Zen-ish Thoughts About the Rise and Possible Fall of Marriage Equality
Preamble: Putting the Dynamic in High Relief
Criticism of slavery is likely as old as slavery itself. Here are just two early examples. Circa 500 BCE (about 2,600 years ago), the Buddha identified trading in living beings as an unethical occupation. (In some translations this is more specifically "human beings", rather than "living beings", but in any case the latter includes the former.) Almost 2,000 years ago, circa 65 AD, the Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote in detail about the inhumanities of slavery, proposing reforms to protect the moral virtue of the masters rather than calling for its cessation to protect those enslaved.
These may seem like tepid responses to so terrible a practice, but they are not. In a world in which slavery predates collective memory, is entirely normative and pervasive, and is unquestioned as the obvious and natural consequence of losing a war or failing to pay a debt, finding it unethical – or even just unethical as currently practiced – is exceedingly radical. Utterances such as these fall far short of abolition, but massive social changes must be preceded by the "mere" challenging of existing assumptions. It is hard to spontaneously see from today's perspective, but calling for an end to slavery is calling for a social movement to change unconscious cultural values, to reshape society entirely (even for non-slaveholders), to deprive the rich and powerful of property and power they need in order to remain rich and powerful, and to devastate an economy that affects everyone.
The historical record is clear: Challenging a culture's existing assumptions is heavily punished. Building movements always begins with expressing ideas to rally people to action, not with action itself. In their historical context, statements like these from the Buddha and Seneca are profoundly disruptive of a social norm that seemed utterly reasonable to nearly everyone who was not directly harmed by it.
If the denigration, oppression, pathologizing, loss of rights, beating, and killing of gay people doesn't reveal a resemblance to the justifications for slavery and its most egregiously evil practices, one needs to look again. Anti-gay discrimination, even when violent, is not equivalent to the more massively destructive force of slavery, but the dynamic is identical: "We are only doing what is natural and God-ordained. They are only getting what they deserve."
What changed in the 1800s such that whole societies, economically dependent on slavery, concluded that the moral imperative to end slavery was more important than the psycho-social and economic disruption that ending it required? Nothing. That's not what happened. Moral clarity that had literally been present in some form for millennia did not just finally find its voice. An accidental ally happened to come onto the scene, with no interest whatsoever in the moral issue. Slavery began to end when early industrialization made wage-earning employees (working under near-slavery conditions) more cost-effective than slavery, and the increased production of goods needed more people with money to buy them.
The British abolition of the slave trade in 1807 appears to complicate this argument – it came decades before American emancipation, and before industrialization had fully matured. But the economic alignment was already shifting. British manufacturers were increasingly interested in Africa as a direct consumer market and trading partner (not only as a source of oppressively extracted labor and stolen resources), and the slave trade was harmful to development of those potential markets. Caribbean colony interests in Britain had blocked abolition for decades, but that coalition was weakening relative to the new industrial and trading interests that were replacing the plantation model of commerce.
Wilberforce's twenty-year Parliamentary campaign against slavery did not succeed until financial interests happened to begin pointing in the same direction. Some historians grant more credit to the moral argument, but the moral argument was the same in 1787 as it was in 1807. Did it just ripen from gradual changes in social attitudes over time? General social conditions in the industrial period, and specifically the treatment of Blacks, do not lend support to that idea. What we know changed was which side of the scale had money's finger on it.
"Well, at least once Britain abolished the slave trade, they went about destroying the slaving ships of other countries!" Yes, for "the noble cause of abolishing slavery" – at the same time they were actively enslaving more of Africa and Asia, treating Blacks within Britain barely any better than during slavery, and just by chance at the same time that damaging the economies of France, Spain, and Portugal by depriving them of slaves was advantageous to Britain in the race for colonial expansion, which was itself economically driven with total disregard for moral concerns.
This is not just a case of "follow the money", although it is certainly that. It's also a lesson in how societies make their begrudging movement in the direction of moral improvement. Sincere believers in moral causes reliably fail to achieve their goals until alignment with financial interests arises. The moral warrior who refuses to work with monied interests for fear of corruption and compromise prolongs the struggle instead of achieving some meaningful portion of their goals. There will be corruption and compromise and partial achievement of goals, or there will be no achievement of goals on a historic scale. Those are the only two playbooks in all of human history. Only one of them works at all. We need to choose the one that sort of works over the one that has never worked.
If this were a book instead of an article, the supply of additional examples would have to be aggressively trimmed to keep them from spanning hundreds of chapters. It has been said that history is the history of wars. I think it is more accurate to say that history is the history of economic forces (which are also a primary factor in the cause of wars).
