to Marry. But I also want to be very clear that Freedom to Marry was the catalyst. Freedom to Marry provided the funding. But we had partner organizations like GLAD. Not double A GLAD, single A GLAD in Boston, which is how I got to know those folks, and HRC.

01-01:13:38 Meeker: I feel like you want to say something.

01-01:13:39 Deaton: Maybe we’ll get to that. But HRC I would say was close to being a silent partner. It took me a few months to even figure out that HRC was involved. I didn’t even know. I knew that basically Marc was the boss. That’s what I knew. And that he apparently had another boss. And I didn’t even meet Evan until probably after the entire campaign was done. I mean, I wouldn’t have met Evan.

01-01:14:15 Meeker: What did you know of Freedom to Marry up to that point?

01-01:14:17 Deaton: Almost nothing. Almost nothing. I knew that they were a campaign, not an organization. I knew that. Like it was the campaign to win marriage nationwide and I knew that they were big, or that was my perception. My perception was that they were big, that they were New York based. But that’s all I knew. And then I got to know Marc, and Marc and I hit it off. Love Marc. And that’s the thing. I was so lucky to have Marc be the person. Because the same dynamic that I was talking about with Liz was the same dynamic with Marc. People were there who wanted to win, who weren’t afraid to work in a bipartisan manner, who weren’t afraid to try new things and test new things, who weren’t afraid to take some risks. I just can’t say enough good things about Marc Solomon or Liz Purdy. Because Marc’s a Democrat: I was impressed like so quickly, just like that they were willing to do what it took to protect LGBT people, even if it made them personally a little politically uncomfortable to like have these conversations with Republicans. But also they were trusting and they understood that we needed to build a team that was like Republicans talking to Republicans. And that was the model that we

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started to build in New Hampshire that is something that actually has spread now from New Hampshire. But that’s where we developed this grassroots Republican model. At the end of the day you need Republicans lobbying Republicans. You have to have Republicans having the grassroots conversations with other Republicans if you’re going to change their mind. It can’t be coming from a liberal. Can’t be coming from a progressive. Has to be coming from a person that they think is a peer.

01-01:16:24 Meeker: How much did you know of the somewhat similar campaign that Marc ran in Massachusetts to preserve marriage there?

01-01:16:32 Deaton: Nothing. Now I know a lot more. Now I know about it and needing the votes to stop the constitutional amendment. But at the time I didn’t know. And there they needed 75 percent because I guess you only needed a quarter to reverse something.

01-01:16:51 Meeker: Yeah, or to get it on the ballot.

01-01:16:53 Deaton: To refer it to the ballot. Now I know all about it. There’s similarities, of course. That was earlier and it was after a court ruling. This also was a Democratic legislature in Massachusetts. But the work that they did there was unprecedented in its own right. But I knew nothing about it then. I didn’t even know all of the details until Marc’s book came out.

01-01:17:26 Meeker: So it sounds like the strategy that you were pursuing here, as you mention, was Republicans talking to Republicans on a grassroots level. How was this operationalized? How did this become methodology?

01-01:17:40 Deaton: We put in place a huge field team for New Hampshire. It was huge. We had a huge volunteer operation that the field team was managing of doing personal phone calls. The phone banking strategy was really, for the time, innovative, that we were only calling into Republican and Independent households. We had a voter model that we were using that the field director and I kind of jury rigged using—we had an interesting methodology that I actually don’t want to talk about publicly. We had a methodology that worked out really, really well and we were able to, with a very high confidence level, predict who the Republicans and Independents were that were in favor of same-sex marriage. So that model, by the way, has grown and is a key part of the work that we still do.

But the first time that we started to work with Republicans was in New Hampshire. That we were doing this constituent level, like cold calling modeled Republicans. And this was like the very first iteration of the model

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and it was extremely basic but it was very effective. And we used that with great success to find the voters in each of these districts. And remember, like these are small districts. Like you might have a very small universe of even potential people to call. So having a good sense of like, “Well, who do you call?” was so valuable. And we had a really smart field director, her name’s Liz Wester, she still lives in New Hampshire. She’s also still a friend. And the field team was able to then turn on all of these grassroots contacts. And I would help do calls from time-to-time and you’d talk to a person and they’d be like, “Oh, Representative so and so. That’s my neighbor. I’m going to go knock on their door right now. What are they thinking?” That’s New Hampshire. And that was not uncommon either, that you would talk to people and they’d be like, “Oh, they live across the street.” “Oh, that rep? Oh, yeah. That’s like my cousin.” Everybody’s related. Everybody’s a neighbor.

And so we had a lot of people coming into the phone banks as volunteers who were Republicans. And then that was important because our volunteers were trained on certain scripts that really emphasized the conservative values. So as soon as you got them on the phone the constituent is getting the conservative pro-marriage message and then they’re being encouraged immediately to talk to their legislature and we would patch them through. Like in real time. If a person agreed to talk to their lawmaker we would say, “Okay, well, hold the line. I’m connecting you to their home phone number right now.” And, remember, there’s 400 members of the house. So we’re not calling all 400 members. We’ve defined our universe of who it is that we need to talk to to get our one-third plus one. But you don’t want to call them every night. You don’t want to give them 800 calls in a night. It was a really good system, that it was set up that we’d get like five or six contacts in in a night and then move on to the next one. And so it was just constantly recycling back through. And we were running these phone banks all over the state at the university towns and in the larger cities. The level of real constituent contact, not stupid petitions, not emails, actual conversations that we triggered with these lawmakers I think was an underpinning factor of how we ended up moving so many lawmakers. Because they could not escape their constituents. And this was just one part of it.

