Quote of the day: How marriage changed the gay rights discussion

Poliglot 's series on DOMA interviews Andrew Sullivan on equality, early on, and why he focused on military service and marriage:

"Those stories, those causes, would re-describe gay people in the minds of straight people," he says. "The images they would put out there of gay people – soldiers, people living in families, which was the truth of who we were – was an important counterbalance to the only thing they previously had seen, which was gay rights parades, which, however wonderful they are, are not fully representative of who gay people are"

For a conservative like Sullivan, it changed the terms of the debate, as well.

"Straight people understood marriage more than they understood defense of sexual freedom," he adds. "And yet we had been trapped into this ... ghetto of defending sexual freedom. And then asking people not to be mean to us. Which, I thought, was the basic gay rights movement until the early '90s."