This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Ketantam. And you know what, in a few years they'll die out. In classrooms, workplaces, and social settings, homophobes targeted gay people with violence. And Matthew Shepard was beaten last weekend high-fool wooden fence by two men who met Shepard in a bar in Laramie, Wyoming.
Eighteen hours later, a passing bicyclist summoned help after almost mistaking Shepard's bloody body for a scarecrow. There were few places to escape. Homophobia was widespread throughout the Western world. Being accomplished or brilliant was no defense.
Alan Turing, the mathematician who helped the Allies win the Second World War by working to crack Hitler's communication codes, was prosecuted by the British government for having a sexual relationship with another man. The state gave him two options, prison or chemical castration. He chose the chemicals. 16 days before his 42nd birthday, he killed himself.
The pain of the past is not the focus of our episode today. It is only the backdrop. But it is necessary to see this backdrop clearly to understand something very new and very surprising. Things have changed dramatically in the United States when it comes to attitudes about gay people.
This is actually one of the most surprising things in the whole history of public opinion in the United States. What we see in attitudes towards gay rights is a really stunning change over time, sooner than almost anybody thought possible. This week on Hidden Brain, this is huge. The psychological strategies behind one of the most dramatic transformations of public attitude, ever recorded.
How can it be that an attitude that was as vicious as this one has changed? Lori Lightfoot becomes the first black woman and the first openly gay person ever elected mayor in Chicago. Each of you, one day, can be the mayor of Chicago. Pete Buttigieg, he's 37 years old, and he's the life's best.
The most important thing in my life, my marriage to Chaston, is something that exists by the grace of a single vote on the U.S. report. Love, commitment, family, inclusion. And the surprising lessons this story holds for anyone who seeks to bring about change.
Dignity, respect, normalcy, normalcy, liberation, not assimilation. Whoop, parents, whoop, parents, whoop. At DID Electrical, we know getting a new appliance is genuinely exciting. A fridge with more space, thrilling.
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most travel insurers see your lost bag as a lost bag but bhi multi-trip sees the head melt the lost party dress oh with coverage of all your trips all year from 63 euro there'll be less melted heads and more melted ice cream bhi multi-trip that's at bhi just travel insurance terms and conditions apply prices for adults 18 to 64 bhi healthcare that trading is bhi healthcare is regulated by the central bank of our land and it's tight constant insurance your membership for bhi multi-trip travel insurance between packing passports and racing to check in holiday prep can be well pure chaos but your travel money that you can take off long before you leave pop into your local post office today to sort your travel money in either cash or card instantly and now on post will even buy back your unused cash when you return if you haven't spent it on ice cream service visit your local post office today on post money making better happen when william cox was a child he noticed something about the world so i'm in the family of five and we're all adopted i'd observe how my sister who's very dark-skinned got treated differently than her twin brother who's very light-skinned um people would see him as white and treat him completely differently than how they would treat her um because they perceived her as black or hispanic in time william discovered that like his sister he too was an outsider as i um grew up i came to realize that um i was gay and then that in and of itself brought about different treatment the challenge in william's case wasn't just at school my parents are mormon um and mormons are not um very much a favorite people being gay and so that created a lot of conflict with us i came up to them when i was 18 and um living at home and still going to college it became just a big argument um that i don't know i was being influenced by society i remember they blamed will and grace was one of the things that that came up in the argument and it's just kind of it's kind of incoherent because it was a big yelling crying sort of affair as they argued he says they kept discovering new things to disagree about william told his parents that given the church's views on homosexuality he had no interest in going on the traditional mission trip when he was 18. and then one day my dad and i um were driving home from somewhere and got in a big fight it was about religion again and my dad said uh you just love stabbing us in the heart don't you something like that and i said to him don't be so dramatic um and then he pulled over the car took my backpack out of the back seat and tossed it in the ditch on the side road and said that's dramatic william got out of the car he says his father drove off leaving him clutching his backpack by the side of the road how did you get home that day i didn't um so that's kind of one of those moments in life where um you know what he later says is that he just expected me to walk the rest of the way home and i i just kind of i guess i went to i don't know crisis mode or what i just kind of shut off a lot of emotional reaction i was just like well what are the next steps what do i need to do he knew he needed a place to stay and he needed to complete a school assignment i had a friend who worked at a hotel downtown and i went there and used their business center to finish a paper that was doing my english class the next day and then um i mean i