"That's too pessimistic. What about Gandhi? What about Mandela? What about the social policy gains of the 60s and 70s?"
Apparent Counter-Examples
Gandhi
Gandhi's campaign for Indian independence is probably the most famous moral-political movement of the twentieth century, and the most obvious challenge to this thesis. Here was a man who appeared to move an empire through moral force, non-violence, and the sheer weight of human dignity.
But here's what actually happened. The post-WWII British economy was devastated, American creditors were demanding market access to India, and the Indian population was becoming too expensive to continue suppressing. Combined, these factors made British withdrawal from India a necessity. Gandhi's moral method created political conditions that made British withdrawal easier to sell domestically, but the British did not leave because Gandhi shamed them into it. They left because the whole idea of empire had become financially untenable. As with the abolition of slavery in Britain, some historians grant more import to the moral argument, but within just two years, Britain withdrew from India, Palestine, Transjordan, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon. The moral argument for Indian independence had been made for decades before conditions arrived that gave the moral argument financial impetus.
Mandela
Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison while the moral argument against apartheid gained no meaningful political wins. When de Klerk released him in 1990 and began dismantling apartheid, it was not because the moral argument had finally gotten through to him. By the late 1980s, apartheid had become an economic disaster. Only allowing Whites to hold many jobs had created a labor shortage that South African industry could not work around. International sanctions, particularly the U.S. Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, cut off technology transfer and capital investment. The acute trigger came in 1985 when Chase Manhattan refused to roll over South African loans and other banks followed, forcing a partial debt default.
White business leaders – the National Party's own constituency – began traveling to Lusaka to meet directly with the ANC in exile. Were they having a moral awakening, or doing the math on their financial self-interest in an economy under siege? History suggests the latter was necessary, even if some moral alignment was also present. The moral argument for ending apartheid was not stronger in 1990 than it had been in 1960. Mandela's release and the subsequent negotiations were made possible by his moral authority and political skill, but they were made necessary by South Africa's financial crisis.
The Social Movements of the Sixties and Seventies
While these movements spanned several countries, I will focus on what occurred in the U.S.
Civil rights, Medicare and Medicaid, women's rights, and the ecology movement – four significant moral victories in roughly fifteen years, seemingly driven by people marching, organizing, and refusing to be quiet. Even though these wins fell short of their goals and were compromised, how do we explain them at all in light of our thesis that moral progress never reaches historically significant scale without economic alignment, especially when economically and politically powerful forces opposed each of these things?
The Civil Rights Act passed because Lyndon Johnson – a transactional political operator with a poor civil rights record – calculated that the financial and political cost of inaction on racism finally exceeded the cost of its unabated continuance, both domestically and abroad. He knew it would cost him Southern Democrats, but believed (correctly) that it would gain him voters in the North, and Black voters who had historically voted for GOP candidates. Government violence against Black Americans was appearing on televisions in the newly decolonizing nations of Africa and Asia that both the United States and the Soviet Union were competing to influence.
The Great Migration had moved millions of Black Americans into northern cities where they were voters, consumers, and an increasingly organized political constituency that the Democratic Party needed in order to win national elections. Control of postwar international influence meant control of trade relationships, resource access, and economic partnerships with newly independent nations in a world being divided into competing economic spheres of influence. The State Department was explicitly telling the White House that American racial segregation was costing the country strategic international influence, the value of which was ultimately measured in markets and dollars, not moral standing. The moral argument for civil rights was not new when Johnson was president. It was newly expensive not to take it up, for both domestic and international reasons.
The political realignment that followed supports the thesis from the other direction. As Blacks moved from the GOP to the DNC, the GOP faced an existential crisis – it was losing too many voters. Nixon's team calculated that the most available block of voters they could attract to replace the loss was aggrieved Southern White Christians. The GOP then ran openly and thinly disguised anti-Black, pro-Christian campaigns.
Nixon's domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, revealed in a 1994 interview – not published until 2016, many years after his death – that Nixon had two enemies – the anti-war left and Black people – and used the War on Drugs to portray them as criminals in order to attract conservative Southern White Christian voters. His family has disputed this, but the diary of Nixon's Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, holds similar observations. The GOP stoked fear and hatred and what happened? They got more money and more votes and more power. They became the party we know them to be now, no longer "the party of Lincoln" (which was grossly overstated to begin with).