We also had different meetings that were being set up. We had different roundtable sessions. You’re asking how it was operationalized, so I’m just trying to go through it. We were direct mailing the members of the legislature, treating them like they were their own village of people the way that you will direct mail voters. We were basically treating the lawmakers like a little village of 400 voters. Oh, and the senators. So 424. And mailing them. We did a mailer featuring Dick Cheney. We did a mailer featuring Clint Eastwood. We had a whole direct mail strategy for the legislature. We were flying in people like Ken Mehlman and Margaret Hoover to do little briefings with the lawmakers. We were doing polling. We had George W. Bush’s pollster do a very in-depth study of Republican attitudes in New Hampshire and just pushed that. Any mailer we did, any flyer that we did, we were just always

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pushing these numbers. And using basically every other poll that would come out. We’re just like inundating people with the data, which was helpful. And we were doing it in certain ways, knowing which lawmakers were more interested in the emotional arguments, which lawmakers were more interested in the philosophical arguments. What does this actually mean philosophically? We knew who were the more libertarian faction, who was the more just old- school Yankee liberal Republican faction. We were deputizing lawmakers within those factions and empowering them to be leaders and whips with their colleagues.

01-01:23:54 Meeker: How were you gathering this intelligence?

01-01:23:56 Deaton: Directly with direct lobbying and we had a contract lobbying firm that was involved. We had a pretty healthy database that we were using to track any information that we got back from constituents. So they would have a call and we would encourage them to call us back if they learned anything. And this was all being logged. There was no piece of information that didn’t go into the database. And so we could see a report on any of the 424 legislators at any time. We would see exactly everything we knew about them and exactly where we knew they were and to the extent that if we didn’t know for a fact where they were we had all of these other variables that we could use to predict where they were. And this is interesting. Pretty quickly, I would say by November, we knew who our people were to get to one-third plus one in the house to sustain the governor’s veto. We didn’t know how reliable it could be. This is just the evidence that we had, the conversations we had, the commitments we had from enough Republican lawmakers that they were absolutely against repeal. We had built our one-third plus one coalition but had really reached that and were hitting a wall. And we were only just at that level. So, by the way, another way to think of this is 134. That’s the actual number of one-third plus one for this universe. We were kind of working in a range of like 140. That was pretty scary. Because by November, your session’s resuming in January. You’re asking how we knew. It’s just because every single lobbyist conversation is coming back in. Every single peer-to- peer conversation. We have reps talking to reps, coming back and telling us here’s where they are, here’s what they’re worried about, here’s what they need to hear, here’s who they need to hear from. Do they need to hear from a faith leader, do they need to hear from a nationally known Republican? What’s going to move the dial? Volume of calls? Quantity? Quality?

01-01:26:28 Meeker: How were you making those determinations though?

01-01:26:30 Deaton: One-by-one.

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01-01:26:31 Meeker: Yeah. But how would you know that one legislature would respond to a faith leader, another one would be influenced by perhaps a national political figure?

01-01:26:44 Deaton: By asking the questions. Again, going through the universe of the legislators who we knew that we needed to win over and just going through the list every day, like where they are today. What’s their personality? What’s their profile? How do they vote on other issues? We had modeled the lawmakers based on their vote profiles. The thing that’s hard about that is that you only had one session’s worth of votes. But, by the way, you rack up enough votes, even in just one session, you can get a pretty sophisticated picture of where are people at across the spectrum of these 400 members. You can get a pretty clear sense even from just one session’s worth of roll call votes.

01-01:27:36 Meeker: Was this data accumulated qualitatively or quantitatively?

01-01:27:40 Deaton: Both.

01-01:27:41 Meeker: Both?

01-01:27:42 Deaton: It was mostly driven on the quantitative side. Most everything that we did had to be measured. But we had a system that whatever information that we had coming in and whatever we knew about them, we would all, at the end of the day, have a personal conversation to kind of like call the question. So like is this person with us or against us? Like given the preponderance of the evidence, and they’re going to have to vote, is it a yes vote or a no vote? But that’s a numerical scale that we use. Because you don’t want to have a yes vote. You can’t track it as whether they’re yes or no because you actually don’t know because there’s different motions and you just actually need to track are they with you or are they against you. So it’s a numerical scale.

01-01:28:30 Meeker: To what extent, once you got people on the “with you” side, was there concern that there would be backsliding?

01-01:28:39 Deaton: Oh, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You had to recheck.

01-01:28:40 Meeker: Because clearly the other side was—

01-01:28:41 Deaton: Yes, you had to reconfirm. We had to constantly be going back, just shuffling through our friends, seeing had there been a change. So everyone was on their own schedule of when they needed to be checked in with. There are definitely

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some people who you knew were never going to leave you. But we checked that, as well, of who did you need to check back in, who was still a little shaky. But we were pretty serious. Once you called them a friend, we didn’t really get them to that point of we thought they were shaky. We would have categorized them differently.

01-01:29:15 Meeker: For the people who were in the changeable middle, if you will, what were the main concerns that you were coming across? How were they presenting their concerns to you and then how would you address those concerns?

01-01:29:30 Deaton: I think as far as the people who were persuadable, that’s who you’re asking what they were concerned about?

01-01:29:45 Meeker: Yeah.

01-01:29:45 Deaton: They were concerned about really big picture questions. It was never very specific. It was always very just global, like what does this mean for society, what does it mean for religious freedom? Does it change my church at all? That sort of stuff. Very impersonal and very nonspecific. It was all about getting people comfortable with also what was already happening in the state. People were already getting married. And so that was the process of persuading the individuals, was really bringing them back to what was happening on the ground, the reality of marriage taking place in New Hampshire. The several hundred couples who had already gotten married. I don’t want to oversimplify it but that was the biggest part of it, was getting people just comfortable.