was i was homeless for a little while i slept on friends couches things like that got a job at wendy's and stayed in school and and here i am now william became a social psychologist at the university of wisconsin madison he studies stereotypes it's been more than 15 years since that incident on the road with his father i asked him how things turned out with his parents my dad you know he got very hot at that moment but um he's a very loving man and he loves me and has apologized and i know he really regrets what happened over time william says his father started to look at gay rights through a new frame he had been a high school history teacher and had been deeply influenced by martin luther king jr and the civil rights movement after this kind of emotional period right after i came out he started drawing parallels to what lgbt people are going through to the civil rights movement and i think his overarching principles of fairness um really kind of started shining through with relations to this things have changed so much that william now looks forward to gatherings with his parents when i first spoke to him it was in the fall and uh they're coming down to have thanksgiving at my house with me and my partner um in a couple weeks from throwing out your son on the side of a road to sitting down to thanksgiving dinner with your son and his partner the art of william's story mirrors a dramatic change across the united states this is actually one of the most surprising things in the whole history of public opinion michael rosenfeld is a sociologist at stanford there's more and more rapid change in attitudes towards gay rights in the past 30 years in the united states than there ever has been in recorded attitudes in the united states on any issue michael sites data from the general social survey one of the most important and reliable ways of tracking over time how americans think they have a pretty good history of long time frame of asking the same questions about gay rights over time let's take one specific question starting in the late 1980s the general social survey periodically asked americans whether gay people should have the right to marry in 1988 when the general social survey first asked the question about same-sex marriage only 11.6 of respondents said that they thought same-sex couples should have the right to marry you have to remember 11.6 is almost as low as you can get it's hard to get less than five percent on any question so 11.6 is really everyone was against it almost but by 2018 the number of americans who said same-sex couples should have the right to marry was 68 that's a really dramatic change it's rare for public opinion on contested issues to change that much at first survey researchers thought that what was happening with gay rights was only generational change younger people with more liberal attitudes were giving survey researchers different answers than older people with more conservative attitudes but when michael looked at the data he found lots and lots of people like william's parents people who in a matter of years had fundamentally changed their outlook even though it was sort of democrats and liberals who were more likely to be open to gay rights it turned out that there were plenty of evangelical christians rural people republican voters who actually changed their mind on these issues now you can argue that public opinion can sometimes change quickly during wartime views about an enemy can intensify from negative feelings to outright hatred but when was the last time you heard of half the country reversing its views on an important issue of course there are many parts of the world where coming out as gay is still dangerous and there are many pockets of prejudice throughout the united states but the tide has turned dramatically psychological tests show that what people are seeing and doing is mirrored by changes in their brains for roughly two decades harvard psychologist mazarin banaji has tracked what she calls the implicit or hidden prejudices of millions of americans her tests measure attitudes toward a number of groups over the last decade there has been one dramatic change so the most surprising result comes from the sexuality test what we see there on the implicit attitude okay i'm not talking now about what people say i'm talking about what the automatic response is on the test we see a 33 percent drop in anti-gay bias this is huge if researchers like michael and mazarin sound a little stunned by their data it's because they are this was not a simple negative attitude gay people have been killed so how can it be that an attitude that was as vicious as this one has changed in a thought experiment mazarin and her colleagues have extended the trend lines of the data to see how long it would take for bias to be entirely eliminated to be clear this isn't a prediction about what is going to happen it just shows you the speed at which different biases are changing the forecast show that if things go swimmingly well in nine years anti-gay attitudes will be all but eliminated that we will reach neutrality by contrast when it comes to race issues the projections are it will take nearly six decades for americans to see blacks and whites the same way biases about skin tone preferences for lighter skin or darker skin that should take 138 years if current trends persist biases against the elderly ageism here's tessa charlesworth a researcher working with mazarin implicit gauge attitudes will not reach neutrality even within the next 150 years ageism and prejudice toward people with disabilities and those who are overweight appear to be rampant and stubbornly persistent what do you think drove the remarkable change in attitudes to our gay people mazarin says she asks herself that question all the time i was in london this summer uh watching