ABSTRACT
In the wake of the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision legalizing same sex marriage, the hashtag #lovewins was ubiquitous. But as paradoxical as it now seems, marriage equality wasn’t always about love. Prior campaigns centered issues of fairness and discrimination in their appeals for marriage equality. Though the love branding was certainly successful, this chapter considers the implications that the turn towards love as the animating rhetoric of the marriage equality campaign has on the future of queer political movements. While the decision to appeal to so-called “American values” of love and freedom, and tie gay and lesbian couples to those values, may have been successful at winning marriage rights in the short term, this chapter argues that it actively precludes the kind of broad-based progressive coalition that could fundamentally change the distribution of power and resources in this country. To illustrate this, the chapter investigates a 2012 “Vote No” campaign in Minnesota opposed to a proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. The chapter concludes by assessing the impact of this shift on the LGBT movement post-marriage, asking how the “love pivot” disciplines the imagination of the movement even after marriage is no longer the target.
