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In 1983, Evan Wolfson, a young law student at Harvard, wrote a startling legal thesis [ [link removed] ] arguing for gay marriage as a constitutional right. At the time, anti-sodomy laws targeted gay people with criminal prosecution in a majority of American states [ [link removed] ]. Only 11% of the American public [ [link removed] ] supported same-sex marriage in polls. Being gay was, by most accounts at the time, not a constitutional right; it was a crime. 
Yet in less than a generation, the landscape on gay rights has transformed. Anti-sodomy laws were abolished by the Supreme Court in the 2003 case Lawrence v. Texas, and the Court followed that by endorsing a constitutional right to gay marriage in the 2015 case Obergefell v. Hodges. Public opinion has been completely upended, with 71% of Americans [ [link removed] ] now supporting gay marriage. 
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How did things change so quickly? I’ve been lucky enough to discuss this with Evan Wolfson many times over the years, including this past Sunday at our Open Rescue Advocates meeting. And there are three building blocks we can learn from the success of the gay marriage campaign: a clear vision; a multifaceted strategy; and a unified leadership team. Importantly, each and every one of us can be involved in harnessing these building blocks to create change.
Establish a clear vision
One of the most important elements of Evan’s campaign was that it set out a clear vision for victory: the freedom to marry. Too often, activists dwell on the problem rather than the solution; that’s not very inspiring. Alternatively, we focus on incremental steps without a long-term destination; that prevents a movement from understanding if it’s truly making progress. Evan’s focus on a constitutional right to marry solved these problems by creating an inspiring goal, and giving activists a strategic North Star upon which to measure their success. 
Shortly after I met Evan in 2016, I tried to establish a similarly clear vision for animal rights [ [link removed] ]: 
[T]oday, we are planting our flag: a constitutional amendment for animals. Changing the constitution has been the method used by activists to expand the moral franchise for 200 years, from the 13th Amendment (which abolished chattel slavery) to the 19th Amendment (which gave women the right to vote). And with so many dimensions to the oppression of animals -- from our food to our clothing to our science - only a constitutional amendment will create the sustained political momentum we need to change the world for all animals. Once such an amendment is in place, every political decision-maker, from the local city council member to the Supreme Court, will be beholden to its power. And since constitutional principles evolve over time, an amendment could adapt to the new challenges we face as we unpack the many brutal layers of speciesism.
The vision established by that blog – a world where every legal and political decision in the nation is constitutionally required to respect animal rights – inspired thousands to participate. People who were accustomed to wallowing in pessimism were fired up to fight for change. For many years, “vision” was the number one factor cited by participants in DxE in explaining their reason to join our campaigns. 
Vision also helped us find incremental steps on the path to success. By establishing a constitutional amendment as our goal, we could better understand what tactics were necessary to make progress. For example, the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution provides [ [link removed] ], “No person shall… be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” If we could establish animals as “persons,” billions of animals would suddenly have a constitutional right to life and liberty. That is precisely what we aim to do in the right to rescue cases, where the key legal question is whether, under the “necessity defense [ [link removed] ],” an animal should be deemed a person or property. A clear vision helped us find this path. 
But it’s not just lawyers and leaders who establish the vision. Everyone in a movement must take part. Movements that succeed have a shared vision that a large number of advocates can crystallize. This allows the movement as a whole to focus on solutions, inspire support, and align its actions towards success. So if you are an advocate, ask yourself: do you have a clear vision of what change means? 
Execute a multifaceted strategy 
But a vision is not enough; movements also need strategy. The concept of strategy can often feel needlessly complex; it is, in fact, quite simple. A strategy is simply a plan for breaking down a goal into smaller and more achievable parts. And all of us execute on strategies in our everyday lives. If you cook, you have engaged in strategy: combining the various ingredients of your meal into a (hopefully) delicious final product. If you travel, you’ve engaged in strategy: figuring out the steps necessary to get to your final destination. Effective movements inspire people to engage in this sort of analytical thinking, across many different domains, to achieve movement objectives.
That’s precisely what happened in the fight for gay marriage. Evan was a lawyer and litigator, but there were countless other activists engaging in non-legal activism to pursue the campaign’s strategic objectives. Protest organizers held rallies, with a goal of putting pressure on legal institutions. Writers issued press releases, with a goal of garnering support for cases in local and national media. And fundraisers asked for donations, with a goal of funding the movement’s legal costs. The campaign’s vision was clear and unified, but its strategy was multifaceted. 
There is one other aspect of effective strategy, however, that’s worth mentioning: snowball effects. Movements have limited resources and support, especially in their early stages. And the world is big and hard to change. The only way to reach success, therefore, is to create self-sustaining and self-scaling strategies for change. This is where the snowball effect comes into play. Campaigns with snowball effects focus on victories that can then fuel further efforts at change. Those efforts, in turn, can win more victories that fuel even more effort. Before you know it, the movement has created an unstoppable snowball effect. 