Because the people who were unpersuadable, like we didn’t even talk to them. We had a clear number in our whip count of people who we knew we would never even talk to. So when I was talking about all the direct mail, we wouldn’t even mail their house. They never got a single call from us. Our field team knew. And that was another thing. We had a very unified effort. So like our field team knew who they were. Like they wouldn’t approach them. We knew that there were a hundred members or so that for our purposes, they never existed. And I think that that was really smart because we didn’t inflame them. And to a large extent they didn’t even know what was going on as a result, because it was so targeted and because we had an individualized plan for every single lawmaker. If they were on our plan to be contacted, like they were feeling it.

And this was a really funny thing, too. There were some people who were our really strongest Republicans who, again, we never bothered with them. We didn’t take them off the mailing list the way we did the crazy people, but the allies, we never wasted time doing calls for them. I remember one of them

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was like, “All these people are getting calls. How come I’m not getting any calls?” Like, “Do you need calls? Do you want me to have volunteers like waste their time on you because I thought we were good.” And they’re like, “Oh, okay. Yeah, sure.” But otherwise the people in the middle needed to be comforted by facts.

And that was another thing that I think our campaign was really good about, was being very just level-headed, very rational, and very straightforward. Like not trying to overhype it, not trying to oversell it. Just letting the facts and letting married couples speak for themselves, and letting the Republican voices go forward and letting people tell, what at Freedom to Marry, we call kind of a journey story of, “I used to be more concerned and at first I didn’t know but then I learned and now I’m okay with it.” That journey relative to marriage is the thing that sells the best with middle voters.

01-01:33:22 Meeker: How do you introduce that narrative concept so that they can adopt it for themselves?

01-01:33:33 Deaton: The Republican lawmakers who had been in the legislature and had voted no, who had not voted to enact marriage equality, those were our people. Those were our messengers. They were older, more Yankee, old-school Republicans that had not voted for marriage equality a year earlier. They were the messengers who ended up changing everything because they were the ones saying, “I didn’t know much about this issue. I don’t know a lot of gay people. I voted no but the fact is marriage is here now and people are getting married and everything I’ve seen is that’s wonderful. And I don’t know why we would ever change that. So I didn’t necessarily vote to bring it here but it is here and this is a good thing and we need to leave it alone.” That was the winning message. And I know that it’s not as affirmational, right, as we would want it to be. We did have Republicans down on the House floor crying and like baring their hearts, espousing the freedom and liberty of every LGBT person in New Hampshire. And that was great. And you want that message out there.

Fast forwarding, the reason why we ended up winning on the very first debate vote [interviewee added: Yes, the first debate of the bill became the first and only voting action on the bill – although there were a series of about ten votes in total – our position prevailed on each vote], and it never even got to a veto, and the reason why we won a majority of house Republicans and every Democrat but one was because of that comfort that we created. That it was okay. We acknowledged the conflict that people themselves felt internally and said that’s okay. Like you can feel that. We’re validating people’s concerns. We’re not dismissing them. We’re not saying, “Oh, you’re a hater. You’re a bigot. We weren’t doing that.” And that was, I think, sophisticated for our campaign to differentiate between the truly far, far, far right, the truly anti-gay people versus the people who were concerned and who were thoughtful and

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were respectful and who had just voted no months earlier. Like if we didn’t reach out to them and help them along their own personal journey—because this issue is very personal for every single lawmaker I’ve ever dealt with, because I’ve lobbied Republican lawmakers in how many states. It’s ridiculous how many Republicans now I’ve talked to about marriage and every single one of them, everyone evaluates it personally. It’s not a tax issue, it’s not even like some other social issues. It’s personal. They want to feel personally right about what they’re doing on this issue. The messaging that we developed in the New Hampshire campaign also on this: like the journey message kind of for Republicans grew out of that process. But if we hadn’t been able to reach out to those people who still felt a little uncomfortable and let them be a little uncomfortable, because that was another thing.

The campaign that we ran, Standing Up for New Hampshire Families, like just the name alone, right, it’s very non-gay. It’s very approachable. It’s almost universal, right. We wanted the campaign to be a place where non-traditional allies could feel very comfortable. And a lot of that is something that I was pushing because I knew like Republicans aren’t going to want to be involved with something that’s all about rainbow flags. They don’t want to come in with equal signs everywhere. They don’t. They’re not going to be comfortable. But talking about this with families and constitutional rights and personal liberty, like that’s where we need to go. And that has also caught on now in other campaigns that we’ve seen. The opportunities to anchor ourselves a little bit closer to the center of the political spectrum and make it that much more welcoming to unconventional and unusual allies.

01-01:38:01 Meeker: How did you help people along on this journey? What kind of things were you doing, things were you saying that were allowing them to move from that point of discomfort to—

01-01:38:12 Deaton: We were showing journey stories. It wasn’t that overt. But we were putting people out there. I was mentioning the mail program. The people who we were featuring, the way that they would talk about it was as the journey. And so what people were basically seeing, is they were seeing other individuals say what they were thinking. Like I at first didn’t know as much about this but now I know and I’m okay with it. You have to model it for them. So that’s all we were doing. Every step of the way was modeling the journey. And then, in very clear-eyed terms, just putting out the facts. So we had like a TV ad for New Hampshire that we ran and we put some serious money behind it, which was Republicans, Democrats, and Independents all saying that marriage was here and that in New Hampshire we don’t take rights away. So we leaned very heavily into that rights based argument, and that you can’t take away people’s freedom, you can’t take away people’s rights, and that also really resonated with Republicans. Again, kind of going at them, of saying, again, “It’s the journey. It’s here. Your question that you’re being faced with is not do you

