A quarter-century ago, America was far from married to the idea of same-sex marriage.
It's rare for the federal government to weigh in on marriage. So how did they get involved in same-sex unions?
Jacquelyn Martin/AP Images
In the decades since Roe v. Wade, public sentiment about abortion has remained fairly steady.
By contrast, in the mid-1990s, only around a quarter of the country supported gay marriage, and then, somehow, just 15 years later, those numbers had nearly doubled.
Sasha Issenberg, author of “The Engagement: America’s Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage,” tracks the twists and turns that the fight for same-sex marriage in America took, from a power struggle over a parade in Hawaii to shifts in elite opinion, which all brought gay marriage from a “quirky,” niche issue in the 1990s to being federally accepted by 2015.
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