CHAPTER 28

Culture Wars, Part II

The Big Three culture-war clashes of the 1990s were over abortion, same-sex marriage,¹ and the concept of “traditional” marriage. And they were waged without letup. First and foremost, the nation was rocked by a major offensive regarding reproductive health, which drew all three branches of government to the front lines. That battle is being fought to this day.

On the eve of the 1992 Democratic National Convention, the Supreme Court hurled a grenade as it broke for summer recess. In a 5-to-4 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the justices narrowly upheld Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that affirmed a woman’s “right to choose.” Yet the ruling reverberated through the pro-choice movement. For the first time in two decades, the High Court—despite supporting Roe and barring states from placing an “undue burden” on those seeking an abortion—was putting restrictions on reproductive freedom. According to the majority opinion, a state (in this case, Pennsylvania) had the legal authority to insist on a twenty-four-hour waiting period before a patient would be allowed to terminate her pregnancy. Furthermore, the state could demand that a minor be required to secure the consent of one of her parents.

Shock waves followed. Many feared that the Court had opened the floodgates for new limits on a woman’s ability to have an abortion. (And, lo, it had. In the years since, legislation and case law built around that Pennsylvania precedent have slowly chipped away at Roe.)

Bill Clinton made his move. He had yet to be named his party’s presidential nominee. And it was not at all clear where he would stand on such restrictions. In the summer of ’92, in fact, feminists were understandably wary, recalls his press secretary Dee Dee Myers. “It wasn’t like he was their champion,” she says, “[even though] he became that over eight years. Women’s groups were suspicious because of his [extramarital behavior]. He was southern. He was a centrist; he was not a traditional liberal. He was pro-choice but he had supported some restrictions on abortion. And his language was different. It was ‘abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.’ So they didn’t know what the ‘rare’ thing meant.… The one thing the country [believed]: people don’t want to hear about abortion. They think there are too many abortions, but they don’t want to get into telling women what to do—most people—[so as to] make it a big political issue.… Clinton got this instinctively. No one had to explain it to him or take a poll.”

The day the decision came down, Clinton had set up a prearranged call with Kate Michelman, the head of NARAL Pro-Choice America. She phoned him after she left the courtroom, and Clinton was unequivocal. “It’s awfully good news that Roe was upheld,” he told her, adding, “I want you to know that you can count on me to continue to stand up for a woman’s right to choose.”

Clinton was good to his word. During his first week in the White House, he signed defiantly pro-choice directives, drawing his own line in the sand on matters of reproductive health, just as his predecessor, George Bush, had drawn his.

For a while, the pro-choice community had the political momentum. Its April 1992 gathering on the Washington Mall drew a half to three-quarters of a million. Voters across the country were electing candidates who forcefully defended a woman’s freedom to choose. According to Gallup, supporters (53 to 56 percent of those surveyed) had now surpassed opponents, including those who would limit abortion to specific medical situations. On balance, those promoting choice were of a like mind: they were adamant that a woman’s control over her own body was not the business of state or federal law, the workplace, or religious decree.

The ’90s pro-choice legions were growing for various reasons. There was a new comfort level with a variety of contraceptive methods, thanks to improved education, marketing efforts, and the impetus in the late ’90s to introduce the French pill RU-486 in the States. There was serious concern about teen pregnancy rates (even as those rates, and the overall number of abortions, declined during the decade). In black communities, Time’s Kate Pickert recently recalled, “the term reproductive justice was coined… by black feminists who wanted to… speak to the needs of African-American women, whose abortion rate [was] 3½ times that of white women.” Pro-choice defenders, moreover, were truly galvanized by the Supreme Court decision. “That case,” says Kate Michelman, who remains active in the cause, “had come after twelve years of Republican presidents who’d been doing the bidding of antiabortion forces [whose power had been centered] in the nation’s churches.”