Legal campaigns, such as Evan’s freedom to marry campaign, often exhibit snowball effects. This is true even when the campaigns suffer “losses” in court. The first courtroom victory for gay marriage in Hawaii in 1993 [ [link removed] ], for example, fueled an enormous wave of activism across the nation. For the first time in history, LGBT folks saw that bigger change was possible. Even though that Hawaii victory was ultimately reversed, it created a snowball effect: more activists pushed for the freedom to marry around the country, in states like Massachusetts [ [link removed] ] and California [ [link removed] ], and this inspired more activism, which in turn inspired more legal cases. Voila: A snowball effect!
A similar snowball effect between legal and non-legal tactics was crucial to the achievement of civil rights in the 1950s and 60s, e.g, with cases such as Brown v. Board of Education or the criminal prosecution of Rosa Parks. Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam describes the process:
The successful outcome of earlier [legal] cases over time contributed to a growing sense of political efficacy within the black community that in turn stimulated further growth…  Hence action begot success-however limited substantively-which in turn laid the cognitive foundation for further mobilizing efforts within the black community.
The same snowball effect can be achieved for animal rights. The right to rescue cases have generated enormous attention and sympathy, which will create more activists. Those activists, in turn, will do rescues that create more cases. And so on. The new prosecutions in Sonoma County [ [link removed] ], involving Zoe Rosenberg and others, are evidence of this snowball effect in action. 
The key thing, however, is that a large number of people need to be aware of, and actively involved in, the movement’s strategic thinking for snowball effects to work. Levels of involvement in strategy will vary. Not everyone will be lead attorney in a groundbreaking trial. But all of us can break the longer term goal into a smaller and more achievable personal step, e.g., sharing the story of a right to rescue case to convince one of our friends to pay attention to, and support, animal rights. 
A unified leadership team 
The third and perhaps most important building block, however, is a unified leadership team. Evidence shows [ [link removed] ] that effective leadership is crucial to successful organizations. And it’s important for at least two reasons: leaders keep us focused on our vision, and they help resolve organizational conflicts. 
Evan’s organization, Freedom to Marry, was created in part to create unified leadership in the campaign for gay marriage. There were many stakeholder groups – lawyers, community groups, and political parties – and someone needed to ensure all the constituent pieces were working towards the campaign’s vision. Without that focus, progress on gay marriage would not have been nearly so rapid. 
Leadership was also crucial to solving movement conflicts. The gay rights movement, like all movements, was afflicted with infighting for decades. Indeed, the very organization Evan worked for – Lambda Legal – was opposed to taking on the 1993 Hawaii case that ultimately proved transformative for gay rights. Even had to take the case on the side.
When I asked Evan at the meeting how the movement handled such conflict, he answered, roughly, “We had a team, not just one leader, which meant there was probably at least one leader who you did not hate who could win you over to the campaign.” But Evan is being too modest. He and other leaders did an extraordinary job of setting aside conflicts and finding ways to work together. Despite their conflicts, Evan graciously welcomed Lambda Legal into the fold after he won the historic victory in 1993. 
The same unity is crucial for animal rights. The Smithfield trial outcome was powerful partly because of the legal outcome – acquittal – but partly because of the unified front presented by leaders across the movement. From Lewis Bollard to Ingrid Newkirk, collaboration ruled the day — and amplified the story of the trial to the point that I was granted an op-ed [ [link removed] ] in the most important newspaper in the world. (Evan joked at our last meeting that he was not given a NYT op-ed [ [link removed] ] until his campaign was already won!)
The Open Wing Alliance, which focuses on corporate cage-free campaigns, is another example of the power of unified leadership. Historically, animal welfare campaigns were torn down by competition for funding and credit among groups. But as Jan Sorfenfrei points out in a wonderful talk he gave at CARE 2022 [ [link removed] ], unified leadership helped solve the problem and create a far more effective campaign. 
But here is the key bit: unified leadership, in the 21st century, requires all of us to participate. As I wrote last month [ [link removed] ], leadership can only survive when each of us supports a culture of candor, curiosity, and courage. So when we ask if our movement has unified leadership, we should first look inwards: am I behaving collaboratively? Candidly? Courageously?
If so, then you are helping us build the leadership this movement needs. If not, then you have some new personal goals to achieve! 
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The three building blocks above – a clear vision, a multifaceted strategy, and a unified leadership team – aren’t sufficient to create change. But they increase our chances at success. And let me reiterate the most important point. These building blocks require all of us to participate.
All of us need to have a clearer vision of what we’re trying to achieve. 
All of us need to understand our role in a multifaceted strategy.
And all of us need to build the culture of leadership that will allow the movement to thrive. 
If we do these things – if you do these things – someday people will be asking of us the same question that we asked Evan:
How did things change so quickly for animal rights? 
Check out the full conversation with Evan Wolfson below. And email us at [email protected] if you’re interested in becoming an Open Rescue Advocate.
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