At the meeting, Boies did just that, discussing Obama’s inaugural speech in the context of their legal strategy. Now that Obama had said what he said, Boies argued, “silence would not be considered neutral.” It would, in fact, be deeply harmful, signaling that even someone as friendly to gay voters as Obama considered their argument a bridge too far. It could cost them the case.

“It’s already being used against us,” Boies said, citing Cooper’s brief.

Both women seemed impressed by their pleas. But before they left, Boies said, Jarrett made it clear that further lobbying via the press would not be helpful. This was now a legal decision, she said, not a political one.

It would have been unusual for the solicitor general’s office to file a brief in a case like Proposition 8 that did not involve a challenge to a federal law. But Olson had already met with Donald B. Verrilli Jr., the solicitor general, who is responsible for representing the federal government before the Supreme Court, and argued that it was not unprecedented. In the landmark Brown v. Board of Education, the solicitor general’s office filed a brief arguing that state segregation laws were unconstitutional. Olson insisted that there was no less a moral imperative in the Proposition 8 case. “This is one of those ‘What did Daddy do in the war?’ moments,” participants in the meeting recalled him saying.

For Verrilli, the easiest course would have been to sit out the Proposition 8 case. His office had already filed a brief in the federal case on the Defense of Marriage Act, asking the Supreme Court to strike down the law. The justices could find DOMA unconstitutional without declaring a nationwide right for gay couples to marry. The remedy was relatively uncontroversial: Already-married couples would simply start receiving benefits.

But if Verrilli simultaneously argued that gay couples had a fundamental right to marry, he would be pressing the court to strike down bans nationwide, which would complicate the administration’s DOMA strategy. In particular, if Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, whom everyone presumed would cast the deciding vote in the DOMA case, became convinced that the only way he could strike down DOMA was to adopt a rule of law that would force every state in the nation to allow gay couples to wed, he might get cold feet. “We potentially run the risk of losing him,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told me, reflecting on his concerns at the time.

But as he reviewed his options, Verrilli was struck by a memo Olson’s team had put together outlining the similarities between the arguments used more than a century ago defending bans on interracial marriage and those being used today opposing same-sex marriage. The supporters of Proposition 8 contended, for example, that allowing gay couples to wed could harm traditional marriages. The Alabama Supreme Court in 1877 opined that the state must “guard” against the “disturbances” that interracial marriage would produce. Defenders of Proposition 8 also argued that the impact of allowing gay couples to marry was unknown. The commonwealth made the same argument in Loving v. Virginia, which struck down a law prohibiting interracial marriage, saying the court should defer to the wisdom of the states given the “conflicting scientific opinion upon the effects of interracial marriage.” It also mentioned the state’s interest in promoting an optimal child-rearing environment, an argument that Proposition 8 proponents were now making.

Verrilli also turned to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” which responded to criticism by white clergymen that King’s demands were premature and ill timed. King’s words, about how you can fight a “degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’ ” for only so long before “the cup of endurance runs over,” resonated. Verrilli studied suicide statistics that reflected the despair felt by many gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender teenagers. When he was finished with his research, he shared his recommendation with Holder: Whatever the risk to the DOMA case, the government should take a stand on Proposition 8.