The making of gay marriage’s top foe
Salon exclusive: How Maggie Gallagher's college pregnancy made her a single mom, and a traditional marriage zealot
Topics: Editor's Picks, Gay Marriage, News, Politics News
In September 1978, Yale freshmen would not have voted Maggie Gallagher the member of the Class of 1982 most likely to get pregnant before graduation. Gallagher was the third of four children from a close family in Portland, Ore. When she was young, her parents, an investment banker and a housewife, had been active in their local Catholic parish, and Gallagher and her siblings spent some years in Catholic elementary school. As Gallagher got older, her parents began to drift away from the church, and Gallagher’s mother became something of a spiritual seeker (“She once took me to an Up With People concert,” Gallagher now recalls, ruefully.) But Gallagher herself moved to the right in high school. Like many precocious girls, she fell for Ayn Rand’s novels, including “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” and for Objectivism, Rand’s capitalist, acquisitive philosophy. (Gallagher’s other formative influence was the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein.) When she got to Yale, she only gingerly embraced the secular mores, the drinking and the drugs and the hookup culture, that defined life on liberal campuses in the late 1970s. She tried marijuana once and did not like it. She smoked cigarettes but, afraid of becoming addicted, never inhaled.
Gallagher’s earliest acquaintances at Yale remember a somewhat sheltered young woman, polite and likable, a bit startled by what she saw. One of the freshmen who shared Gallagher’s suite of rooms, Bird Jensen, now a musician in Australia, remembers Gallagher as “a born-again Christian” — which Gallagher was not, but the mistake is telling. She remembers Gallagher, who after all was from a progressive, metropolitan area, as if she were from a small town in the middle of the plains. “It was very different for her to have Jewish people celebrating Shabbat, or have a bunch of hippies strumming guitar, or punk people playing music in our room,” Jensen says. “That was all very new to her. But Maggie was friendly. She had strong views on things, but we all got along.” Another freshman suitemate, Faith Stevelman, now a professor at New York Law School, remembers Gallagher as intellectually provocative — “She was introducing me to ideas nobody else would introduce me to” — but a bit of a killjoy. “I think she was somewhat socially immature.” Although Gallagher recalls being totally happy to be at Yale — “It was the first time in my life I was surrounded by many intellectuals,” she says — Stevelman remembers a young woman who stiffened at everything risky about college in the 1970s: sex, drugs, radical politics. “She was not easygoing,” Stevelman says of her suitemate. “She wasn’t what you would call a fun roommate.”
As a freshman, Gallagher joined the Party of the Right, a debating society affiliated with the Yale Political Union. The YPU is a very large campus organization, with hundreds of members, whose main activity is to bring speakers to campus several times a month. But it is organized into “parties,” smaller clubs that meet for meals, pub nights and informal debates. Each party has its own flavor, political and cultural. The Tory Party is right-of-center and high Anglophile (the men wear tweed, the women plan to take their future husbands’ last names); the Liberal Party is left-of-center, earnest and wonkish. The Party of the Right has the deepest culture of the half-dozen or so parties. Its membership is diverse, comprising libertarians and monarchists, Catholic traditionalists and Objectivists, monetarists and distributivists. But they share a passionate, if often pretentious, reverence for the life of the mind. Members of the Party of the Right often major in philosophy, and they prefer debating questions about God or the Good to mundane matters of policy.
The party’s intentional eccentricity — when I was at Yale, in the 1990s, several Party of the Right men affected hats and trench coats — helps explain its reputation for cultishness. For many members, the party becomes their entire social world, and so it is not surprising that party romances are common. As a senior, Gallagher began seeing a fellow party member, a sophomore who wrote conservative editorials for a campus magazine and dreamed of being a doctor.
Today, they have different memories of the relationship — how long they had been dating, how close they were — but on one fact they agree: 30 years ago this spring, months before she was supposed to graduate, Gallagher discovered she was pregnant. Then, as now, Yale students did not get pregnant — or if they did, no baby came of it. But Gallagher knew she would have this baby. At first, she planned to give the baby up for adoption, but she soon changed her mind. The father, however, was not interested in being a father. Or so she says.