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support marriage equality, the question is are you willing to take it away from people?” And we leaned into that. We didn’t want it to become a vote on are you voting to enact marriage equality. We wanted it to become a vote on are you really going to take it away from people. I can’t remember now exactly but at the time we had the number of people who’d already gotten married and we were pushing that on people and trying to humanize it in those two different ways, of both we’re humans, we’re all on a journey, so modeling that but also reminding them of the human beings. And I think that that campaign told a lot of stories of the couple’s themselves. At first I remember us kind of being a little uncomfortable, like should we be that heavy on having gay couples speak for themselves or should we have other people kind of speak on their behalf? And we ended up doing both. We ended up just, I think, getting enough into it that we saw that it was very persuasive in humanizing the issue and making it personal and making it relatable. The evidence bears it out that it must have been irresistible because these Republicans ended up feeling like, “Well, we can’t take away rights. And I’m still not sure that I would have voted to enact it but I’m certainly not going to take it away. And Gary and Bob live in my town and I wouldn’t want to do that to them.” So that’s, in a nutshell, how you could end up getting a majority of the Republicans to vote to keep the law. Like that’s what their mindset was. It was very grounded, I would say.

01-01:41:30 Meeker: Can we talk about how this whole process was funded, how this campaign was funded?

01-01:41:34 Deaton: Freedom to Marry. They had their own supporters.

01-01:41:42 Meeker: What was your role there? Did you have a title?

01-01:41:45 Deaton: I never really had a title. I was just like Republican. Campaign Republican.

01-01:41:52 Meeker: Chief Executive Republican. [laughter]

01-01:41:54 Deaton: Yeah. Here’s what I would say in hindsight. Liz Purdy, campaign manager. Tyler Deaton, deputy campaign manager. And then we just had a whole bunch of consultants and lobbyists and a field team. I never really had a title. But the work that I was doing was just to work on the Republicans. That was it. It was just like how do we win over Republicans. So Freedom to Marry had gotten support specifically to prioritize New Hampshire and prioritize this Republican engagement. They also had a consultant that they brought on named Jeff Cook, now Jeff Cook McCormac, who was my predecessor as the head of AUF. He now works for Dan Loeb at Third Point, which is a hedge

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fund in New York City. Dan Loeb is one of the major funders and supporters of American Unity Fund and American Unity PAC.

At this time, whenever New Hampshire was getting underway, he was in New York and helping on the New York campaign. But then he was able to be a huge resource in helping us understand like—whenever we needed help nationally from like Ken Mehlman or Margaret Hoover or people like that, Jeff was the one who was making those connections. And Jeff’s a great lobbyist and a really smart strategist and he helped us a ton working with the contract lobbying firm and really refining what our strategies were for the lawmaker outreach, whenever we were doing that lobbying, like the lobbying conversations. And we had a couple of communications consultants. I’m mentioning all of this media work that we were doing. The TV campaign was paid media. But most of what we were doing was earned media. So it was featuring the stories that I’ve been talking about and getting those placed as stories all across the state, making it very localized with all the small town newspapers that we have in New Hampshire. We have our own little media culture. So that’s why you would need a couple communications people. And then the field team. [break in audio]

And what I will tell you is that New Hampshire was a make or break moment for the LGBT movement. And I felt that a few times. That the pressure from Marc, the pressure from Freedom to Marry, that we have to win. It’ll kill the movement if we lose, if we lose marriage, if it’s repealed. There was a sense that was in the movement that I think is accurate that it would have been a momentum breaker. In the same sense, if we could win and demonstrate that kind of success with Republicans, that it would be a real momentum booster. The stakes were very high in whether or not we could hold on to New Hampshire’s marriage law.

And that’s sort of a theme of where I’ve been fortunate in the movement to work in what I think is at least a section of the movement that is empowering, that is missional focused. It’s not broader. It’s not a progressive thing. It’s a single-issue mission, to advance LGBT freedom. And in this little corner of the movement it’s always been empowering and I think it starts at the very, very top. That we’re very clear about the mission. We raise the resources that we think we need to be successful in that mission, and then from that point forward it is like go and do the work and win and then come back. But like go do the work. And you’re the expert, so go do it. And that is very much Freedom to Marry’s approach. And then that’s Marc’s personal approach. That was Liz Purdy’s personal approach. And I believe that on my better days, right, it’s my personal approach.

I have been inculcated into this concept of what is our political theory of changes. You don’t micromanage. You set the vision. You’re aggressive. And then you hire the people and you find the people and you give them the resources to go and do and go and implement. And I think that that’s another

32 thing that Freedom to Marry has to be credited for in the movement of being an organization that has always been empowering. Like whenever Freedom to Marry has done all of this work in the states, they leave something behind of value. They’re helping the locals step up. Like they want locals in leadership. They want to empower new allies. They want to make new friends. That’s why I think Freedom to Marry has been so successful as an organization, because it’s empowering. And I think that we wouldn’t have been successful in New Hampshire if it had been kind of run from out of state, top down. It wouldn’t have worked. So I think they deserve a lot of credit for that being their approach everywhere and that’s I think why they’ve been able to be so successful, by not trying to be top down and not trying to be micro-managerial, but instead being empowering and adding then real value. The experts who’ve been involved at Freedom to Marry, like Thalia Zepatos, who’s like the message guru. Amy Mello, who before she was at Freedom to Marry, was working in some of the state campaigns, but just doing the very best fieldwork in the movement, having the very best digital strategies in the LGBT movement. This is not to diminish my praise for anyone else, but the digital team is probably like the best digital team in politics. Period. So they just brought so many resources to bear. But anchoring that, and the reason why they had those resources was because there was a core group of Republican funders in New York City led and convened by Paul Singer, who said, “We’re going to win in New York, we’re going to win in New Hampshire,” and then we did and then we did, and then they were like, “This is great. We’re going to do even more and we’re starting American Unity Fund and American Unity PAC.