from my hotel room um a pride parade and i was mesmerized happiness everywhere london police marching uh gay police and straight police in support of gay police i saw banners of you know the largest uh for-profit corporations in the world marching goldman sachs uh pwc ey each with their own banners and i asked myself what would a black lives matter parade look like would the police be marching uh would would these corporations have a banner uh in a parade of that kind i doubt it so yes something has happened but to us the question is why most travel insurers see your lost bag as a lost bag but bhi multi-trips sees the head melt the last party dress with coverage of all your trips all year from 63 euro there'll be less melted heads and more melted ice cream bhi multi-trip that's how bhi does travel insurance terms and conditions applied prices for adults 18 to 64. bhi health care dot trading is bhi health care is regulated by the central bank of varland and it's tight cons and insurance your membership for bhi most future travel insurance between packing passports and racing to check in holiday prep compete well pure chaos but your travel money that you can take off long before you leave pop into your local post office today to sort your travel money in either cash or card instantly and now on post will even buy back your unused cash when you return if you haven't spent it on ice cream service visit your local post office today on post money making better happen on june 28th 1969 police raided a bar in new york city the stonewall inn for decades gay bars like this one had been targeted by police raids anti-sodomy laws made it a criminal offense to live openly as a gay person in most places in the united states but on that steamy summer night under the glow of a full moon something changed witnesses said that if police dragged people out one woman shouted out to her fellow patrons why don't you guys do something why don't you guys do something why don't you guys do something why don't you guys do something they did Riots broke out. Within an hour, the surrounding streets were surging with people.
Police were outnumbered. They sought shelter inside the very bar they had come to rave. People threw bricks. They smashed windows.
But it was a creative energy. The rioters were building something new, demolishing an old structure to make way for a new one with fewer closets. Many historians look at the start of the modern gay rights movement to the Stonewall riots. Of course, history doesn't come with a start date.
You can go back further and find examples of activism. But Stonewall was a pivotal moment. Gay people were saying, enough, stop harassing us. But the protest also did something else.
Sociologist Michael Rosenfeld says, for the first time in the lives of many Americans, gay people were making themselves visible. It's in the period when gay and lesbian people come out of the closet that straight Americans' attitude about gay rights really start to shift. It turned out that gay people had a singular advantage that many racial minorities do not. Gay people were embedded within the homes and the communities of those who thought gay people were an abomination.
Most gay and lesbian people have heterosexual parents. So within the same family, you have relatives who are gay and relatives who are straight, whereas the family system segregates not completely, but almost completely, whites and blacks. And then it's also true that because gays and lesbians are in the same families as heterosexual people, they have the same socioeconomic background and they're geographically integrated with them. So there were just a lot of more opportunities for straight people to meet gay people who were similar status to themselves.
Parents with gay kids often had to grapple with a form of cognitive dissonance. As psychologist Mazarin Bananji says, many parents were forced to choose between their love for their children and their pre-existing attitudes about homosexuality. Many people have changed their attitudes towards the group because a child came out. In any reckoning of why attitudes to why gay people change so fast, coming out of the closet is a central part of the story.
But of course, this doesn't entirely explain the mystery of why anti-gay attitudes have declined so dramatically. Think about other groups that face persistent discrimination in our society. Old people are found across all income groups in black and white families in all parts of the country. Like many gay people, the elderly have had long associations with others before they became elderly.
And yet, as we noted earlier, implicit biases against old people have hardly budged. Implicit gay attitudes will not reach neutrality even within the next 150 years. Or consider women. They are also embedded in the homes of people who are avowed misogynist.
Women's deep connections and daily presence as moms and sisters and wives and daughters and friends and colleagues have not eradicated the persistence of inequality and abuse. People around the world are coming forward on social media to share their stories of sexual abuse. Hashtag me too. Me too.
Women are consistently paid less than men. Maternal wall, referring to discrimination against hiring or promoting mothers based on his... I never reported that I concealed my injuries and taught the next morning. Me too.
What explains the very different trajectory in our attitudes toward gay people? Scientists at the National Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta today released the results of a study which shows that the lifestyle of some male homosexuals has triggered an epidemic of a rare form of cancer. One answer lies in the response to a crisis that befell the gay community, and especially gay men, in the 1980s. AIDS broke the silence about who gay people are.