On a mild November day, Gallagher and I are upstairs at City Bakery, near Union Square in Manhattan, where after months of requests she has agreed to meet me. As Gallagher tells it, she and the baby’s father were close; they had been together “on the order of one year,” she says, so he might have been expected to stand by her. “My son’s father was my boyfriend at Yale,” is how she describes their relationship. But when she told him she was pregnant, right before spring break in 1982, he vanished on her. “I was in his room and he had to go do something, and I was going to fly out in a couple of hours, had to get to the airport. And the last thing he said to me was, ‘I’ll be back in 30 minutes.’ And then he wasn’t.”
He just left her sitting in his room. And that was the end of them. When summer came, Gallagher moved home to Oregon and took some classes to finish her degree. In the fall, she gave birth to a baby boy, Patrick.
The next year, Gallagher says, she and the father reconciled and moved in together. He was still in school, and they shared a house by the Connecticut shore with some other undergraduates. “It was one of those things that you have to be pretty young and stupid to think is going to work, because it was a very collegiate environment and, you know, basically my parents were supporting me. And so, you know, we, we broke up. I moved into a separate apartment, and he came by occasionally.” He graduated, and soon they were living near one another — she was commuting from Jersey City to Manhattan, to work at National Review, the conservative magazine, and he was in Harlem. He occasionally baby-sat for Patrick, until one day, after staying with his son while she attended a conference, he decided he wanted out. “He called me up the next day, or the next, and said that he couldn’t do it anymore, and that he didn’t really want to have anything to do with either of us,” Gallagher says. “And that was it.”
The father remembers it differently. When I ask if he and the woman he got pregnant in college were indeed a couple, he thinks for a moment, then says, “Sort of.”
He is not pleased to have been found after all these years. To get him to speak, I have promised to keep his identity secret. He became a doctor, as planned. He lives in a small town on the East Coast with his wife and family. He has not spoken to his son or to his son’s mother since that final break in the mid-1980s. He knows who she has become — she is in the newspaper and on television — but he does not pay much attention to her writings. “I don’t read them extensively, because I don’t agree with them, and I find it personally painful to do so, as you might imagine.”
His memories are vague, and rather self-serving. It seems that he did not work very hard to stay in his son’s life, but after thinking on it he apportions some of the blame to the boy’s mother. “To the best that I can recall,” he says, “initially she did want both of us to be involved in parental responsibilities, but from the beginning it was always on her terms. It’s hard to describe. It seemed to me at the time that she had an idea of how she wanted things to go, and it was not particularly important whether I had an idea of how things would go or not.” I ask if he might have done more, 30 years ago, to make the three of them into a family. “There’s a million things I wish I’d done differently back then,” but, he adds, “it would have required me to be a different person.”
That was not really his fault, Gallagher says. Neither of them thought they should get married. Nobody did. “There was literally no one — not his mother, not my parents, not the counselor I talked to, none of my friends, nobody in that world,” she says, who suggested they get married. “And in fact I would say the concern was that we not get married” — that they avoid the mistake of marrying too young.
“But I think, looking back, that if he had said, ‘You know, Maggie, I love you, I love you, let’s get married,’ I would’ve been thrilled. You know, he was my boyfriend.”
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Counterfactual history is a dangerous business, but it seems fair to say that Gallagher’s was the non-marriage that changed the world. If that sophomore cad had married Gallagher, she might never have become a writer. “I don’t know what I would have done,” she tells me. “I became a writer because I had a baby and had to make money.” And what she writes about is same-sex marriage: why it’s bad for children, bad for America, simply bad. In her books and newspaper columns, and above all in her fundraising and political organizing, Gallagher has done more than any American to stop same-sex marriage. The organization she founded in 2007, the National Organization for Marriage, helped organize the successful effort in 2008 to pass Proposition 8 in California, overturning that state’s same-sex-marriage statute. (A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that it violated the Constitution, setting up a likely appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.) In 2009, her organization contributed over 60 percent of the entire budget of Stand for Marriage Maine, the primary organization behind Proposition 1, the referendum that overturned Maine’s same-sex marriage law. In 2010, National Organization for Marriage money helped determine the election that ousted three Iowa Supreme Court justices who had upheld same-sex marriage.