But most significant of all was a backlash against violent attacks by a cadre of pro-life activists, a backlash that shocked large segments of society and invigorated the pro-choice camp. “The ’80s and the ’90s saw a gathering of strength of the forces on the far right wing working to deny women the right to choose,” Michelman insists. “Their extremism—demonstrated in their aggressive assaults on clinics and doctors—was [regarded] by the general public as desperate and unacceptable.”

Despite all of this, however, it was the antiabortion movement that was gaining the upper hand in the longer-term culture war.

Most Americans who opposed abortion stood by their principles quietly, even stoically, and entirely out of public view. Many had arrived at their beliefs after having undergone the procedure themselves, or from firsthand experience with ultrasound imaging, neonatal surgery, or visits to the preemie units at their local hospitals. Many had been persuaded on religious grounds. But the most visible and vocal abortion opponents in the ’80s and ’90s were the most radical—and they were making serious political inroads.

At first, protestors had participated in so-called direct-action interventions, using methods ranging from blockades to vandalism to other tactics for forcing clinics to close. They set up “rescues”: attempts to preempt planned patient consultations by protesting, occupying public spaces, or actually confronting pregnant women outside clinics and trying to persuade them to reconsider.2 By the 1990s, “an estimated forty thousand individuals had participated in sit-ins at abortion facilities and related locations in the United States,” according to anthropologist Carol J. C. Maxwell in her book Pro-Life Activists in America. “Most had no previous experience with direct activism; this political involvement was a dramatic, portentous episode in their lives.”3 A large segment of this faction had become involved, in part, because they felt they were on the losing side of a vast cultural rift. “Many activists,” Maxwell contends, “perceived themselves to be excluded from the mechanisms through which people control and change society. They spoke of their religious values as making them a targeted, disenfranchised minority vulnerable to the havoc wrought by a dominant, ‘liberal,’ ‘humanist’ majority.”

But after hundreds of actions and thousands of arrests, many participants saw little result for their efforts. A splinter alliance perceived a need for drastic escalation. “When ten years of sit-ins had failed to recriminalize abortion,” notes Maxwell today, “a call for violence surfaced—[from] an isolated minority. The injunction to murder came from the fringe. This was a like-minded group… decreasingly challenged in their own forums as dissenters abandoned them.”

With increasing frequency, clinics and other facilities were set aflame or firebombed.⁴ Protestors released acid into buildings, making them inoperative for weeks. And one by one the killings began. Between 1992 and 1996, two physicians, two clinic workers, and an assistant were slain. A half dozen more were wounded by gunfire.⁵ Dr. George Tiller, of Wichita, was shot in both arms by an assailant. (Sixteen years later, Tiller—having been repeatedly called out by the conservative press for performing thousands of abortions—would be murdered in cold blood while dispensing leaflets at his church.)

Much of the country, including most abortion opponents, looked on with alarm in the 1990s. Attorney General Janet Reno, law enforcement agencies, and the courts mobilized. Congress passed and the president signed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. And yet the murderous violence was a goad to some extremists, who adopted new predatory tactics. Doctors and medical practitioners were targeted, their homes picketed, their families threatened. Physicians’ names sprang up on antiabortion websites, their faces on “wanted” posters. Women seeking medical help were intimidated and shamed. “Patients were brazenly stalked and ‘outed,’” Paul Solotaroff would recount in Rolling Stone, “their names emblazoned on picket signs, their front steps daubed with [red paint].”

Elsewhere, there was another kind of combat going on. In state legislatures, lawmakers had begun to follow Pennsylvania’s lead. “Eighteen states now have legislation that mandates a waiting period,” Tina Rosenberg would report in Rolling Stone in 1996. “Twenty-eight states require women under 18 to notify or get the consent of one or both parents. Thirty-three states deny Medicaid coverage to poor women even when abortion is necessary to preserve their health.” Moreover, a ban on so-called partial-birth abortions—a late-term method to end pregnancy via “dilation and extraction”6—was passed by both houses of Congress, in 1995 and 1997. President Clinton vetoed it both times. (The ban, however, would go into effect with Bush II’s signature, in 2003.)

