Previous edition published under the title Redeeming the dream: the case for marriage equality.

The company her family runs is at an impasse, so Paige, for the sake of her family, has decided to marry Nicholas, a wealthy man. He’s an older man who makes a brilliant impression and kisses ever so gently. Although theirs would be a marriage of convenience, she is sure she can grow to love him. And that he will love her back… Everything proceeds at an astonishingly rapid pace, and soon she greets him as his bride. But Nicholas didn’t appear on their first married night together and their marriage quickly collapsed. Then, after a year of living separately, Paige was hit by a storm on an island trip and suddenly reunited with her husband. She’d fallen into a trap!

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year | A Washington Post Best Book of the Year “[A] riveting legal drama, a snapshot in time, when the gay rights movement altered course and public opinion shifted with the speed of a bullet train... Becker’s most remarkable accomplishment is to weave a spellbinder of a tale that, despite a finale reported around the world, manages to keep readers gripped until the very end.” - The Washington Post A groundbreaking work of reportage by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jo Becker, Forcing the Spring is the definitive account of five remarkable years in American civil rights history, when the United States experienced a tectonic shift on the issue of marriage equality. Focusing on the historic legal challenge of California’s ban on same-sex marriage, Becker offers a gripping, behind-the scenes narrative told with the lightning pace of a great legal thriller. Taking the reader from the Oval Office to the Supreme Court ruling, from state-by-state campaigns to an astounding shift in national public opinion, Forcing the Spring is political and legal journalism at its finest.

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 that state bans on gay marriage were unconstitutional, making same-sex unions 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 the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 to the Goodridge decision that made Massachusetts the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, and finally to the seminal Supreme Court decisions of Windsor and Obergefell. 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.

"Tells the story of a watershed trial that unfolded over twelve tense days in California in 2010. A trial that legalized same-sex marriage in our most populous state. A trial that interrogated the nature of marriage, the political status of gays and lesbians, the ideal circumstances for raising children, and the ability of direct democracy to protect fundamental rights. A trial that stands as the most potent argument for marriage equality this nation has ever seen. In telling the story of Hollingsworth v. Perry, the groundbreaking federal lawsuit against Proposition 8, Kenji Yoshino has also written a paean to the vanishing civil trial--an oasis of rationality in what is often a decidedly uncivil debate"--Dust jacket flap.

Tax reformers, take note. Clarence Lo's investigation of California's Proposition 13 and other tax reduction bills is both a tribute and a warning to people who get "mad as hell" and try to do something about being pushed around by government. Homeowners in California, faced with impossible property tax bills in the 1970s, got mad and pushed back, starting an avalanche that swept tax limitation measures into state after state. What we learn is that, although the property tax was slashed, two-thirds of the benefits went to business owners rather than homeowners. How did a crusade launched by homeowning consumers seeking tax relief end up as a pro-business, supply-side political program? To trace the transformation, Lo uses the firsthand recollections of 120 activists in the movement, going back to the 1950s. He shows how their protests were ignored, until a suburban alliance of upper-middle-class property owners and business owners took charge. It was the program of that latter group, not the plight of the moderate-income homeowner, which inspired tax revolts across the nation and shaped the economic policies of the Reagan administration. Tax reformers, take note. Clarence Lo's investigation of California's Proposition 13 and other tax reduction bills is both a tribute and a warning to people who get "mad as hell" and try to do something about being pushed around by government. Homeowners in California, faced with impossible property tax bills in the 1970s, got mad and pushed back, starting an avalanche that swept tax limitation measures into state after state. What we learn is that, although the property tax was slashed, two-thirds of the benefits went to business owners rather than homeowners. How did a crusade launched by homeowning consumers seeking tax relief end up as a pro-business, supply-side political program? To trace the transformation, Lo uses the firsthand recollections of 120 activists in the movement, going back to the 1950s. He shows how their protests were ignored, until a suburban alliance of upper-middle-class property owners and business owners took charge. It was the program of that latter group, not the plight of the moderate-income homeowner, which inspired tax revolts across the nation and shaped the economic policies of the Reagan administration.