Gallagher stepped down as president of the National Organization for Marriage in 2010 — before it made news by doctoring a photograph of a thronging Obama rally to make an anti-gay-marriage rally look well attended. She was its chairwoman until last August, but now writes a blog called Culture War Victory Fund, which offers commentary on “marriage, life [and] religious liberty.” The organizations Gallagher founded, and the fundraising and activist networks she continues to build, are active everywhere that same-sex marriage — currently legal in six states and Washington, D.C. — is being contested. Her armies are working to pass anti-gay-marriage amendments in North Carolina and Minnesota and to stop gay-marriage bills or referendums in Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Washington state. In 2011, when New York state passed its gay-marriage law, the number of people living in states that permitted same-sex marriage doubled; in 2012, the number could double again. The issue has not yet dominated the presidential race, largely because the Republican candidates are uniform in their opposition; but it’s hard to see how same-sex marriage will not roar back in the general election.
Which means this could be the year of Maggie Gallagher. Among the leading generals in the fight against same-sex marriage, she is not as cerebral as Robert P. George, the Princeton professor whose articles provide intellectual ammo for the movement; and she does not move as smoothly across enemy lines as her former boss David Blankenhorn, whose politic tone makes him gay-marriage supporters’ friendliest enemy. But Gallagher is shrewd, she is indefatigable and she is everywhere, from Fox News to a campus near you. If you turn on C-SPAN and see a stout, black-haired, middle-aged woman in modest clothing — the stern elementary school teacher who, you later realized, taught you all the grammar you know — patiently explaining to a campus auditorium of skeptical, liberal collegians why the definition of marriage is immutable, you are watching Maggie Gallagher.
Gallagher’s unplanned pregnancy — so great a rupture in a young conservative woman’s sense of life’s proper path, coming at so young an age — focused her politics, and gave her traditional-family conservatism a messianic tinge. But her path to marriage activism was not quite so straight and uncomplicated. When Gallagher returned to the New Haven area the year after graduation, to live with her son’s father, she continued to socialize with her conservative crowd. One of her fellow campus conservatives, Charles Bork, the son of the future Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, got Gallagher her first work in journalism. Along with another student, Bork had sneaked into Afghanistan one spring break to take pictures of the anti-Communist mujahedin. When Bork’s traveling companion failed to produce the accompanying article he had promised to write, Bork asked Gallagher to step in, and on Aug. 28, 1983, the New Republic published her article “Inside Afghanistan.” Gallagher was soon hired at National Review, where her early pieces included articles on pro-life politics, attacks on Legal Services, an essay about the nascent “men’s movement,” a review of a book about Afghanistan, a penetrating analysis of the “Baby M” surrogacy case, and a sympathetic obituary for the Bork nomination (in which she never mentions that Bork’s son was her close friend and patron).
As a Yale-educated journalist living in Brooklyn, Gallagher was an enviable type. Although being a young single mother made her unusual, nothing about her situation was an obvious prescription for bitterness. But in 1989, when Patrick was 7, Gallagher published a book that remains startling for its combination of sadness and anger; it’s hard to believe any author can sound so hopelessly disappointed before the age of 30. In a sense, “Enemies of Eros,” a jeremiad about the sorry state of sexual culture and gender relationships, must have been gestating since her son was born. Its author is sad that lifelong marriage is no longer an accepted norm; that many children do not grow up with fathers; that sex has been decoupled from marriage and parenthood. And she is angry at everyone she finds culpable for these changes, including “elite women, magazine editors, book publishers, screenwriters, advice columnists, and auteurs who are the moral guardians of the new generation, mentors to guide young women through the thickets of modernity into a sexual utopia that seems to be receding ever further into the horizon.”