The battlefront kept shifting. And by the close of the ’90s, the right-to-life brigades had made concrete strategic gains. The laws they championed became the laws that prevailed. Their most radical acts proved to have been an effective deterrent. Clinics became scarce in many states. Health professionals left the practice in droves. Most young doctors-to-be opted out of training or specializing in reproductive health. “Abortion moved to the margins of medical practice,” according to journalist Emily Bazelon. “In 1995, the number of OB-GYN residencies offering abortion training fell to a low of 12 percent.”

At the same time, the notions of conception, abortion, and viable life had been repositioned in the public mind. More women were exploring the medical, familial, moral, and religious consequences of terminating a pregnancy, asking, “When does human life actually commence?”

Through it all, those seeking reproductive health care and family planning services have arguably been made less safe as a result of the strategies adopted by antiabortion advocates in the ’80s and ’90s. Clinics have been shuttered. Restrictive laws are still on the books. Measures have emerged to curtail funding for legal abortion. More women have had to take out loans to pay for their care. Schools have done away with comprehensive sex-ed classes. And there has been a distressing rise in the number of women taking matters into their own hands and attempting self-induced abortions. These added burdens and perils, according to the National Organization for Women, have disproportionately impacted “low-income women… women of color, as well as immigrant women and young women.”

“Women have to take days off work to get to clinics,” says Kate Michelman. “I know of women who drive to neighboring states and sleep in their cars through waiting periods. It is taking us [back] to the days when women seeking an abortion were demeaned, humiliated, and made to feel like criminals.” This has remained the barbarous reality across much of the nation, even though abortion remains legal and protected for every woman in the United States of America.

In 2016, the Supreme Court would deal a severe blow to the antiabortion cause by issuing its most impactful reproductive health opinion in a generation. The Court reaffirmed the pivotal 1992 ruling that forbade states (in this case, Texas) from putting an “undue burden” on any woman intending to terminate a pregnancy. The pro-choice camp had recouped its momentum—and the legal high ground—even if the Republican administration that took office in 2017 was avowedly pro-life, averse to funding Planned Parenthood, set on curtailing women’s rights to abortion services, and determined to continue nominating justices who would ultimately roll back Roe v. Wade.

But let’s return to the 1990s. As this confrontation got more heated, another was brewing on a second, decisive front: the struggle over domestic partnerships.

I am operating the video camera. Through the lens, my brother and his partner stand before a minister. They are encircled by dozens of friends and family in the courtyard arbor of Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Hotel. “This has to be an historical moment,” says William Stayton, a pastor and psychotherapist. “If you can imagine: a Jewish man and an unreligious man being brought together by a Baptist minister. Eat your heart out, Jerry Falwell.”

Stayton addresses my brother, Richard. “Will you be joined to Steven, to live together as friend, mate, and lover? Will you love and cherish him through all the changes of your lives?” Stayton then faces Richard’s partner. “Steven, will you love him as a person, respect him as an equal, sharing joy as well as sorrow, triumph as well as defeat?” Each in turn asserts, “I will.”

A friend, Ken George, steps forward. Heterosexual matrimony, he explains, typically holds the promise of affirmation. When a man and a woman are so joined, the couple’s loved ones, through their presence, are decreeing that for years to come they will recognize and honor the newlyweds’ relationship. This is not the case, George testifies, for same-sex partners. Instead, such couples, when ritually united, have historically tended to lose that support.

That day in Philadelphia, vows are exchanged, along with twin trinity rings of rose, white, and yellow gold. Then Stayton tells the assembled, “I present to you, Richard and Steven, partners in love.” A kiss seals their bond. A pianist breaks into “Our Love Is Here to Stay.”

