and oklahoma and other states are making plans for alternate methods of execution in case the court rules against them. some are throwbacks like the electric chair. and some never used before. the really big case before the supreme court being watched and fought over already in state houses and the campaign trail is the one the justices are going to hear on tuesday. that is the day the court will hear arguments on whether to declare same sex marriage to be legal nationwide. specifically the justices have two questions before them. number one, does the constitution require states to license a marriage between two people of the same sex? and number two, does the constitution require a state to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed outside of that state? the justices have addressed the issue of same sex marriage before most notably two years ago in the windsor case. that s when the court narrowly struck down a porti
in this case. they haven t yet. and supreme court didn t. supreme court. that s right. there have been a number of rulings since in various other courts. many of those cite the windsor case. exactly. dwhoot you say to people who said that was in fact, the pivot point. i think the windsor case was tremendously important. the day the two decisions came down the same day. and the first thing that i said, when i was asked by reporters on the steps of the supreme court, was that the perry case meant that people were going to be able to get married in california today. and the windsor case meant that people were going to be able to get married across the country over the next few years. as you say in the book with mr. olson, our effort and the efforts of the scores of people who helped and supported us and have contributed to it, we hope to be the beginning of the end of this last major bastion of institutionalized discrimination. one of the more contentious responses is it s d
clear that the olson/boies team believes that marriage equality was nothing and nowhere before they entered the stage. in your chapter you lay out you are aware of the history. unfortunately mr. frank just didn t read the book. if you read the book, he would have seen what we lay out in terms of the history. and, for example, anybody who is active here, i mean, every year the human rights campaign, you know, has a big dinner. and people are active in this go to that dinner. 4,000 or 5,000 people there. last year, ted and i robby c caplin from the windsor case was there. what ted and i had done was simply building on what everybody else had done. i analogized us to the people in the olympics who get the flame just before they enter the you are part of a rely. here s the thing and the problem is, the people who are actually active
whether it is going our way or not. frequently courts make decisions that are not with public opinion at that particular time. it is not part of our calculus. i think viewers will look at map on the screen and show where same-sex marriage is lawful and recognized and all of these decisions are going in the same direction in which you taken the commonwealth and they assume there is a connection between the two. the public sentiment and trends. you are saying that is not the case. we are not blind of the decisions of other courts. there may be persuasive in logic in other decisions. i m glad you said that. how developed is the law in the supreme court on this issue? because all the federal judges seem to be doing what you have done. the one particular question that was not addressed in the windsor case that was decided last year is whether there is a fundamental right to marriage that extends to the same-sex
create the climate for the victory. that s what we re doing. what we re seeing now is we have reached that critical mass and america is ready for the victory that will bring this joy to everyone across the country. richard, do you agree that a state-based approach is appropriate right now? well, what we ve seen recently is almost a tidal wave of decisions out of the federal courts in various states since the supreme court s ruling in the windsor case, which has proven now to be very important. and we haven t gotten the supreme court ruling yet that evan talks about, but it almost seems like now we may not need one. i think we probably will need one. but every state since the supreme court s ruling in the windsor case has every ruling has gone for in a positive way for gay marriage. so it s really been remarkable and faster than even we thought it would be. it seems like this was once a very contentious dispute whether