The experiences of New York and New Hampshire, they’re different experiences, very different experiences. But both of them were premised on the idea of like we have to work with Republicans. We have to work with Republicans, we have to win with Republicans, we have to develop some new strategies to allow that to be successful. And out of those two states basically came a whole new mindset that not only did Freedom to Marry carry forward into new states where we were working legislatively or at the ballot, but then AUF coming online as its own organization kind of became the repository of how could you operationalize the Republican engagement nationwide in more states, at more than one at a time, and in Congress. But then AUF was on the marriage work supplementing what Freedom to Marry was already doing in a lot of ways, both from a funding perspective but also from a strategic and a lobbying perspective. That’s where I was able to then personally go and have all these conversations.

I was thinking this morning about this and I would have to think about it a little bit more. I don’t know if I’ve talked personally with every Republican lawmaker who’s voted for marriage since 2011 but I think I might have. That is a lot of people. I wish it was more people. But AUF then dug deep very quickly into getting to Delaware, Rhode Island, Minnesota. All of these states. Hawaii. Working with Republicans there, building on what we learned,

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learning even more new lessons. But in rapid order after the ballot measures in 2012 and after we went four for four there was a ton more state work to do. And in some of those cases required Republican votes to be successful. In some states Republican help was nice to have, in some states it was more of a must have, like Minnesota.

[break in audio; extraneous side conversation deleted]

A key thing, of course, is that after these Republicans vote to allow marriages to continue in New Hampshire, there’s an effort, right, to ensure that these people are not voted out of office.

01-01:57:25 Deaton: Oh, yeah.

01-01:57:27 Meeker: That they’re not punished. And this also happens in Minnesota and this is, I think, a big part of what American Unity Fund did, right?

01-01:57:35 Deaton: We protect our friends.

01-01:57:37 Meeker: You protect your friends. So when you were having the initial conversations with people in advance of the vote what was the conversation like? Were they saying, “Listen, I’m going to need help in my reelection?”

01-01:57:51 Deaton: You can’t really talk about it. First off, there’s certain levels of what’s even an appropriate conversation, right? And so clearly different lobbyists have different styles. My style has always been here’s the information available in the public domain. There’s a PAC that exists. The very first super-PAC started in New Hampshire was this super-PAC. It’s insane. The first super-PAC in New Hampshire was a Republican oriented gay rights super-PAC. And we made that very loud and very public, and that it was well resourced.

01-01:58:33 Meeker: What was the name of that again?

01-01:58:33 Deaton: New Hampshire Republicans for Freedom and Equality. And political dollars in New Hampshire go a long, long way. Like we don’t have a lot of super- PACS. Now that they’re legal there’s still not really super-PACs in New Hampshire. So having this was very big news. Having it then have over a quarter of a million dollars is just unheard of. And it was like the Death Star. It was just sitting there. You didn’t have to talk about it. Like it’s in the news, it’s there. People can interpret from that what they will, right, because you can’t promise anything. You’re not going to promise anything. But you’re making this statement that there’s support. And maybe there’s fear for people

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who don’t do the right thing. So I’ve always been very clear with the lawmakers that if they vote for the freedom to marry it carries some political risk. And we walk them through that. We’re like, “Here’s the realities. Okay. There’s a certain segment of the population that will be angry. It’s much, much smaller than you think. There’s a certain segment of the population that will be very, very happy. It’s not as big as we’d like it to be in a Republican primary. Then you’ve got all of these people, they’re going to vote in the Republican primary and this is not a top three, top five, top ten issue for them. And then here are the strategies that we encourage you to pursue to continue to win their vote.” And we walk them through that. We talk to them about how many hundreds of Republican lawmakers across the country have now voted for this. We tell them that of those individuals, this is the percentage that have actually faced a primary challenge. This is even narrower, the ones who faced a primary challenge because of their vote on this issue, because other people take other controversial issues that can draw a primary. Labor votes, whatever. But these are the ones. And we’ve always, I think to our credit as an organization, been very honest and forthright with these lawmakers, so that we basically help them assess the risk that they face.

The conversation that I’m having with Republicans is, “Do you want to vote for this?” Because if you don’t want to then like let’s not waste each other’s time. But that’s where we’ve been successful, is finding the people who are open, who want to have the conversation. And if they want to vote for it, those political risks, they don’t even factor in. If they want to vote yes and they want to enact the freedom to marry, they are throwing caution to the wind. That’s what I’ve seen systematically. The number of lawmakers we’re talking about, this isn’t a big enough universe to be scientific, but all I can tell you is every single one of them has known full-well that there could be a political consequence and every single one of them has said, “Why do I care? I’m going to do what I want to do on this issue.” Now, then, that doesn’t mean that they don’t want to be reelected and that doesn’t mean that we don’t also want them to be reelected. That doesn’t mean that we all don’t care as a movement to see them be successful. It does no one any good for a pro-freedom Republican to then be targeted for being pro-freedom and to be removed from office. It does no one any favors. It sets the movement back, it sets the Republican—it’s a lose, lose, lose.

Thankfully, overall, we’ve been wildly successful. The only scenarios where we’ve had incumbent Republicans lose their seats in a primary over this vote, two times in New York and one time in Oregon. Three times. In New Hampshire we had such overwhelming force that over 86 percent of the Republicans who voted were returned to office. We outperformed. And it was in a year, in 2012, when Republicans overall were losing seats. They were at a high-water mark, so they were bound to lose seats. But our people outperformed the set of Republicans who hadn’t voted our way, both in the primaries and then in the general election.

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01-02:03:15 Meeker: So those 14 percent who lost didn’t lose in the primary, they lost in the general?