The occasion is a commitment ceremony between Richard Friend and Steven Mauldin. The date is auspicious: June 24, 1994—the week that marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which forged what would become the modern LGBT movement in America.7 In fact, the following morning, many guests head north to join tens of thousands at the closing ceremony of New York City’s Gay Games and to attend events surrounding Stonewall 25.

Commitment ceremonies, while not uncommon at the time, were ahead of the curve. Straight and, to some degree, gay culture was largely resistant to the notion of same-sex matrimony.⁸ True, a pioneering case in Hawaii in 1991 had sought to force the state to officially recognize marriage equality. But Hawaii’s citizens, like those in several other states, had other ideas, voting to deny legal recognition of same-sex partnerships. In the meantime, lesbian and gay couples by the thousands were formally announcing their love and commitment in public.9 And through the work of lawyers such as Mary Bonauto, the first state supreme court in the union—Vermont’s, in 1997—gave blanket protection and benefits to all, no matter their sexual orientation. In April 2000, both houses of the Vermont legislature went on to pass a bill, signed by the governor, letting town clerks grant licenses to same-sex couples. Their unions, according to the statute, would be recognized by the state as enjoying “the same benefits, protections, and responsibilities under the law… as are granted to spouses in a civil marriage.”¹⁰

With two decades of hindsight, my brother—a diversity and leadership development expert with a PhD as a human sexuality educator—looks back fondly at the service. “There was a trend going on around commitment ceremonies,” Richard says, “but with little of the marriage-equality component you see now. Had it been a legal marriage, I probably wouldn’t have chosen it. In the ’90s there was actually a politics around not calling it marriage because to do so was viewed as supporting a heterosexist ideology. Today, I fully support marriage equality. But at that stage it was all about creating a community ritual, about engaging those around us to stand up and make a commitment to us as a couple.”

Steven, a textile expert, agrees. “It was partly political for Richard and me to have the ceremony,” he says, “to do it in an open way, to have it in a hotel—which would have turned us away just a few years before. And to do it on the anniversary of Stonewall was kind of like taking back the power and saying, ‘I’m a human being. I have rights.’ Having the ceremony was kind of like the ultimate coming-out.”

“The beauty of such ceremonies at the time,” Richard reflects, “was about formalizing a redefinition of what family is. It became our capacity to define our ‘family of choice,’ our ‘family of friends,’ on our own terms—above and beyond our ‘family of origin.’ Families changed in the ’90s. We started to see and accept blended families, cohabitating couples, more and more grandparents raising kids, etcetera.”

Another factor making their partnership particularly strong was the fact that Steven was HIV-positive, which no one in the family knew back then. “We never used language at the ceremony like ‘forever’ or ‘in sickness and in health,’” Richard continues. “The whole HIV bubble that surrounded our lives and that period makes ‘forever’ an odd construct to commit to. He was diagnosed in March of ’93. The diagnosis wasn’t a reason for me to leave the relationship and it would have been patronizing to have [provided] more of a reason to stay. But we supported each other through it. The summer after the ceremony, he got really sick and almost died. And because he wasn’t out about his status to his family or mine, that was hard and isolating.”

Steven recalls, “You were seeing real change in the Clinton era with regard to progressive matters involving sex and gender rights. But it was almost like a reverse of that—in some ways—for gays. A lot of people had died. And [our commitment to each other] was just kind of, ‘All right, what’s the real meaning here? How do I exist in this?’ In that period, it was a real political issue. And deeply personal. If I look back on it, I probably did want stability and a partner who cared for me and looked out for me, which was connected with my HIV status. When you think that you can die relatively easily, you look at things differently.”

Though Steven and Richard decided to end their partnership in 1999, to this day they remain connected as “family of choice.” Steven now admits, “I totally looked at the breakup as a failure in my life. We both saw it as a failure. We don’t now. And I think it’s good that we both are as close as we are still. I don’t think a lot of straight people do that.”