What about Medicare, Medicaid, and the broader Great Society? These were explicitly and deliberately framed by Johnson's economists as investments that would pay economic returns. Johnson's chief economic adviser, Walter Heller, made the case to business audiences in language company executives could appreciate. Poverty was an economic drag, sick workers were less productive, and the consumer economy needed a larger number of people with money to buy things. "Okay, let's pretend we care about grandma living in poverty so the government will give her tax money she will spend on goods and service provided by the private sector", transferring wealth from everyone in the country (via taxes) to companies and their owners – the new American Dream.
Medicare and Medicaid are wonderful programs, but this was not the first time they were proposed. They came into existence only when sold to monied interests as a way to convert taxes on the public into private profit. Medicare alone created the modern American hospital industry. The construction, insurance, and pharmaceutical industries were direct financial beneficiaries of Great Society spending.
The Women's Movement made a sophisticated argument that women's economic exclusion was financially irrational as well as morally wrong. Excluding women from full participation in society limited the labor pool, and limited the dollars flowing through the consumer economy. The campaign for the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, which gave women the right to obtain credit without a male co-signer, was explicitly a financial campaign aimed at banks and credit card companies. The movement framed its argument in financial terms and used organized pressure to achieve a legislative outcome, rather than winning voluntary corporate alignment.
Ms. magazine was among other things a demonstration that a feminist publication could be financially viable ("in a man's world"), which was itself a political statement made in the language of the economic marketplace. And it did succeed, despite advertisers not initially believing that feminists formed a commercially useful audience. The Women's Movement understood, earlier and more clearly than most socially progressive efforts, that moral argument and financial alignment are synergistic partners rather than mutually exclusive alternatives. It is the only example in this survey where the movement itself consciously built financial alignment in from the start, as deliberate strategy, rather than waiting for economic interests to arrive as accidental allies. This is the operational model we must replicate.
The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the EPA passed because property owners, the fishing industry, tourism operators, and real estate interests had concrete financial stakes in clean water and air, and big polluters had never before needed to be organized in a way that produced political clout. They were overrun, until they weren't.
Before long, the fossil fuel industry, the chemical industry, and the agricultural industry built think tanks, funded politicians, and constructed ideological infrastructure – climate denial being the most elaborate example – specifically to erode the financial and political conditions that made regulating them possible in the first place. The current regression is not a moral or cultural development per se. It is a financially organized campaign by industries whose profits depend on continuing to externalize onto the public the costs of their negative environmental impact.
On close examination, each of these apparent counter-examples ends up providing additional support for the thesis, not a challenge to it. In each case, financial alignment was a necessary condition for the moral argument to succeed at scale. The moral argument sets the direction, but the financial argument wins the battle. In no case did the moral argument succeed without financial partnership, and not just in the form of donations, of cash on hand to print posters, buy air time, and fund rallies, but partnership in the form of ongoing financial impact on monied interests.
Marriage Equality
Marriage equality was not won until the Human Rights Campaign began publishing its Corporate Equality Index (CEI) in 2002 – a benchmarking tool measuring LGBTQ inclusion policies at major employers. Companies began competing for perfect scores on the CEI because talent recruitment and retention, particularly among younger workers, was visibly affected by where a company stood on this issue. The old moral issue had newly acquired financial weight.
By 2012, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein had become HRC's first Fortune 500 national corporate spokesperson for same-sex marriage – framing it not as a moral position but as a business principle grounded in the firm's commitment to attracting and retaining the best talent. In 2013, 278 businesses and organizations, filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in United States v. Windsor, arguing that the Defense of Marriage Act was operationally bad for business – that it hampered talent recruitment, imposed wasteful administrative burdens, and created unnecessary complexity for companies operating across state lines. The court struck down DOMA's key provisions in June 2013.
By 2015, 379 companies filed a second amicus brief in Obergefell v. Hodges. The language of that brief does not say discrimination is wrong. It says: "Employers are better served by a uniform marriage rule that gives equal dignity to employee relationships." The Supreme Court ruled for marriage equality in June 2015.
Indiana governor Mike Pence signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, hot on the heels of Obergefell, a law widely understood to permit businesses to deny service to LGBTQ customers on religious grounds. Within days, Salesforce, Apple, Angie's List, Eli Lilly, Cummins, Walmart, and NASCAR publicly threatened to withdraw investments and cancel events that were financially valuable to Indiana. The NCAA, headquartered in Indianapolis, and then hosting its national basketball championship in Indianapolis, expressed concern. The Indianapolis Star ran a front page that said simply: "Fix. This. Now." Pence promptly announced that he would amend the law. It passed days later. The entire arc from passing a morally regressive law to gutting it took about a week. No moral argument accomplished that. No protest march, no petition, no op-ed accomplished that. The financial threat did.