01-02:03:19 Deaton: Some of them lost primaries, some of them lost generals. There were like a handful who lost primaries. But basically analyzing the races, no one lost because of their vote on gay marriage. When someone has lost because of their vote on marriage we’ve owned it. There were a few other contentious issues that we don’t have to get into, but one of them being a big labor issue that a few of our good friends also voted with the labor unions on a very contentious issue and they were targeted by totally separate outside groups on a totally separate issue and challenged and a couple of them lost. Now, we’re helping people regardless of where they’re at on any of these issues. We’re going to help people who are our friends but also I just don’t want us to like take credit for a loss when it just wasn’t even a factor.

The other difference, too, is you’re talking about such a different political environment in New Hampshire because you’re talking about 400 seats. The state senate, which is a more kind of contained environment, it was perfect. And we had two tough races and we won both of them. Pretty much going away in New Hampshire state senate. The New York state senate races were tough losses. It was all about their marriage vote and those were devastating. We recovered but I’m telling you, and I don’t want to gloss over it, that that was really tough to lose those races in 2012. But overall the picture that the data shows is extremely low risk. You don’t even have to get into sticky conversations with lawmakers because the public domain is what it is. There’s very low risk. Only a handful of people who’ve taken this vote have suffered a political consequence for it. And there is national concern out there to help like-minded Republicans. Like it exists. So in Minnesota we’ve had a state level super PAC that we ran that won every race. In Illinois state level super PAC that we’ve set up that won every race. Those are a couple of states that have required kind of a full super PAC treatment.

But in a lot of races we’re able to just race money for people and help them with direct contributions, introduce them to all of the donors across the country. By the way, Republicans and Democrats who want to help allies who are Republicans and Democrats. At the end of the day a lot of this is non- partisan, that you want to help your friends and you want to punish your enemies. So the last couple cycles have been really successful. We haven’t lost anybody now since New York. And there have been a lot of races since New York but we’ve not lost any.

01-02:06:40 Meeker: I’m wondering if you can give me a sense of your interactions or response to the national Republican Party. I don’t know if there’s an entity, maybe like the Republican National Committee or something like that, the extent to which they’re engaged in the states or have been engaged in the states marriage issue.

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01-02:07:08 Deaton: They’re not.

01-02:07:10 Meeker: They’re just not?

01-02:07:11 Deaton: No.

01-02:07:12 Meeker: Did you engage with those people?

01-02:07:15 Deaton: Yeah, we try. But no, they’re not engaged in a negative or a positive way. The RNC does not do anything on this issue.

01-02:07:21 Meeker: They’re just absent?

01-02:07:23 Deaton: Yeah. Which is good for us. We’re fine with that.

01-02:07:30 Meeker: Did you ever have engagements with them, in the sense that, “Why don’t you just leave this to the states and we’ll fight it out here and don’t stick your nose into it.”

01-02:07:39 Deaton: No. The conversations we had with the party and other national kind of party organs are, “This is the data. You need to get on the right side of this issue.” Like you need to weigh in and be positive. They’re already at neutral. We need them to be better than neutral. We need them to weigh in first off. We encourage them to protect incumbents who are good on these issues and to circle the wagons for people like Rob Portman, circle the wagons for any Republican who’s being attacked for being thoughtful and inclusive and pro- LGBT freedom. So that’s part of it. Another big thing is we’re trying to get this anti-gay language out of the party platform. It’s absolutely negative. The language is deplorable. It’s mean spirited and it needs to come out of the platform in 2016.

01-02:08:33 Meeker: What is the language? What is the status of that now?

01-02:08:35 Deaton: There are five different anti-gay sections in the national party platform. The 2012 platform was the most anti-gay platform the party’s ever had. So in 2016 we need to turn that around. And especially now in an environment where marriage is legal in all fifty states and where the majority of Republicans polled support the marriage decision, the platform should reflect that there is not a monolithic anti-gay point of view. The problem with the platform is it references don’t ask don’t tell. It’s insane. It’s such a relic. It needs to be

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updated. And we’re not asking for the platform to affirm the freedom to marry. We’re asking for the platform to affirm that there’s a healthy diversity of views in the party on marriage and that gay people shouldn’t be discriminated against. Gay and transgendered people shouldn’t be discriminated against just for being gay or transgender and that of course they have a role in the military. I could name any issue and I would tell you I don’t care what the RNC says. I don’t want their help. I can’t even theorize an issue where I would be like, “Yeah, we need the RNC.” No. They don’t help. They couldn’t help if they wanted to and you wouldn’t want their help. So on this issue, no. If you’re kind of trying to figure out where the problem’s at, the problems are just with these outside groups whose only issue is being anti-gay and the only way they raise money is by being anti-gay. But thankfully they’re going broke.

01-02:10:25 Meeker: For example?

01-02:10:26 Deaton: Like National Organization for Marriage. They’re now turning in the post- marriage environment to try to raise money off of a fear of transgender people. That’s going to be the new thing that we have to watch out for. They’re going to try to create the next episode in the culture war over transgender people’s access to public facilities. To a smaller extent they are really trying to raise money off of the wedding service issues. But NOM is broke. They’re tax filings are out. They’re broke. I think that some of the bigger more established conservative organizations that are well resourced, they can be more of a concern but they’ve not prioritized attacking LGBT people in recent years. The only thing being this new wave of religious freedom, “religious freedom” legislation that’s being proposed and is really bigger than just LGBT people. It includes attacks on LGBT people but it’s kind of a bigger mission that some people on the far right have concocted under the guise of religious freedom to try to just gut half a century of civil rights laws. We have to be very clear with that that it does target LGBT people, unfortunately because it’s targeting anybody who’s protected by our nation’s civil rights laws and then a whole lot more.

So maybe another aspect of this is like where is the national Republican party. Yeah, maybe not the RNC per se but like Republican thought leaders and people like that.

01-02:12:20 Meeker: Or presidential candidates this year.