This is gay rights activist Evan Wilson. It led non-gay people to see gay people as members of families, as parts of couples, as people who were grieving, as people who were fighting, working to care for one another, struggling against discrimination, having courage and dignity in the face of awful death. It prompted gay people to understand our vulnerability in being excluded from institutions and law, such as marriage. It changed our movement from being a movement about wanting to be basically let alone, don't harass us, don't attack us, don't persecute us, into a movement about being let in.
We want to be part of it. We want to participate. We want to share. The epidemic also galvanized organizing efforts.
Head up! White bear! White hate! Head up!
White bear! White hate! History will be gone! Reagan and Bush did nothing at all!
History will be gone! Reagan and Bush did nothing at all! D.C. D.C.
D.C. HIV! Activists carried ashes of dead family members and flung them on the lawn of the White House. Bring the dead to your door!
White bear! Bring the dead to your door! We won't take it anymore! Bring your foot!
You behind! We charge you with genocide! Protesters disrupted scientific meetings to demand better medical care. We have seized control of the FDA.
About 20 people sat down walking a four-lane street. Watched drivers became angry. You're blocking my road! You bunch of queers like faggots!
You bunch of queers like faggots! Get out of my road! By the summer of 1992, protests began to translate into recognition on the political stage. And yet for too long, politicians have told the most of us that are doing all right that what's really wrong with America is the rest of us.
At the Democratic National Convention, presidential candidate Bill Clinton talked about gay rights during his speech accepting his party's nomination. Them the poor! Them the homeless! Them the people with disabilities!
Them the gays! We've gotten to where we've merely them-ed ourselves to death! Them and them and them! As president, Bill Clinton was not seen as a beacon for gay rights.
Activists today believe he did not do enough. He had campaigned on the idea that all people should be allowed to serve in the military, regardless of sexual orientation. But once in office, he supported Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the military ban on openly gay service members. It went into effect during his first term.
A few years later, the Republican-controlled Congress passed and Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, codifying that marriage should be only between men and women. But sociologist Michael Rosenfeld argues that as a presidential candidate for a major party in 1992, Bill Clinton sent an important message. Gay rights was civil rights. Prior to 1992, Democrats and Republicans were similarly opposed to gay rights.
And after 1992, Democrat voters in the 90s started to be more approving of gay rights, and Republicans also started to be more approving, but the gap between Democrats and Republicans really started to grow right around 1992. So that's another indication that the presidential politics have an influence. This is America. There is no them.
There is only us. As more people signed on to the gay rights movement in the 1990s, Hollywood studios and TV networks began to turn more stories about gay people. I'm so afraid to tell people. I mean, I'm just...
Susan, I'm gay. I'm not making any value judgments here. I mean, I don't care that Frank is gay, but he is gay. Based on what?
The Frank Fontana gay-o-meter? Nothing about the guy. What's wrong? Are you talking...
All right. Her name is Marla. I'm seeing a woman. So as you can see, lots of things built on one another.
Activism around AIDS drew headlines and policy changes. Politicians began to respond to these activists. The entertainment industry began telling the stories of gay people. But does this really solve the mystery of the rapid decline in homophobia in the United States?
