Ken Mehlman is responsible, according to NPR, for the one hundred and thirty-one prominent Republicans who have signed a pro-same-sex marriage Amicus Curie brief to the Supreme Court in light of the recent marriage equality cases. According to NPR, Kenneth Mehlman is now “arguably the most high-profile openly gay Republican in the country.”
In order to accomplish this, Ken Mehlman has been making what he calls “the conservative case” for gay marriage. As NPR puts it, “Mehlman compares the right to marry to other fundamental rights conservatives embrace — for example, the right to bear arms and the right of corporate free speech embodied in the Supreme Court’s controversial 2010 decision striking down the ban on corporate spending in candidate elections.”
Mehlman is himself a lawyer, and was involved in some of the confirmations of the current justices. But getting the signatures of all of these Republicans was not an easy task. It was the product of hundreds of long conversations and some rejections as well. But for Mehlman, it’s all part of his coming out process.
“You can’t change the past,” Ken Mehlman says, “but you can try to, as much as you can going forward, be helpful and be constructive.”
Read the entire piece on their site here.