In the end, the civil-union and marriage-equality movements would stay the course and win the war. In the 2010s, leaders of both political parties would join forces in recognizing the constitutionality of domestic partnerships, even if many, especially on the right, had been forcefully resistant in the intervening years.11 Finally, thanks to struggles waged in the ’90s, the Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that marriage equality was indeed the law of the land. And so it shall remain for the near term, despite the current administration’s rollback of transgender rights, its stated desire to have states (not the federal government) set the terms for domestic partnerships—and Vice President Mike Pence’s history of opposing initiatives promoting LGBT equality.¹²

While the legal consensus was shifting in favor of marriage equality in the 1990s, domestic partnership laws faced one seemingly insurmountable roadblock: the Defense of Marriage Act. More than any other culture-war skirmish of the ’90s, it was this one to which social conservatives claimed a resounding victory.

The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act—DOMA—was introduced by thrice-married congressman Bob Barr, the Georgia Republican; cosponsored in the Senate by the twice-married majority leader, Bob Dole; and backed by a bipartisan wave of legislators. DOMA had been devised for three reasons. First, it would create a federal law that would void any state statute that recognized same-sex marriage. Second, it would legally define marriage as being the exclusive right and privilege of heterosexual couples. Third, it would curry favor with “family-values voters” on the eve of the 1996 elections. “Lacking anything better to do,” quipped the Economist, “America’s Senate has been busying itself banning something that is not legal anyway.… What is marriage ‘defended’ from? Divorce? Illegitimacy? No. In Hawaii two men want to wed, and the state courts there may let them do so.”

In truth, the institution of marriage was under pressure from every angle.13 The rates for first marriages were declining. Couples were getting married later in life. Divorce rates, meanwhile, were slowing but still at near-record levels, affecting half of all marriages. (Nearly 30 percent of couples who wed at the start of the ’90s were split up before the decade was out—even as more than two-thirds of ’90s marriages survived fifteen years or more.) For many young single mothers, there was little or no stigma associated with bearing children early. Other partners or parents were forgoing matrimony altogether. Or they were choosing, whether married or unmarried, not to bear children. By the end of the 1990s, two statistics represented all-time lows: only one in four households had stay-at-home moms; only one in four consisted of two-parent families with kids.14

Another less obvious partnership pattern was emerging: serial monogamy. As Andrew J. Cherlin writes in his eye-opening book The Marriage-Go-Round, many Americans were on a partnership carousel, getting into relationships earlier and with more frequency—and then extracting themselves, instead of sticking it out if things weren’t going right, only to recouple with new partners later on. A large demographic study comparing romantic relationships cross-culturally found that Americans between 1989 and 1997 “partner, unpartner, and repartner faster than do people in any other Western nation,” as Cherlin put it. “They form cohabiting relationships easily, but they end them after a shorter time than people in other nations. They tend to marry at younger ages. After a divorce, they tend to find a new partner more quickly.” The evidence pointed to a widespread personal desire—and cultural sanction—for having a single, largely exclusive romantic partner at any one time. And if that one didn’t work out, it was time for a do-over.15

Whatever the trends, social conservatives seemed poised to play the Defense of Marriage Act as a trump card in the 1996 presidential race. Bob Dole, who enthusiastically endorsed the legislation, was in line to become the Republican nominee for president. But before he got the nod, two remarkable twists would forever change the complexion of the decade.

First, Speaker Newt Gingrich, who’d been flying high the year before, took a nosedive.¹⁶ In one of the most self-destructive political acts of the era, Gingrich and his fellow House Republicans overplayed their hand in a heated budget battle with Bill Clinton. Trying to pressure the president to cut a deal, the Speaker engineered not one but two shutdowns of the federal government. And the maneuver backfired in epic fashion. American voters, come election time, would place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the Grand Old Party. (As fate would have it, the November 1995 shutdown—resulting in fewer staffers traversing the halls of the West Wing—would also precipitate the first intimate encounters between the president and White House intern Monica Lewinsky.)