Same-sex marriage has become one of the defining social issues in contemporary U.S. politics. State court decisions finding in favor of same-sex relationship equality claims have been central to the issue's ascent from nowhere to near the top of the national political agenda. Same Sex Marriage in the United States tells the story of the legal and cultural shift, its backlash, and how it has evolved over the past 15 years. This book aids in a classroom examination of the legal, political, and social developments surrounding the issue of same-sex marriage in the United States. While books about same-sex marriage have proliferated in recent years, few, if any, have provided a clear and comprehensive account of the litigation for same-sex marriage, and its successes and failures, as this book does. Updated through 2013, this edition details the watershed rulings in favor of same-sex marriage: the Supreme Court's June 26th repeal of DOMA, and of Proposition 8 in California, as well as the many states (New Jersey, Illinois, New Mexico, Hawaii, and Nevada among others) where activists and public leaders have made recent strides to ensure that gay couples have an equal right to marry.

Told in their own voice, this is the story of two women who took their struggle for marriage equality all the way to the Supreme Court--and won. Kris Perry and Sandy Stier are the lead plaintiffs in the team that sued the state of California to restore marriage equality. By 2008, when Californians voted in Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage, Kris and Sandy had been a couple raising their four sons for almost a decade. Living in Berkeley, they were a modern family, but without the protections of legal marriage. In alternating voices, Love on Trial tells the story of each woman’s journey from her 1960s all-American childhood to the US Supreme Court, sharing tales of growing up in rural America, coming out to bewildered parents, falling in love, and finally becoming a family. From wrangling teenagers and careers to hot flashes at the Supreme Court, this book provides an honest, amusing look at a family that landed in the middle of one of the most important civil rights battles of our era.

Until very recently, no society had seen marriage as anything other than a conjugal partnership: a male–female union. What Is Marriage? identifies and defends the reasons for this historic consensus and shows why redefining civil marriage as something other than the conjugal union of husband and wife is a mistake. Originally published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, this book’s core argument quickly became the year’s most widely read essay on the most prominent scholarly network in the social sciences. Since then, it has been cited and debated by scholars and activists throughout the world as the most formidable defense of the tradition ever written. Now revamped, expanded, and vastly enhanced, What Is Marriage? stands poised to meet its moment as few books of this generation have. Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George offer a devastating critique of the idea that equality requires redefining marriage. They show why both sides must first answer the question of what marriage really is. They defend the principle that marriage, as a comprehensive union of mind and body ordered to family life, unites a man and a woman as husband and wife, and they document the social value of applying this principle in law. Most compellingly, they show that those who embrace same-sex civil marriage leave no firm ground—none—for not recognizing every relationship describable in polite English, including polyamorous sexual unions, and that enshrining their view would further erode the norms of marriage, and hence the common good. Finally, What Is Marriage? decisively answers common objections: that the historic view is rooted in bigotry, like laws forbidding interracial marriage; that it is callous to people’s needs; that it can’t show the harm of recognizing same-sex couplings or the point of recognizing infertile ones; and that it treats a mere “social construct” as if it were natural or an unreasoned religious view as if it were rational.

With precision and passion, David Blankenhorn offers a bold new argument in the debate over same-sex marriage: that it would essentially deny all children, not just the children of same-sex couples, their birthright to their own mother and father. If we change marriage, we change parenthood - for all families. Altering marriage to accommodate same-sex couples would mean weakening in culture and eliminating in law the idea that children need both their mother and their father. The Future of Marriage analyzes recent survey data from 35 countries, offering the first scientific evidence that support for marriage is weakest in those nations where support for gay marriage is strongest. Blankenhorn explains how same-sex marriage would transform our most pro-child social institution into a purely private relationship (''an expression of love'') between adults, defined by each couple as they wish. Changing marriage laws to include same-sex couples, he argues, would require us to ''deinstitutionalize'' marriage, ''amputating from the institution one after another of its core ideas, until the institution itself is like a room with all the furniture removed and everything stripped from the walls.'' For Blankenhorn, the main question concerning the future of marriage in the United States is not whether we will adopt gay marriage. The main question is whether the social institution of marriage will become stronger or weaker. If we wish to strengthen marriage on behalf of children, there is no shortage of ideas for doing so. What matters is whether we as a society regard this as a worthy and urgent goal.