If political activism and attention from Hollywood were enough to combat bias, wouldn't we also see a faster decline in misogyny and white supremacy? Women and people of color have been fighting for equal rights, often on a bigger scale and over a longer time period. there is one answer to why attitudes toward gay people have changed faster than racist or sexist attitudes not all prejudices are the same some in fact may have deeper roots as gay rights activist evan wilson acknowledges the stakes involved in entrenched racism in the entrenched subordination of women are really for most people much greater than the stakes involved in the sort of casual almost unthinking subordination of gay people so in essence it was almost easier to crack not that it's easy and not that it's done but but the singularity of racism and the way in which we're carved up by race and the singularity of the experience of women and the subordination of women the stakes in social structure around that um may mean that you can't just immediately say oh this work for this so it's exactly the same for the others they're not the same they're not the same and yet the data also suggest that we are missing something important while the change in attitudes toward gay people has been building for a long time the pace of change has dramatically accelerated in recent years remember we said that pro-gay marriage attitudes stood at 68 percent in 2018 just two years before that it was 59 percent for a long time such rapid change seemed inconceivable gays and lesbians are going to remember 2004 11 states passed anti-gay marriage laws president bush wants to amend the constitution to ban gay marriage and california courts invalidated the marriages performed last spring now gay activists are debating how to move forward if you look at positive attitudes toward gay people the graph turns upward sharply after 2004 when we come back what drove the transformation and the painful choices that often confront change makers at did electrical we know getting a new appliance is genuinely exciting a fridge with more space thrilling a washing machine that's actually 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christianity social tolerance and homosexuality by a man named john boswell a professor and it was a sweeping history of the first four thousand years of the west's treatment of homosexuality and gay people and how different societies and different centuries within this period had treated gay people evan learned that gay people have not always been treated as second class citizens but there have been many societies in history where there was little distinction made between gay and straight and so the lesson i took from the book was that if things had once been different they could be different again we could change things evan asked a deceptively simple question in his thesis i thought the main reason why gay people are discriminated against is because of who we love who we love is what is disdained here and so i thought okay well how do we how do we change that how do we change that understanding what is the central structure what is the central language in which love is regulated in which love is understood in which love is valued and in our society as in virtually every other throughout human history that central structure that central language is marriage marriage the very first lawsuits arguing that gay people should have a right to marry will file soon after the stonewall riots but marriage equality as it would come to be known was a peripheral part of the gay rights movement evan started working as a pro bono lawyer for gay rights organizations in the 1980s he tried to bring what he had written in his law school thesis to his activism i immediately began arguing that we needed to have a strategy for including winning marriage in the mix of things we were working on the idea seemed far-fetched there were those who were opposed to fighting for the free and to marry as a matter of ideology and a matter of their own views and then there were people who regardless of their own views on whether we should have marriage or fight for marriage were concerned that strategically it was simply the wrong time we were dealing with aids we were dealing with reagan we just couldn't do it now but evan was tenacious marriage equality as far as he was concerned was not just about marriage it was a strategy it was an engine that would pull many other rights behind it if we could claim the language of marriage we would be claiming an engine of transformation a vocabulary of shared values love commitment family inclusion dignity respect that would help non-gay people better understand who gay people really are and allow us to share equally not only in marriage but in everything as the 80s rolled into the 90s and the aids crisis crested evan continued arguing with his fellow activists and i would press the case and would be shot down again and again and again by almost everyone in the room not always everyone but almost everyone for a variety of reasons some of the strongest voices felt that marriage wasn't what gay people ought to be fighting for period marriage was a heterosexual institution academics who studied gender and sexuality argued that some of the same forces that produce homophobia also propped up the institution of marriage it was patriarchal it was oppressive it was discriminatory so why should we fight to be part of something that is a bad thing to begin with there was an even deeper conundrum marriage equality for evan was a way to telegraph to a straight audience that gay people and straight people were actually very similar they were attracted to different people but when it came to the important stuff love and family and commitment they had the same values to activists who had faced decades of discrimination at the hands of straight people this argument fell demeaning why tell people who have been your tormentors that you are just like them some of evan's fellow activists implied to him that he was being a sellout as gay people we should be fighting for redefining institutions such as marriage or the family we shouldn't be fighting to join marriage we should be fighting to redefine the family we should be fighting for liberation not assimilation evan told them they were missing the point his strategy was based on pragmatism an acknowledgement that if gay people wanted equal rights they could not seize them on their own straight people at least some straight people were needed as allies they were an indispensable part of it we you know the vast majority of judges who are going to rule on the question the vast majority of legislators who have to take action the vast majority of voters are of course not gay Here he is in 1996, speaking at the San Francisco Public Library, urging fellow activists to go beyond preaching to the choir. My new mantra in life is, there is no marriage without engagement.
We have to engage non-gay people who are beginning to talk with us. They are listening, they are hearing, and they are largely fair-minded and reachable. But if we, gay and non-gay people, care, do not go out and talk to them, how can we expect them to get over their discomfort? At the core of this debate was a question that bedevils many movements that seek radical change.
