The Engagement

The riveting story of the fight for same-sex marriage in the United States--the most important civil rights breakthrough of the new millennium.

On June 26, 2015, the United States Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was unconstitutional, making same-sex marriage legal throughout the United States. But the road to victory was much longer than many know. In this seminal work, Sasha Issenberg takes us back to Hawaii in the 1990s, when that state's supreme court first started grappling with the issue, and traces the fight for marriage equality from the enactment of DOMA in 1996 to the Goodridge decision that made Massachusetts the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, and finally to Windsor and Obergefell the Supreme Court decisions that prompted the complete repeal of DOMA.
This meticulously reported work sheds new light on every aspect of this fraught history and brings to life the perspectives of those who fought courageously for the right to marry as well as those who fervently believed that same-sex marriage would destroy the nation. It is sure to become the definitive book on one of the most important civil rights fights of our time.