Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality by Jo Becker Page A

on behalf of a campaign called “ProtectMarriage.com,” to do so as intervenors in the case. Their lawyer was Chuck Cooper. He was an old friend of Olson’s from back in their days in the Reagan Justice Department and had succeeded him as head of the Office of Legal Counsel.
    Olson had pulled Cooper aside just before the start of the hearing to privately suggest that they jointly oppose Walker’s trial plan. “We don’t want to have some Scopes monkey trial here, do we?” Cooper recalled Olson saying, a reference to the famous 1925 case in which the then controversial theory of evolution was debated by two famed lawyers of the day. When it became clear the judge would not be deterred, Olson had suggested in more diplomatic language that perhaps he and Cooper could stipulate to some of the facts at issue in order to move things along. “That might help to narrow the issues upon which there then might have to be expert testimony,” Olson told the judge.
    Stewart was appalled by Olson’s suggestion. Cooper had defended Hawaii’s right to ban same-sex marriage in state courts there. And he had written a brief in the
Romer
case defending the constitutionality of the Colorado initiative that prohibited municipalities from including gays and lesbians in their antidiscrimination laws. Any offer of cooperation by Cooper, Stewart thought, could not possibly be good for the case.
    Gibson Dunn, Olson’s firm, had already asked the city of San Francisco to file an amicus brief, a legal argument filed by a party not directly involved but with an interest in a case. Stewart had readily agreed. Whatever the establishment gay rights groups thought about Olson’s lawsuit, what was done was done. It was imperative that he succeeded.
    Now, worried about the direction the case was taking, she wanted to advocate for a larger role. Following the hearing where Olson and Cooper had suggested limiting the facts in dispute, she went to see her boss, City Attorney Dennis Herrera. He looked up as she came in, a five-foot-three whirlwind in a dark pantsuit, with short white-blond hair and preppy glasses. Stewart tended to convey urgency in breathlessly fast sentences, one tumbling over the next. Forget the amicus brief, she said. We need to file a motion now, asking that the city of San Francisco be made a party to the case. That would give her and Herrera a far greater say in charting the course of the trial.
    “They need our help,” she said, “even if they don’t know it.”
    Herrera, a jovial politician well liked by both the city’s gay community and its more conservative Catholic population, agreed to reach out to Chad, whom he knew well. He had been the one who hired Chad and Kristina to help fight Proposition 8 in the waning days of the campaign, paying them out of his own political coffers because he felt that the people in charge of the official “Noon 8” campaign were running it into the ground. The city, he told Chad when he reached him, wanted to intervene in the case, and allowing that to happen could help Chad with a problem of his own.
    After publicly questioning the wisdom of AFER’s legal strategy, the American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights now wanted to be made parties to the case as well. “We think it will be very helpful to Judge Walker and the ultimate resolution of the questions in the case for the litigation to have the benefit of the community in all of its diversity,” Lambda’s Jenny Pizer, explaining the motion they had filed with the court, told reporters.
    Kristina had never seen Chad so furious. After everything that Lambda Legal and the other groups had done to trash their case, now they wanted in? When Chad got angry, his southern accent became more pronounced, and he was in a full-on drawl as he shouted from his office, “We’re screwed.”
    It was also the last thing Olson wanted. The team was going to have a hard enough time winning. A united