Gallagher charges these women, sitting in “their perch atop the towers of Manhattan,” with conspiring — “conspiracy” is indeed her word — to delude women into thinking that the sexes are basically the same. But the sexes are obviously not the same, Gallagher argues. Men are different. “Sometimes they prefer a hotel room to a house in the suburbs, or beg us to exchange bodily fluids without ever exchanging phone numbers. Sometimes they do not appreciate that making a baby is making a long-term commitment you cannot just walk out on when you’re feeling unfulfilled.” Because men are so different, society developed norms to pressure men to take responsibility they might wish to avoid. The naive hope of the women’s movement, that gender roles could wither away, has only tangled ladies’ stockings in a hopeless knot: Without marriage norms, and the sex norms that go with them, men can get away with anything — all the sex they want, and no more of the housework than before.
Undoing feminism’s damage will involve better laws, retrenching to older views of gender, and gentle condescension to men. Gallagher was years ahead of her time in arguing, as writers like Kay Hymowitz do today, that contemporary society has left men without a role. “We will never find a solution to the New Man shortage, unless we jettison gender neutrality,” Gallagher writes. “Men need a role in the family. What men need, loath though we are to utter the word, is a sex role.” Gallagher approvingly offers the example, drawn from a Wall Street Journal article, of one Millie Stephens, “a 28-year-old manager for Bell of Pennsylvania who earns $46,000 a year.” Her husband, Carl, a state trooper, earns $31,000 a year, and “to disguise her salary, they put all of her earnings in the bank and live off his income.” “Mrs. Stephens” also washes the dishes and irons her husband’s shirts. “I don’t mind treating him like a man,” she says.
Starting with “Enemies of Eros,” marriage policy became the focus of Gallagher’s career. In September 1992, while she was working as an editor at City Journal, the conservative journal she helped found, Vice President Dan Quayle criticized the television character Murphy Brown for becoming a single mother by choice. It was a perfect occasion to see the contemptible liberal elites in action: They swarmed Quayle, attacking him for his backwardness. In the vice president’s defense, Gallagher wrote “An Unwed Mother for Quayle,” an Op-Ed column for the New York Times in which she offers her bits of advice, learned over 10 years of single-mothering, for women who might be tempted to follow Murphy Brown’s lead. “Have relatively affluent parents who got and stayed married themselves,” she writes. “Be able to choose a profession with flexible hours … Find a boss who doesn’t mind if you bring a sick 4-year-old and his dinosaurs to the office, which will happen regularly … Expect to give up all the advantages of single life — freedom, romance, travel … Prepare for the nights when your child cries himself to sleep in your arms, wondering why his father doesn’t love him.”
Although she was, for the time being, without a father for her son, Gallagher was not alone. Co-workers at National Review remember a cheery young woman with a gift for friendship. And Sherry Weaver, who met Gallagher on their sons’ first day in kindergarten at P.S. 321, in Park Slope, moved in with Gallagher and Patrick after her third marriage fell apart, in 1992. Weaver remembers a crowded and happy house, filled with guests, many of them from the conservative movement. Charles Bork was often there, and sometimes stayed over.
Weaver says that Gallagher is one of the kindest people she has ever met, and that Gallagher was happy to blend their families for months on end. “She housed my two children and me for seven months,” Weaver told me in an email. “But it was not in the spare bedroom or the family room downstairs in some out-of-the-way space that would not interfere with her life. No, she lived in a small two-bedroom house, so we slept in her bed and she slept on the couch. She slept on the couch for seven months! Who would do that? And she did it with grace and generosity. She paid all the bills, gave me some work that I did horribly, in order to give me money. She did all the cooking and nurtured us with unbelievable kindness. She was never grumpy or out of sorts. My children and I were completely traumatized, and this time with Maggie was a time of healing for us.”
One of the other frequent guests, Weaver says, was Raman Srivastav, a fellow conservative from Gallagher’s Yale days. “He was always around the house when I was living with her,” Weaver says. Near the end of Weaver’s seven months in residence, Gallagher and Srivastav got engaged. Weaver moved out, around Christmastime, Gallagher and Srivastav married on Jan. 2, 1993, and immediately afterward he moved in. Gallagher is coy about their courtship — “How do things go from friendship to more?” she muses, and that’s as much as she will say. David Wagner, now a law professor at Regent University, knew both Gallagher and Srivastav in the Party of the Right, and he puts a romantic spin on their eventual union: “She eventually married another Party member who had adored her from the beginning, and he adopted Patrick and gave them a better life. And that is a happy outcome.”
