family history and family law, especially as they relate to same-sex couples and their children. He is the author of many articles, and the books The Age of Independence: Interracial Unions, Same-Sex Unions, and the Changing American Family (2007) and The Rainbow after the Storm: Marriage Equality and Social Change in the US (2021).Rosenfeld applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Rainbow after the Storm and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about The Rainbow after the Storm at the Oxford University Press website.Lessons of Romer and Baehr (1996):Does the text from page 99 give a good account of what the whole book is about?
When gay people appeared in court in the U.S. before the 1990s, the courts had not been required to take them seriously. Many people, especially gay men, were simply processed in local courts for offenses like solicitation that derived from the illegality of gay sex. If gay sex was illegal, as it still was in many states, gay people’s claims to equal citizenship were not likely to receive a fair hearing. Gay plaintiffs in civil cases often fared just as poorly. One justice in the Minnesota Supreme Court actually stood up and turned his back on lawyers representing same-sex marriage plaintiffs Baker and McConnell in 1971. Justice White’s majority decision in Bowers v. Hardwick in 1986 expressed a fundamental disdain for the idea that the law should treat gay people as the equals of straight people, as if the very idea of equality of gay and straight people was preposterous.
Because U.S. courts had never had to take gay defendants or gay plaintiffs seriously, it was not obvious how gay rights issues would be adjudicated if and when they ever were taken seriously. Kennedy’s majority decision in Romer v. Evans showed for the first time from the nation’s highest court in an affirmative way that gay people were entitled to be treated as the equals of straight people. If gay people had to be treated as equal citizens, then a variety of discriminatory policies and assumptions were on the chopping block. The constitutional assumptions behind a variety of antigay discriminatory policies were going to turn out to be grossly insufficient once they were examined closely.
Just as the flimsy constitutional bases for antigay discrimination had escaped scrutiny for decades, so too had the scientific and pseudo-scientific background for antigay policies escaped official scrutiny for decades. Social science had been making tremendous strides in understanding same-sex couples and their children in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, but U.S. courts had rarely been forced to listen to the social science. Instead antigay policies were backed by sham science, prejudice, and faulty assumptions. The Baehr v. Miike trial in 1996 put the defenders of same-sex marriage bans on the witness stand and showed them to be either unconvincing or charlatans. The empirical social science foundation on which antigay policies had been made and justified turned out, on close examination, to be vacant. If you held it up to the light, you could see right through it.
Yes, page 99 is a good window into this book. The Rainbow After the Storm is about how marriage equality came to be the law of the US before almost anyone thought it was possible. One of the great turning points was the Baehr v. Miike same-sex marriage trial in Hawaii in 1996, where the marriage equality plaintiffs won. Prior to the Baehr trial the opponents of marriage equality had never faced a trial before so the public had never gotten to see how un-scientific and vapid the anti-marriage-equality arguments and experts were. The book of course ties together a lot of additional threads that are not present on page 99. The book has an in-depth discussion of the public opinion survey data and what it tells us about the change in gay rights over time. There is a deep discussion of the three important same-sex marriage trials, and of the social science and social scientists on both sides of those trials. And there is a discussion of why LGBT Americans have seen their status and rights improve so much in the US while other groups and rights claimants have not seen the same kind of progress.
--Marshal Zeringue
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