01-02:12:22 Deaton: Well, presidential candidates are not thought leaders. They are definitely not thought leaders. But whenever you look at like, let’s say, the Republican intelligentsia, they’re already there on both marriage and non-discrimination. I know this is about freedom to marry so I’m trying to confine it mostly to talking about the marriage issue. But the intelligentsia are there. If you were to

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poll Capitol Hill Republican staff, they’re overwhelmingly there. Young Republicans are overwhelmingly there. The trend line is still on the same trajectory. And now that we’ve had the Supreme Court decision, look, it’s very clarifying. The things that are left are the basket of non-discrimination issues. And what remains to be seen is how quickly are those now resolved and are they resolved as part of kind of a composite picture, something complete, like a comprehensive federal bill, an act of Congress that just updates the US civil rights act in one fell swoop to protect sexual orientation and gender identity? That’s what we would prefer. Or is it something that’s more incremental and how is it going to be resolved with this tension with the religious freedom arguments.

There is a federal bill called the First Amendment Defense Act, which is a response to the Supreme Court marriage decision, to try to gut it. It’s not a surprise that there be an effort. It’s going nowhere but it’s introduced federal legislation. Some of our presidential candidates are cosponsors on that really ludicrous bill. That’s not where the leadership is. The leadership’s not even entertaining that legislation. So my concern is we’re at a little bit of a standstill in a post-Obergefell landscape and we don’t want to be. We want to keep the momentum going and really finish the job.

So for Freedom to Marry, their mission was marriage and that’s why it’s shutting down. AUF has a similar shutdown mission. Our mission is full freedom for LGBT freedom in all fifty states, which includes marriage and nondiscrimination. We want to get that done. I would love nothing more than to, like Freedom to Marry is winding down, to see American Unity Fund similarly wind down and for it not to be necessary.

01-02:15:14 Meeker: I’m going to sort of ask you to gaze into a crystal ball. I wonder if you envision a point in the future in which the culture wars are ended, to a certain extent.

01-02:15:26 Deaton: No.

01-02:15:26 Meeker: No?

01-02:15:26 Deaton: On LGBT issues? Yes.

01-02:15:27 Meeker: Well, to the extent that the Republican Party would allow itself to focus on issues around labor and the extent of power of labor unions, the size of government, immigration, which kind of does flow into social issues, and defense. Those kind of like core issues that are not necessarily within the—

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01-02:16:01 Deaton: Like the issues where two-thirds of the public agrees with us? Those issues?

01-02:16:04 Meeker: Right, right. Yeah.

01-02:16:05 Deaton: Why don’t we focus on those? Yeah, wouldn’t it be great. Just like win every election running away Ronald Reagan style. It’d be fantastic. Culture wars are not ending. LGBT issues will end. We’re hurdling towards it. It’s very close. It’s closer than people realize. It’s closer than the opposition wants it to be. We have this fight over religious freedom which is part of really a cyclical fight in our society and it’s a reaction. That’s the last thing that people have. The last thing they can do to attack LGBT people. And it’s not working because, by the way, every single one of these bills has been stopped or, in the case of Indiana, rewritten after the fact. And these are in conservative states. These are in red states. We’re working with Republican legislatures to stop the madness and we’re winning. This next year is going to be tough. We have a few more years that it’s going to be tough.

But the demographics, they are what they are. America’s already there. The only people who really aren’t there now are the members of Congress and some of the members of some states state legislature. But it’s really the only institution left that isn’t fully there, is this Congress. And they’re hurtling in that direction, too. ENDA passed the US Senate with ten Republican votes. A similar bill or a more comprehensive bill would have that level of support in the US Senate or more. The House is where there’s still a lot of work to do but we have other social issues, right. We have the fight over abortion. That’s, I think, eternal. The fight over LGBT issues is not. Well, I don’t even want to draw analogies. It’s not going to continue. LGBT people are friends and family. The millennial generation is just monolithically in support of LGBT people. It doesn’t matter your politics. I think that there’s a day that’s coming very soon, that the idea of a bakery turning away a gay couple would horrify everyone. I recognize we’re not there yet, that there are people who think, well, that’s the little shop owner's religious freedom to turn away a customer. Like that’s been said about other communities in other times and it’s been popular until finally it’s not, and then it’s toxic and it’s shocking, right, that you would be turned away just because of who you are, who you love, or who you worship, or the color of your skin, or your gender, or any of those things. So I firmly believe that’s the track that we’re on with respect to LGBT status.

Look, the conservative movement and the Republican Party, to the extent that they’re aligned, there’s always going to be a tension over cultural issues. There are other issues coming down the pipeline that are going to be knockdown drag-out fights with bioethics, with the advances of science. And some of these are going to implicate the LGBT community. And I talk about these organizations having missions and shutting down and they should, but I don’t want that to confuse people and let them think then that everything’s

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hunky dory. I think one of the fights that I’m concerned about is surrogacy for everybody, but especially for LGBT families. There’s going to continue to be a debate over what’s allowed. And right now it’s very, very hard for some gay couples to raise a family and to create a family and there are people who are going to want to make that even harder. So fights over family planning, fights over adoption, fights over surrogacy. Those are things that are, I think, going to continue to be with us and are going to continue to be opportunities for some people to try to discriminate against LGBT families.

So I don’t want to be too sweeping whenever I say like I think the LGBT culture war will be over but I’m also looking at that and thinking of as soon as the millennial generation is firmly entrenched and running Congress, then I think when those questions come up, like whenever my husband and I are looking to start to have a family and raise a family, I don’t know exactly what year that will be and where Congress will be at at that point, but you’re going to have to be prepared that there will still be people who want to stand in the way of that. And even in the adoption arena, that’s another new fight we’re facing, that people do want to make it harder for gay couples to adopt, gay and lesbian couples, just to be very clear. Same-sex couples. They want to make it hard for us to adopt kids. It’s not consistent with being conservative at all. It’s not the Christian position, mind you, but it’s a fringe position that can unfortunately take hold.