In 1996, Gallagher began writing a weekly newspaper column, published a second book, “The Abolition of Marriage: How We Destroy Lasting Love,” and joined the Institute for American Values, a New York think tank. David Blankenhorn, the institute’s founder, says he is a political liberal, and his image is that of a cosmopolitan: He is a Harvard graduate, a Presbyterian with a Jewish wife, and to all appearances an unconflicted New Yorker (although born in Mississippi). Blankenhorn founded his institute in 1987 to unite those of varying political persuasions around the urgency of keeping nuclear families together. (Blankenhorn’s first book was called “Fatherless America.”) Today, Blankenhorn is second only to Gallagher as the face of the anti-gay-marriage movement: In 2010 he was a witness for the defense in the appellate trial over Proposition 8, the ballot measure that ended same-sex marriage in California. But until recently he tried to keep his institute away from so divisive an issue.
When she joined Blankenhorn’s institute, Gallagher was not interested in same-sex marriage either. She was busy writing about easy divorce, out-of-wedlock births, and the high costs of feminism. Gay men and lesbians, for their part, were focused on increased funding for AIDS research, hate-crimes statutes, and the dim prospect of someday, maybe, ending “don’t ask, don’t tell.” They did not believe they would live to see the legalization of same-sex marriage, and neither, of course, did Maggie Gallagher.
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In early April 2003, the Institute for American Values invited two dozen activists, scholars and journalists to Osprey Point, a conference center near the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, for a “marriage leaders summit.” Wade Horn, the Bush administration’s point man for pro-marriage policies, was there, as was Ann Hulbert, then of the New York Times Magazine; Will Marshall, of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute; and David Popenoe, who runs the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court had agreed to hear the Goodridge case the following November, and Gallagher suspected, correctly, that same-sex marriage would become the central front, in fact the only front, in the marriage wars. This gathering was probably the last occasion that a large group with reasonably diverse political views could amicably discuss marriage.
“The official meeting had nothing to do with gay marriage,” Gallagher says. “But it was the first time I remember sitting down and at least expressing my concern. Before that time — I don’t think, I can’t say for sure — but I had rarely if ever thought about or read about or taken same-sex marriage seriously, and it was at that meeting I first raised the question, which is what do people who care about marriage think about this same-sex marriage issue, because it’s not theoretical. It’s coming.”
The meeting lasted three days, and one evening, after the main sessions had ended, Gallagher gathered a group of attendees to talk about same-sex marriage. “The questions began by talking about what people think about homosexuality,” Gallagher recalls. “And I said that’s a perfectly legitimate question, but that’s not my concern. My concern is that marriage really matters because children need a mom and a dad, and after gay marriage, I can’t say that anymore. I won’t be allowed to say it. Marriage will not be about that anymore. We will not have an institution dedicated to putting together mothers and fathers and children.”
As Gallagher saw it, her fellow marriage enthusiasts were not prepared to face the implications of same-sex marriage. “It was a new idea for them,” she says. Blankenhorn, her boss, was as unsure as the rest, she says, and after they returned from Osprey Point he expressed his concern that if the Institute for American Values became entangled with same-sex marriage, it would find itself on one side of a very bloody culture battle. “He felt quite rightly that my doing what I wanted to do would be distracting to the main mission of the institute,” Gallagher says.
In November 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, and the following spring same-sex marriage came to Massachusetts. By that time, Gallagher had left the institute — Blankenhorn refused to be quoted for this article — and founded the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, a small think tank promoting conservative positions on all aspects of marriage, including no-fault divorce law, adoption and, of course, same-sex marriage. IMAPP had its largest budget in 2005, when it reported income of just over $413,000. By 2008, the last year it made public its tax forms, revenue was down to about $161,000, the bulk of which, $125,000, went to Gallagher’s salary.
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