Isn't it unfair to ask people who have suffered so much pain to speak the language of their opponents in order to win them over? Evan said, yes, it is unfair. But there was a goal just as important as fairness. To make things better.
To ensure gay kids don't get bullied in schools. To make it easier for gay people to advance in workplaces. To allow gay people to spend time with terminally ill partners in hospitals. The debates between Evan and his fellow activists have played out in many conflicts around the world.
If you or your group has suffered grievous harm, you might feel yourself pulled in two directions. The first looks backward, seeks justice and redress. Restitution for wrongs. The second approach looks forward.
It prioritizes change, reconciliation. It often recommends forgiving those who have harmed you. These paths are not mutually exclusive, but there is tension between them. India's nonviolent leader Mahatma Gandhi frequently disagreed with militant leaders during India's struggle for independence.
In South Africa, Nelson Mandela clashed with activists about whether white people had a role to play after apartheid was abolished. Here's a scene from the movie Invictus, where one of President Mandela's bodyguards objects to allowing white officers to join his security team. The same debate unfolded right here in the United States during the 1960s. Malcolm X believed that preaching brotherhood between blacks and whites, as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
was doing, was demeaning. It asked too much of African Americans, the victims of racism. In one fiery speech in Harlem, he said, So don't you be fooled by Kennedy? Don't you be fooled by these Uncle Tom Negro preachers?
Malcolm X was calling preachers like Martin Luther King Jr., Uncle Tom's. This often happens to advocates who preach forgiveness and reconciliation. Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a fellow Indian, who called him a sellout. Or take Avner Gariyahu and Muhammad Dajani, an Israeli and a Palestinian, whom we featured in an earlier episode of Hidden Brain.
Each was branded a traitor for recommending reconciliation with the other side. I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. In his language and symbolism, Martin Luther King Jr.
suggested that the civil rights movement welcomed allies. One day right now in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. Now, I'm oversimplifying some of the nuances here.
Martin Luther King Jr. certainly believed in fairness and righting the wrongs of the past. Not the Mets welcomed changes that improved the lives of African Americans. But the tension between their positions is real.
Those who champion justice say, how can we break bread without tormentors? Those who champion change say, how can we make things better without winning over those who are amenable to persuasion? Exactly like the civil rights movement brought over whites by emphasizing shared values and shared dreams, Evan Wolfson argued in the 1990s that marriage equality could turn many straight people into allies. And once the gay rights movement had enough allies, the courts, the legislators, the politicians, they would all follow.
In order to really succeed, it was not about just simply asserting our own and talking to ourselves. We had to find a way of bringing the majority of others who are, of course, the majority to a better understanding of who we are and a more capacious understanding of freedom. And I believe we could do that and marriage would be an engine for it. Sociologist Michael Rosenfeld says it helped that the gay rights movement had a conciliatory side to it and an angry side.
It was like playing good cop, bad cop. Any movement that has a lot of ground to cover needs a sort of more radical arm that is not taking any gut from the other side and sort of shows the possibility of standing up and fighting back. And, you know, gay rights movements had that civil rights movement, certainly. You can think about the sort of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King comparison.
But the truth is that you can't make progress, I don't think, without having an arm that wins votes in Congress and convinces strangers to come over to your side. And so you can't, you need them both. Social psychologist Rob Willer has thought a lot about how movements attract and repel allies. He has studied how moderate tactics and extreme tactics trigger different reactions among onlookers.
Aggressive and angry protests certainly draw more media attention, but they run the risk of turning off allies. I think that the best explanation for this effect has to do with social identification. So one of the most robust predictors of people's likelihood of joining a movement is the extent to which they identify with the members of the movement and the cause. And extreme protest tactics, because they involve significant disruption of the social order and they can involve violence or inciting violence, they tend to lead people to say, I don't identify with that group of people.
Like, I might have agreed with their cause, but the way they're doing it is not the way I would have done it. And so I think that's the risk with extreme protest tactics is they lead people, observers, bystanders, to answer that question, am I like those people? Should I go join them? In the negative, where they might have said, yeah, I am like them.
I'm going to join that movement. While getting straight people to join the marriage equality movement wasn't easy, the truth was it wasn't really asking a lot of them. In reality, marriage equality cost straight people nothing. Michael Rosenfeld says it made allies feel good to be part of celebrations, inclusion, and love.
