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Michelle Obama snuck out of the White House to celebrate marriage equality with crowd outside gates

The White House is lit up in rainbow colors to celebrate the Supreme Court's opinion legalizing gay marriage in all fifty states on June 26, 2015
The White House is lit up in rainbow colors to celebrate the Supreme Court's opinion legalizing gay marriage in all fifty states on June 26, 2015 Photo: Shutterstock

Former First Lady Michelle Obama’s new memoir, Becoming, includes a section about the day the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. It includes a shocking revelation about the depths of the First Lady’s support for the LGBTQ community.

As the White House was lit up in rainbow colors to celebrate the ruling, Obama documents being able to watch the happiness as celebrants gathered in the park outside the White House gates, but that she couldn’t even hear the crowd.

Suddenly “desperate to join the celebration,”  she decided to do something about it – and she enlisted help from her eldest daughter, Malia, to accomplish it.

“We were going on an adventure—outside, where people were gathered—and we weren’t going to ask anyone’s permission,” Obama writes in the book. “Malia and I were now on a crusade. We weren’t going to relinquish our goal. We were going to get ourselves outside.”

After a complicated process of sneaking past the Secret Service and being thwarted once, the two finally made it outside.

“We made our way down a marble staircase and over red carpets, around the busts of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and past the kitchen until suddenly we were outdoors. The humid summer air hit our faces. I could see fireflies blinking on the lawn.”

“And there it was, the hum of the public, people whooping and celebrating outside the iron gates. It had taken us 10 minutes to get out of our own home, but we’d done it. We were outside, standing on a patch of lawn off to one side, out of sight of the public but with a beautiful, close-up view of the White House, lit up in pride.”

 

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