The New Yorker profile's Kenneth Mehlman's mission for marriage equality. Ken Mehlman has started an LGBT organization, Project Right Side, as well as spoken at many events on marriage equality.

1. The New Yorker: Ken
Mehlman’s Gay-
Marriage Mission
Posted by Richard Socarides, February 26, 2013 on The New Yorker

2. The news, on the front page of the Times this morning, that dozens of leading Republicans had
signed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the case of Proposition 8, the California gay-
marriage ban, merited the A1 treatment that it received. Despite their party and their own past
positions, Jon Huntsman, Meg Whitman, Ken Duberstein, and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen said that
they supported a Constitutional right to same-sex marriage. This comes two days before the
Obama Administration must decide whether it is ready to file a similar brief. In the most high-
profile Supreme Court case of the year, with the future of how we view civil rights and treat our
fellow-citizens at stake, someone had quietly engineered enough prominent conservatives from
the opposition party to sign onto a legal brief supporting full equality for gay and lesbian
Americans. That someone was Ken Mehlman, the openly gay former political director of the
George W. Bush White House, the campaign manager for Bush’s 2004 reëlection campaign,
and the former chairman of the Republican National Committee.
When Ken Mehlman came out of the closet, in August, 2010, announcing his sexual orientation
to Marc Ambinder, in an Atlantic article, not everyone was completely surprised. But it did
represent something of a turning point. For the first time, the gay and lesbian political
community had a real conservative leader among its ranks, and you knew—if you knew
anything about Ken Mehlman—that things would be different from then on.
It’s not just that Ken Mehlman is a prominent Republican, which makes him an important asset
to—and, now, organizer in—the gay-rights movement; it’s that he is one of the smartest political
operatives anywhere in the country right now, and that he understands better than perhaps
anyone how moderate and persuadable Republicans think. These are the very people the gay-
rights movement is now trying to speak to. As Mehlman told the Times reporter Sheryl Gay
Stolberg, “We are trying to say to the Court that we are judicial and political conservatives, and
it is consistent with our values and philosophy for you to overturn Proposition 8.”

3. The summer of his coming out, I asked Mehlman what he planned to do now that his sexual
orientation was public. He told me that while he wanted to be an advocate and work for change
and greater acceptance, he thought that he should first spend some time listening and learning.
And, for a while, Mehlman kept a fairly low profile. They were many calls for him to apologize
directly to the gay community for past misdeeds, some real and others imagined. When he
came out he had said, “I can’t change the fact that I wasn’t in this place personally when I was
in politics, and I genuinely regret that. It was very hard, personally.” (As an out democratic
staffer to President Bill Clinton when he signed the Defense of Marriage Act, I understand some
of what this might have been like for him.) Later, in May of 2012, after he had done substantial
behind-the-scenes work to advance the cause of gay equality, he expanded on that: “At a
personal level, I wish I had spoken out against the [anti-gay] effort… As I’ve been involved in
the fight for marriage equality, one of the things I’ve learned is how many people were harmed
by the campaigns in which I was involved. I apologize to them and tell them I am sorry. While
there have been recent victories, this could still be a long struggle in which there will be
setbacks, and I’ll do my part to be helpful.”
Mehlman, now an investment banker by day, is on the board of the American Foundation for
Equal Rights, the group that has organized the challenge to Proposition 8, and which hired the
superlawyers Ted Olson and David Boies to spearhead it. He has worked with the other most
prominent national organization fighting for gay marriage, the New York-based Freedom to
Marry, and has offered his help to pretty much in the effort anyone who wants it. (I have worked
with the same organizations.) He was active in the past election on the side of advocates who
won in all four states where marriage equality was on the ballot: Maine, Maryland, Minnesota,
and Washington State. Perhaps he will never be able to fully undo the 2004 effort by
Republicans to put anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendments through in order to bring out
the conservative base vote. But it will not be for lack of trying.

4. How was Ken Mehlman able to go to all of these people who signed this brief for gay equality
and ask them for help? It was because he had worked with and known many of them for
decades, and because now they finally knew him. It is often said that the most important
political act any gay person can take is to come out of the closet. Telling your family, friends,
neighbors, and business associates who you really are makes people aware that anti-gay
discrimination is discrimination against someone they know, like, and respect. It’s not easy to
come out of the closet at any age. It’s certainly not easy if you’re a teen-ager living in an
intolerant community. But it also must have taken courage to come out of the closet as a
middle-aged Republican who had been so prominent on the conservative side of the political
debate. There were no former Republican Presidents who signed on to the brief, nor any
former Republican attorneys general, but one gets the feeling that it won’t be long now.
Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty.
Original article on The New Yorker: Ken Mehlman’s Gay-Marriage Mission