The Truths We Hold

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The Truths We Hold Page 12

by Kamala Harris


  There was much to applaud in the Ninth Circuit’s ruling. A three-judge panel affirmed the lower court’s decision that Prop 8 had deprived same-sex couples of their civil rights in California. But the court didn’t take issue with the Prop 8 proponents’ right to appeal. Instead, the court issued a stay in its ruling and allowed them to appeal once again—this time to the Supreme Court.

  As I sat listening to the oral arguments, the Supreme Court justices homed in on the issue of standing. Justice Stephen Breyer questioned whether the Prop 8 proponents were “no more than a group of five people who feel really strongly.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wanted to know how the lower court’s ruling had caused the proponents an injury “separate from that of every other taxpayer to have laws enforced.” But when the arguments were over, there was really no way to tell what the decision would be.

  As I left the Supreme Court, there were hundreds of people gathered, waving rainbow flags, holding signs, waiting anxiously for justice. It made me smile. They were why I had become a lawyer in the first place. It was in the courtroom, I believed, that you could translate that passion into action and precedent and law.

  I looked out at their faces and imagined all the people who had stood in the same place for similar reasons: black parents with their children, fighting against segregation in schools; young women marching and shouting, holding signs that said KEEP ABORTION LEGAL; civil rights activists demonstrating against poll taxes and literacy tests and laws prohibiting interracial marriage.

  In everyday life, they might have seemed like they had nothing in common. But on these steps, they shared something profound: in one form or another, they had faced treatment “directly subversive of the principle of equality,” as Chief Justice Earl Warren had once put it. And in one way or another, they believed the Constitution could set them free. They revered that document, in the words of Franklin Roosevelt, “not because it is old but because it is ever new, not in the worship of its past alone but in the faith of the living who keep it young, now and in the years to come.” So they marched. And they fought. And they waited.

  I knew that nothing was certain. The Supreme Court had made some terrible decisions in its past. In 1889, it upheld a law—still not overturned—that specifically excluded Chinese people from immigrating to America. In 1896, it held that racial segregation did not violate the Constitution. In 1944, it held that there was nothing unconstitutional about the forced internment of Japanese Americans. In 1986, it held that gay relationships could be criminalized. In 2010, it ushered in an era of dark money in politics with its ruling in Citizens United. And on the day before we would hear the ruling in our case, the Court’s conservative justices invalidated—and gutted—a critical part of the Voting Rights Act. Nothing was certain.

  But on the morning of June 26, 2013, we received wonderful news. The Supreme Court agreed that Prop 8 proponents had no standing to appeal, and dismissed the case in a 5–4 decision. That meant the lower court ruling would stand. And that meant marriage equality was the law again in California—finally.

  I was in my Los Angeles office when the word came through. A spontaneous celebration broke out, with whoops and applause ricocheting through the hallways. After so many years of struggle and setback, love had finally conquered all.

  I gathered my team to discuss a plan of action. I wanted the marriages to begin right away. But that couldn’t happen until the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals lifted its stay, and the appellate court said it would take weeks to do so. This was unacceptable to me.

  As I headed to a press conference to discuss the victory, my staff cautioned against challenging the court to act. There was decorum around these things, and my publicly weighing in might offend. But this was no time for decorum. Our fellow Americans had been waiting far too long. And so I leaned into the microphone and called on the Ninth Circuit to lift the stay as quickly as possible.

  Two days later, I was in my San Francisco office with my team for a Friday afternoon strategy meeting, where we were discussing transnational criminal organizations ranging from drug smugglers to human and weapons traffickers. We were deep in conversation about a recently opened investigation when my assistant Cortney Bright came in and passed me a note. “The Ninth Circuit made a decision.” I read the note to the team, and we lost all ability to focus on the work at hand. We needed to know the answer.

  A short while later, Cortney was back. The Ninth Circuit had lifted the stay. The state could begin issuing marriage licenses right away. We erupted in cheers.

  My phone rang, and it was Chad Griffin. He was with Kris Perry and Sandy Stier.

  “Kamala, we’re coming to San Francisco. Sandy and Kris are going to be the first marriage, and we want you to perform the ceremony.”

  “Of course! I would love to!” I told Chad. “Nothing would make me more proud.”

  Normally, I had to travel by official car, but this time I insisted that we walk. As my team and I made our way to City Hall, I recalled the famous image of Thurgood Marshall striding purposefully with Autherine Lucy, who had been denied admission to the University of Alabama, one of the first tests of integration. Though we were the only ones in the street this time, it felt like we were leading our part of a parade—one that stretched through generations. We were following in the footsteps of giants, and widening the trail for our time.

  When we reached City Hall, we made our way to the clerk’s office, where a crowd was already gathering in the hallway. Kris and Sandy arrived soon after, beaming and ready to go.

