On “Meet The Press Yesterday,” David Gregory didn’t ask Jo Becker to defend her claim that the marriage equality revolution “began” in 2008 and was the triumph of Ted Olson and Chad Griffin over the countless 
activists who had allowed the issue to “languish in obscurity” for years. No surprise there – but a clue as to why Gregory has led MTP to epic lows in viewership.
Becker – amazingly – has stuck to a p.r. strategy that doesn’t even mention the controversy over her book – check out her Twitter feed here, where she simply won’t address it at all. You’d think that an author who wrote such a controversial book would engage the criticism – or link to it and respond forthrightly. But Becker just pretends that the controversy doesn’t exist! Or says she wrote a book that is utterly different than the one I’ve read. What does that tell you? In my view, it tells you that she has no defense, has no grasp on gay history, and cannot defend her own thesis. The book is as much a hagiography of a handful of late-comers to the cause as it is a brutal denigration of all those who came before. Why won’t she defend this argument in public?
Meanwhile, the man who relentlessly spun Bill Clinton’s signing of the Defense of Marriage Act, Richard Socarides, was interviewed for the book and covers for its distortions of history here. And Noah Feldman has a critical must-read on the ludicrous legal claims of the book. Money quote:
In order to take credit for results they didn’t achieve, based on the accomplishments of a movement to which they did not and do not belong, Boies and Olson and their media proxies need to marginalize and circumvent the real activists. But even that is not all. Their aim for credit has real-world consequences. Boies and Olson are seeking out new clients and actively trying to beat the gay-marriage movement’s own legal eagles to the courthouse in a mad rush to get credit for what they have already failed to achieve. In the course of doing so, they are engaging in high-risk legal behavior that could backfire on the whole movement.
Jonathan Capehart says that I have raised “a valid concern about how the history of the quest for marriage equality is being portrayed,” but like Socarides, he doesn’t really care. The juicy tidbits from a fawningly uncritical hagiography are worth it.
A couple of readers have also pointed out that, in the first page, Rosa Parks is described merely as a “black seamstress” who took a stand for justice one day in 1955 in a moment of clarity. Becker doesn’t seem to understand that Parks had been a civil rights activist for twelve years before the protest that made history, just as she seems oblivious to the notion that others had been doing what she describes as Chad Griffin’s unique civil rights work for twenty-five years before he came along.
If you want to read a film script for a Hollywood movie about the lone courage and insight of a couple of people who showed up at a civil rights movement a quarter century late and then claimed ownership of all of it, this is your book. A work of actual and informed journalism, let alone history, is yet to come.
(Photo: Jo Becker appears on “Meet the Press” on April 20, 2014. By William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC NewsWire via Getty Images)
The Dish 