Supporters of gay marriage often viewed those who disagreed with them as corrupt and vicious. For Kaplan, DOMA was simply an “odious law.” Morally speaking, this was not an open-ended debate but the orderly and inevitable procession toward an already known civil rights “truth,” the only question being whether justices and activists, working together, should occasionally slow the pace of reform in order to avoid provoking a democratic “backlash.”