What Is Happening Now
The corporate alignment that built the Marriage Equality victory is now visibly retreating. In January 2025, our Chief Tantrum Thrower signed executive orders targeting DEI programs across the federal government and pressuring the private sector. HRC's Corporate Equality Index saw Fortune 500 participation collapse by 65% in a single year, from 377 companies in 2025 to 131 in 2026. Mastercard, Citi, Pepsi, Anheuser-Busch, Comcast, and Deloitte withdrew from Pride sponsorships. Amazon scrubbed mentions of LGBTQ people from its policy pages. Ford announced it would no longer comment publicly on "polarizing issues." Nine states introduced bills challenging marriage equality in the first half of 2025.
The moral argument for marriage equality has not changed in the slightest, and public support stands at 70%, the highest it has ever been. What goes up and down is the financial weight of the moral argument.
What This Means
The key is not money but monied interests – not cash donated to a cause, but financial self-interest that makes powerful players align with outcomes we desire, even if their reasons are not the same as ours, even if they are fickle, even if we don't like other things those monied interests are doing. Our moral causes need pragmatic power to succeed, and monied interests are that power. Compromise and get something, or don't compromise and get nothing. Wait for accidental alignment, or actively pursue it.
That one-week reversal in Indiana was possible because relationships with commercial interests had been built, maintained, and could be activated when needed. What is happening now is that financial pressure in the opposite direction has surged, and financial interests are doing what they always do – following the money, not the morality.
The thesis presented here works in both directions: Money is the most important ally for moral regress as well as for moral progress. Those opposed to marriage equality did not change their minds or go silent after 2015, but they were impotent until financial alignment shifted in their favor. What looks like a battle over morals – and sincerely is that for many of its participants – is in actual operation nothing more noble than the ebb and flow of financial tides operating under political pressure.
Companies came to a supportive position because it was in their financial interest. They retreated when that was in their financial interest. The message to advocates of marriage equality (or any social movement) is plain: The morality of it matters immensely to those within whom it resonates, but it is not effective until accompanied by financial interests that point in the same direction. We must embrace that without apology. Our opponents do, masterfully. It's how the world of humans actually operates, however much we want it to be otherwise.
Companies withdrawing from LGBTQ commitments are already facing measurable costs in sales and in attracting and retaining younger workers. The business case for inclusion did not disappear when Trump signed his executive orders. It was temporarily outweighed by a more immediate financial threat from the other direction. The work is to make the progressive argument loudly, persistently, and in the language corporations actually respond to: money. Not moral exhortation, financial consequences. It's just naked power-mongering, and money is the primary medium of power.
To be clear, I am not saying that money is all that matters, that changing public opinion means nothing, that people engaged in these issues are insincere, or that sincerity is irrelevant. Just that sincerity has little impact at historic scale until paired with monied interests. People with immense power do not get it by being nice, and do not give any of it up just to be nice. When speeches inspire action that increases cost, people begin to pay attention.
Martin Luther King made great speeches that moved millions of people. What moved Lyndon Johnson was the prospect of uncontrollable civil unrest in every major American city – a cost-benefit calculation, not a moral awakening. Our goal must be to make it too expensive to retreat from Marriage Equality. When it comes to making change at historic scale, morally informed speeches don't count for beans until they produce action that registers with the bean-counters.
That is not a compromise of the moral argument. It's not even pessimistic. It's just what is so. Financial alignment is a necessary condition, not just a help. If we are to prevent the loss of Marriage Equality (or pursue any other progressive social cause effectively), we must find and cultivate business partners who don't actually care until we show a financial impact.
To us as compassionate humans, the moral argument is all-important. To us as observers of human history, it is only the why, and never the how. If we want to succeed, we must appeal to the financial self-interest of powerful people and companies, and we must allow those people and companies to subsequently bathe in their fatuous cover story about their high moral principles.
We must be prepared to get less than everything, because monied interests will indeed increase corruption and compromise. We must not allow the unattainable perfect to be the enemy of the attainable good. We must not let our disdain for the "dirty" world of finance and power stop us from functioning well within it, because that is the actual world we live in.
The moral argument is not the problem and never has been, not across millennia of human history. We don't need to fine-tune the moral argument, imagining that it will finally resonate with people for whom it will never be compelling. We need to actively get financial self-interest pointing in the same direction as the moral argument. That is what effects change. That is our work.