The second surprise: Clinton, conferring with adviser Dick Morris, had begun to tack center-right on his social agenda. The president, hoping to broaden his electoral appeal in the wake of Gingrich’s 1994 midterm blitzkrieg, adopted what columnist Ross Douthat would later term “soft ‘values’ rhetoric on marriage and family.” Clinton got on the school-uniform bandwagon. He endorsed the V-chip, which was intended to give parents more control over their kids’ TV-viewing habits. He backed a sweeping welfare reform bill (as a way to incentivize people to work by forcing many off government assistance, but leaving millions in the lurch),17 prompting three high-profile assistant secretaries to quit. And in Clinton’s most out-of-character move of all, he announced he would actually sign the Defense of Marriage Act, outlawing legal recognition of gay and lesbian couples.

Critics said that the president, mindful that a veto might cost him the popular vote, was pandering yet again, smokescreening but not inhaling. Maybe so. But in the end, Clinton was above all a survivor. The sanctity—and heterosexual purity—of the institution of marriage, instead of becoming a Republican cudgel, had been neutralized. (While same-sex marriage, mid-decade, appeared to be on the ropes, the tide would eventually turn. The majority of Americans would line up in support of marriage equality, with commentators such as columnist Frank Rich calling Clinton’s support of DOMA “the most ignominious civil rights betrayal” of his presidency. But on this singular issue, for the remainder of the ’90s, the right emerged victorious and the left was resigned to waging its battle in the courts.)

Clinton, again, had finessed a culture-war fracas. Gingrich, who’d worked with his nemesis and GOP moderates to cobble a historic bill to balance the budget, swiftly saw his own approval numbers disintegrate, along with his power. He would be disciplined in 1997 by his fellow House members in a 395-to-28 vote—the first Speaker in history to receive such a rebuke for conduct unbecoming a congressman.

And what about Bob Dole? First, he would get trounced by Bill Clinton in the 1996 election, the incumbent having successfully “grabbed family values for the Democrats,” in the words of Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter.¹⁸ Second, in 1998 Dole would pull off what many considered a marketing masterstroke, and one that ingeniously blended politics, commerce, celebrity—and sexuality. The candidate, who’d lost to the national fall guy for sexual indiscretion, was hired by Pfizer—the makers of a new drug called Viagra—to help raise awareness about erectile dysfunction.

To be fair, Dole wasn’t actually shilling for Big Pharma. He was putting a public face on a public health issue by lending his status as a statesman, war hero, and ED sufferer. (His condition, he said, was a consequence of his having undergone prostate surgery.) “It’s a great drug,” the senator would tell talk-show host Larry King, explaining how he’d been a volunteer in early Viagra trials. “My wife was a little startled.”

Dole’s communications director, Douglas MacKinnon, recalls the senator’s decision to step forward, a red-state icon commending a little blue pill. “I’m not exaggerating,” MacKinnon says, there were “hundreds and hundreds of jokes… at his expense. [But] it was huge in terms of someone with Bob Dole’s profile being willing to put himself out there publicly on a pretty sensitive subject.”

The timing was uncanny, not just in terms of the Clinton-Dole dynamic but the entire culture war dustup. In early 1998, revelations emerged that the president had been involved in another extramarital affair. News reports would include graphic descriptions of sexual matters and would provide Republicans with even more explosive family-values ammo. The scandal plus Pfizer’s coincident rollout of Viagra plus Dole’s TV spots (“erectile dysfunction, ED, often called ‘impotence’”) would gum up the political news cycle with the indelible stain of sex.

“It was the summer in America when the nausea returned, when the joking didn’t stop,” wrote Philip Roth in his novel The Human Stain. “It was the summer when a president’s penis was on everyone’s mind, and life, in all its shameless impurity, once again confounded America.”

But first: the unlikely and largely untold story of Bob Dole’s wonder drug.