Race, gender, sexism. These are just some of the issues played out, tackled and beaten down in this book about love and family and the right to marry. It’s a raw look behind the curtains of several members of one family fighting to marry the person they love.

– Retha Hill, former VP of BET Television, executive director of Digital Innovation and Entrepreneur Lab at Cronkite School of Journalism

Couples get married every day in the United States, but some have to work harder than others for the right to do so. Rarer still is when two such couples exist in the same family, a generation apart. This fascinating memoir tells the story of interracial and same-sex couples who refused to take no for an answer.

– Sharon and Mary Bishop-Baldwin, Oklahoma marriage-equality case plaintiffs and authors of Becoming Brave: Winning Marriage Equality in Oklahoma and Finding Our Voice

Gold digger, Nigger lover. Whore! Those were the names shouted at Iris by military brass in 1961 when she stood before them and asked to marry the man she loved. Ray and Iris Green were repeatedly told no by Ray’s US Air Force superiors. They were denied not just because she was English and he was American - but also because she was white and he was black. The young couple refused to take no for an answer and eventually married.

The Marriage Battle: A Family Tradition is a story about American culture as told through one family by Ray and Iris’s daughter, Sue.

Like her parents, Sue fought for the right to marry the person she loved. And almost 50 years to the day of the Loving decision which struck down anti-miscegenation laws in the US, The Defense of Marriage Act was repealed. Same-sex marriage was finally legal and Sue married her love and now wife, Robin.