01-02:21:38 Meeker: And it’s not consistent with a pro-life position either.

01-02:21:38 Deaton: It’s not. I wasn’t going to say it but, yeah, you did. So yeah, it’s not. What Evan Wolfson has, winning isn’t won, something that he said. So like, yeah, we’re winning the culture war. It’s probably never truly won on LGBT issues because there are some other issues coming down the pipeline. One thing that I’m also really concerned about and that our organization is looking at for 2016 and working more on, prioritizing more, is conversion therapy. And I was thinking about that, remember I was talking about how I was lucky to have a really good counselor. Was just thinking like, “Oh, man.” I get it. It resonates with me. These kids growing up in the south, in the intermountain west and their parents send them to an awful counselor. Like I cannot imagine. So we’ve been working on banning conversion therapy in a couple of states. I think that that’s an area that has a lot of bipartisan potential.

Freedom to Marry, the organization, is shutting down. The people who worked at Freedom to Marry are all across the movement and are now in other movements. My regret is that there weren’t more conservatives who had the chance to work in Freedom to Marry and to be trained up with those values, with those political and even just managerial values. I wish that there were more conservatives who had worked at Freedom to Marry and were also either in the LGBT movement or heading into other areas. But with Freedom to

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Marry shutting down, the same work that they were doing on marriage, we’re using those lessons now on non-discrimination. There’s a new campaign called Freedom for All Americans that we’ve started. AUF’s a major funder. I’m on the board. And I’m really excited about that campaign and I’m excited for it to finish its job even faster than Freedom to Marry finished its job. I’m excited for it to surprise everybody and get this act of Congress through. But all of that to say that I think that these other cultural war issues, I don’t know that any of them quite today have the same resonance that marriage did. And I think that’s on everybody’s mind as a concern. Like is it as compelling as marriage. Maybe it’s not. I don’t know that conversion therapy is as compelling. We’re trying to ban something. It’s in a totally different mental frame. Some of these other things don’t have to be as compelling because we’re not starting with the same hostility. So you can slice and dice it a million different ways. I just know that with LGBT issues there’s definitely still work to do but I don’t think it’s that controversial of a thing to think that we’re within reach. Like maybe, I would say, five to ten years of having a comprehensive non-discrimination bill passed by Congress and having conversion therapy banned in all fifty states. Our ultimate strategy there is also with an act of Congress. Maybe ultimately this all is one bill. Who knows? Maybe we’re heading in that direction. But I do think when that’s done LGBT people can just duke it out on other non-LGBT issues.

This is another prediction I will make. I also think that as soon as we get this all behind us, LGBT people will no longer be nearly as aligned with the Democratic Party and I think that very, very quickly LGBT people will become just as divided as any other community. And I think that LGBT people, because LGBT people are just in every race, every religion, every corner of society, like we’re just going to be fortunate to be able to fight it out on all the other issues that we care about. And I think that’ll be very healthy. So I’m really looking forward to having way, way, way more LGBT Republicans. Maybe in about a decade.

01-02:26:28 Meeker: Let’s wrap-up. And there’s a final question that I think I’m kind of asking everybody. I’d like to know where you were and how you experienced the Obergefell decision when it came down.

01-02:26:44 Deaton: That’s really sad actually. My dad died the day before the decision. So I was unfortunately dealing with his death and the funeral in the middle of the decision coming down. So it was really sad. It was really sad. So I missed out on everything. But I didn’t really miss out on it. But I was gone. I wasn’t here in DC. I was in Alabama. And he had been sick for a while. So I missed the decision. But everybody here in the office, everybody on the team, got to go. But what was good about it is we got married this year and so that was kind of our celebration of the decision. So we read from the Obergefell decision at the wedding, which was like our little nod to it all. And a whole bunch of people

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are now doing that, I think. That’s now like all the rage. And I think straight people are doing it. They’re reading Kennedy’s decision on Obergefell. But for me it was definitely complicated because I was dealing with something so sad in the middle of something that we’d all been working on for years. And I also know that my colleagues and friends in the movement just were supportive and I know that they all just couldn’t believe like the timing.

But as a really good way to wrap it all up though, is the fact that my dad, who grew up in the hills of Kentucky, was an extremely conservative Republican, one of the last things that he was—because he had a little bit of a lead time. He was in hospice for a couple of weeks before he died, so he was able to have an orderly death and to say the goodbyes and to say everything. He was lucid until just the last few days. Hospice, I don’t know if you’ve ever had to experience it, but then it’s the morphine and everything. So you only have a window. But in that window, one of the saddest things for him is that he wasn’t going to be able to make it to the wedding. Because it was scheduled. The day was set for almost a year, I guess. So he was very sad that he wasn’t going to be able to make it to the wedding and that was very important to him to say, “That’s one of my biggest regrets. I’m ready to die but that’s sad.” We didn’t really get too much into this but when I finally came out to my parents in kind of the college era, they were not happy. They did not see it coming. The therapy in high school did not clue them in. I think there was also some powerful denial going on. But they did not know, so they said. They did not like it at all and it took us a good couple of years of pretty rocky family encounters to get that fixed. And I don’t want to make this sound insulting, but like for a country boy from the hills of Kentucky who is conservative, Christian, Republican through and through, to be able to get to that point, anybody can get to that point. Like anybody can get to that point. If my parents can be excited about a gay wedding of their youngest son, anybody can get to that point and I think that that’s what I’ve tried to tell people, too, is just like, listen, that’s how you know things are changing. Because it’s every corner of our country. Nobody’s immune from being happy for their LGBT family and friends. So that’s where I was.

01-02:30:55 Meeker: I think that’s a good place to stop.

[End of Interview]