Joe Biden Takes a Marriage Equality Victory Lap

Jay Michaelson

On Thursday in Manhattan, the vice president looked back at the long battle—and what’s next. But what really made this win inevitable was when love became the essence of marriage.

In a way, Jane Austen won the right to same-sex marriage.

Not Austen specifically, of course—though Mr. Darcy has been the object of much gay and straight adoration—but the centuries-long movement of which she is a part: the humanistic, romantic idea that love should conquer law.

Such was my impression at Thursday night’s marriage equality victory lap at the swanky Cipriani New York, put on by the advocacy organization Freedom to Marry and its founder/guru, Evan Wolfson. He’s the man who, more than any other individual, including Jane Austen, deserves the most credit for winning national marriage equality.

As Vice President Joe Biden, Wolfson, and others recognized, there were many, many factors that caused marriage equality to become the law of the land on June 26, 2015. But as Biden said, in a way, at the core of the movement has been a very straightforward proposition. Recalling a time when he and his father saw two men kissing, Biden said Thursday: “I looked at my Dad, and he said, ‘they love each other—it’s simple.’”

Of course, as Biden quickly added, the long march to marriage equality hasn’t been that simple. Dozens of lawsuits have been filed, millions of philanthropic dollars spent, and a myriad of cultural moments marked, from La Cage Aux Folles to Ellen DeGeneres. “This is the civil rights issue of our generation,” Biden told the cheering crowd. “And what you have accomplished didn’t just take moral courage. It took physical courage.”

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