  “Congratulations!” I exclaimed as I hugged them both. They had been through so much, for so long. We were laughing and chatting when a reporter and a cameraman came over to ask me a question. He’d heard there might be an appeal and wanted to know what I thought about it.

  I just looked at him and smiled. “Wedding bells are about to ring!”

  Meanwhile, news started to spread, and people started coming to City Hall by the hundreds. Some to celebrate. Some to get married. Some just to bear witness. We could hear the Gay Men’s Chorus singing, their voices soaring in the rotunda. As we filed into that confined space together, everyone experiencing pure joy, the feeling was magical.

  We were preparing for the ceremony when somebody pulled me aside to say that the clerk in Los Angeles was refusing to issue marriage licenses until he heard from the state. He clearly needed direction. It was as simple as passing me the phone.

  “This is Kamala Harris,” I said. “You must start the marriages immediately.”

  “All right!” he responded, sounding relieved. “I will take that as our notice and we will issue the licenses now.”

  I thanked him. “And enjoy it!” I added. “It’s going to be fun.”

  A short time later, I took my spot on the balcony and watched Kris and Sandy, followed by their loved ones and friends, walk up the stairs of City Hall. They made an elegant pair, in matching beige and white. Sandy was holding a bouquet of white roses. Two days earlier, they had become living symbols of justice. Now, as they took their final steps toward me—through the same building in which Harvey Milk had lived and died defending the dignity of all people—I could feel history being made.

  “Today we witness not only the joining of Kris and Sandy, but the realization of their dream—marriage. . . . By joining the case against Proposition 8, they represented thousands of couples like themselves in the fight for marriage equality. Through the ups and downs, the struggles and the triumphs, they came out victorious.”

  Kris and Sandy exchanged their vows, and their son, Elliott, handed over the rings. I had the honor and privilege to say, “By virtue of the power and authority vested in me by the state of California, I now declare you spouses for life.”

  There were hundreds of weddings that day, all across the state, each one of them an expression of love and justice and hope. San Francisco City Hall was lit in the colors of the rainbow—a
beautiful tribute to the beautiful words “I do!”

  When I got home that evening, I had a chance to reflect on the day. My thoughts turned to a man I wished could have been there to see it. Jim Rivaldo was a San Francisco political strategist, one of the co-founders of The National Lampoon, and a leading member of the gay community who had been a key player in getting Harvey Milk elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. He was truly brilliant, and when I first ran for district attorney, he was one of my most important advisers. My family and I loved him, especially my mother. In the years after my first election, we would see him often. He spent Thanksgiving with us the year before he died, in 2007. My mother cared for him at his bedside, trying to keep him comfortable in his final days.

  I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to share the moment with him. But even in his absence, I knew exactly what he would have said: We’re not done yet.

  It would take another two years before the Supreme Court recognized marriage equality in all fifty states. And today, it is still the case under federal law that an employer can fire an employee if they identify as LGBTQ. It is still the case, in statehouses across the country, that transgender rights are getting trampled. This is still very much an active civil rights battle.

  What happened with Prop 8 was an important part of a longer journey, one that began before America was its own nation and one that will continue for decades to come. It is the story of people fighting for their humanity—for the simple idea that we should all be equal and free. It is the story of people fighting for the promise made to all future generations at the signing of the Declaration of Independence: that no government has the right to rob us of our life or our liberty or our humble pursuit of happiness.

  In the years to come, what matters most is that we see ourselves in one another’s struggles. Whether we are fighting for transgender rights or for an end to racial bias, whether we are fighting against housing discrimination or insidious immigration laws, no matter who we are or how we look or how little it may seem we have in common, the truth is, in the battle for civil rights and economic justice, we are all the same. In the words of the great Bayard Rustin, organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, “We are all one, and if we don’t know it, we will learn it the hard way.”

  * * *

  • • •

  A few months after Kris and Sandy got married, I was on my way to an event at a nonprofit organization called the California Endowment, run by my friend Robert K. Ross, a health philanthropist. The endowment is headquartered in a beautiful, modern space, and during my time as attorney general, we often used it to hold big events. On this particular day, the topic for discussion was one few might have expected to be on an attorney general’s agenda. I was there to talk about elementary school truancy, and to initiate a discussion about solutions.

  When I first started as attorney general, I told my executive team that I wanted to make elementary school truancy a top priority for my office. Those who didn’t know me must have thought I was joking. Why would the state’s top law enforcement official want to focus on whether seven-year-olds are going to school or not? But those who had been with me for a while knew I wasn’t messing around. Indeed, instituting a statewide plan on truancy was part of the reason I’d run for the office in the first place.

  When I was district attorney, much of the work I had done in crime prevention focused on interventions later in life. Back on Track, for example, was all about helping young adults avoid prison time and the consequences that flow from a felony conviction. But I was equally concerned about early interventions, about the kinds of steps we could take as a community—and a country—to keep children safe and on track to begin with. I wanted to identify key moments in a child’s life when my office could make a difference.