What was really effective about the marriage equality movement was the way it undermined the frame of pathology and created a new frame of love and commitment and normalcy. Look, the bottom line is that regardless of how you were made or who you love, you should be able to get married if you want to get married. I truly believe it's that simple. That frame of committed couples was a frame that really helped straight Americans understand that gay Americans were a lot more similar to straight Americans than straight Americans had fought.
Gay and lesbian couples have the same values, like family and commitment. And it breaks my heart to know that millions... It wasn't like a marriage equality movement convinced everyone with homophobic views to become an ally. But it did convince the people who were amenable to persuasion.
And it turned out there were a surprising number of them. As state-for-state legalized gay marriage, what had seemed like an impossibility, came to be seen as inevitable. An historic victory for gay rights today. The Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution guarantees the right for same-sex couples to marry no matter where they are.
Exactly as Evan had predicted, marriage equality turned out to be much more than just about marriage. Michael Rosenfeld says the data shows attitudes towards every kind of gay rights has increased in a similar way, not quite as fast, but in a similar way to marriage equality. And then what little data we have on trans rights also suggests that there's been a sharp increase in appreciation for the rights of trans people. And I think one of the things that has been shown by the marriage equality movement is that if you're a gay or lesbian, you have more rights than you used to have.
And those rights are important. They have ramifications for everybody, whether they want to marry or not. Evan says he consults today with a number of other activist groups. He reminds them that each struggle for change is different, and that what worked in one case won't always work in another.
Having said that, there are commonalities and there certainly are elements of success that I now do try to share with others who come to me from different movements, different causes in different countries, including struggles over women's empowerment or racial justice or the rights of immigrants, et cetera. And one of those is the importance of connecting with others, of finding a way to bring the other over to your side, to bring about empathy, understanding, awareness, not by sacrificing your identity, not by subordinating or disclaiming your difference. But by finding a way to bridge those differences and to evoke in people the shared values that will enable them to connect with your personal story, your personal reality, and the rightness of treating others the way you would want to be treated, the golden rule. And it's not easy to do this for anybody.
It wasn't easy, and it's not done for gay people or for marriage or for transgender people, and it's certainly not easy with regard to race. And yet our country teaches us that we have moved, we have changed, we have been able to make progress. Not that we're done by any means, not that there isn't still ugliness, and not that there aren't still opponents. But to ignore the progress is also to miss part of the story.
Changemakers often have a choice. Overthrow the old order, perhaps through violence or revolution. Or reform the old order, reconcile, and forgive. Which path you choose can be shaped by many factors, including how strong you are, and whether you need allies to succeed.
Those who wield a sword, and those who hold out the olive branch, can both be successful. But if you look at the long sweep of history, the evidence suggests one approach has been more effective. The political scientists Maria Stefan and Erika Chenoweth have analyzed hundreds of protest movements around the world that occurred over the course of the 20th century. They found that violent movements succeeded about one quarter of the time.
Non-violent movements succeeded twice as often. The campaign for marriage equality told its opponents, look, we share the same values. Instead of force, it disarmed. Instead of arguing, it co-opted.
Instead of shaming, it celebrated. The psychological brilliance of the strategy comes down to this. It's very difficult to fight with people who say they embrace their values. This week's show was produced by Parth Shah.
It was edited by Tara Boyle and Jenny Schmidt. Our team includes Raina Cohen, Laura Querell, and Thomas Liu. Voice acting from Alex Andrea Macedu, Galina Abdelaziz, Maissa Alves da Silva, and Casey Myers. Special thanks to Keith Woods, Sammy Ennegan, and Gene Demby.
Our unsung hero is Lillian Fademan. She's a scholar who wrote a comprehensive history of the gay rights movement. It was titled, The Gay Revolution. The work of researchers like Lillian was critical as we put together this episode.
We're grateful to Lillian and to countless other scholars who've documented this remarkable chapter in American history. For more resources and history, please visit npr.org. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend. If they don't know how to subscribe to our podcast, please help them.
I'm Shankar Dilantham, and this is NPR. At D.I.D. Electrical, we know getting a new appliance is genuinely exciting. A fridge with more space?
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