  It was during that process that I started connecting a series of research-related dots. The first dot concerned the importance of third-grade reading proficiency. Studies show that the end of third grade is a critical milestone for students. Up until that point, the curriculum focuses on teaching students to learn to read. In fourth grade, there’s a shift, and students transition to reading in order to learn. If students can’t read, they can’t learn, and they fall further behind, month after month and year after year—which forces them onto a nearly inescapable path to poverty. The door of opportunity closes on them when they’re barely four feet tall. I believe it is tantamount to a crime when a child goes without an education.

  At the same time, I was focused on a rash of homicides in the city and county of San Francisco. It was an issue for leaders across the area, in and out of government, so there was a lot of activity and concern about what we should do to address it. When we studied the data, we learned that more than 80 percent of prisoners were high school dropouts.

  I went to see the school district superintendent, a wonderful woman named Arlene Ackerman, to ask her about the high school dropout rate. She told me that a significant percentage of their habitually truant high school students had missed their elementary school classes, too—for weeks, even months at a time. That, to me, was a call to action. The connections were so clear. You could map the path for children who started drifting away from the classroom when they were young. The truant child became the wanderer . . . who became the target for gang recruiters . . . who became the young drug courier . . . who became the perpetrator—or the victim—of violence. If we didn’t see that child in elementary school, where they belonged, chances were we’d see them later in prison, in the hospital, or dead.

  Some of my political advisers worried that tackling truancy would not be a popular issue. Even today, others don’t appreciate the intention behind my approach; they assume that my motivation was to lock up parents, when of course that was never the goal. Our effort was designed to connect parents to resources that could help them get their kids back into school, where they belonged. We were trying to support parents, not punish them—and in the vast majority of cases, we succeeded.

  Still, I was willing to be the bad guy if it meant highlighting an issue that otherwise would have received too little attention. Political capital doesn’t gain interest. You have to spend it to make a difference.

  My office joined with the city and the school district, and we developed a truancy initiative. I’m proud to say that by 2009, we had reduced truancy among San Francisco’s elementary school children by 23 percent.

  As we dug into the issue, what we found was quite different from what a number of my colleagues expected. Stereotypes held that a child becomes a chronically truant student because his or her parents don’t care about the child’s future. But the truth is different. The truth is that the vast majority of parents have a natural desire to parent their children well. They want to be good fathers and mothers. They just may not have the skills or the resources they need.

  Imagine a single parent, working two minimum-wage shift jobs, six days a week, and still trapped below the poverty line. She gets paid hourly, with no vacation or sick leave. If her three-year-old daughter runs a fever, she can’t bring her to the day care she took a second job to pay for. There’s no money for a babysitter, but if she stays home, she’s not going to be able to afford diapers for the rest of the month. It’s already been hard enough saving money to buy new shoes for her eleven-year-old son, whose feet seem to grow a whole size every few months.

  What amounts to a headache for those with means takes the form of desperation for those without. If a parent in that situation asks her son to stay home from school for a day in order to take care of his little sister, we can’t accuse her of loving her children any less. This is a matter of circumstance and condition, not of character. She wants to be the best parent she can.

  The goal of our truancy prevention initiative was to step in and provide support. We wanted the schools to reach out to parents with information: not only about the links between high truancy, illiteracy, and high crime, but, i
mportantly, about resources they might not have been aware of—support the city and school district offered to make it easier to get their kids to school.

  When we were first putting the initiative together, the draft guidance to the school districts told them to notify the parent with whom the child lived in case there was a truancy issue. This was usually the mother.

  “Wait a minute,” I asked. “What about the father?”

  “Well, in a lot of these cases,” one of my staffers explained, “the kids don’t live with the father and the father isn’t paying child support.”

  “So what?” I replied. “He may not be paying child support. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t want his child to go to school every day.” And sure enough, in one of these cases, a young man found out that his daughter wasn’t going to school every day and ended up changing his schedule to take her there each morning. He even started volunteering in her classroom.

  When I became attorney general, I wanted to use the power of my office to expose the truancy crisis across the state. I knew the cameras would show up for a lot of what I did, and I wanted to shine a spotlight on this issue and appeal to people’s self-interest. Like it or not, most people prioritize their own safety over the education of someone else’s child. I wanted to make them see that if we didn’t prioritize education now, it would be a public safety matter later.

  Our first report, the results of which I was announcing that day at the California Endowment, estimated that we had approximately a million truant elementary school kids across the state. And in too many schools, nearly everyone was truant: one school had a truancy rate higher than 92 percent.

  And so as I took the stage, what might have seemed like a tangential topic for the state’s attorney general became the heart of impassioned remarks, in which I called on educators and policy makers, inside the room and beyond it, to step up and acknowledge the severity of the crisis.

 

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