People across the country are pledging to take part in Freedom To Marry’s campaign, 7 Conversations in 7 Days, in honor of the 12th annual Freedom to Marry Week! Here’s how to love out loud every day this week!
Monday, February 9th: Make Your Voice Heard
Add your face and voice to the conversation. Create a blog post, vlog, comment on our blog, change your status on facebook, or change your picture on social networks.
Tuesday, February 10th: Email for Equality
Sign the marriage resolution and email it to friends. Support your state’s equality organization – THAT WOULD BE MERI! Make a tax-deductible donation to honor your loved one(s)!
Wednesday, February 11th: Button Up for Equality
Sign up to receive a button to wear or place on your website, blog, or social networking page.
Thursday, February 12th: Face to Face to Equality
Have a face to face conversation by attending or hosting an event. Tell us about any events happening during the week, and we’ll post them. ATTEND THE “OPEN YOUR HEART TO EQUALITY” RALLY AT THE STATE HOUSE IN PROVIDENCE THIS THURSDAY, FEB 12
Friday, February 13th: Txt 4 Equality
Send a text or tweet about why marriage matters and forward on to friends.
Saturday, February 14th: Get Local With It
Write a letter to the editor of the Providence Journal.
Encourage your friends, family, and co-workers to take the pledge to have 7 Conversations in 7 Days this February 8-14! Stuck on what to say? Pick up some talking points and conversation starters
February 9, 2009
Attorney Ken Starr and the Prop 8 Legal Defense Fund have filed legal briefs defending the constitutionality of Prop 8 and attempting to forcibly divorce 18,000 same-sex couples that were married in California last year. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in this case on March 5, 2009, with a decision expected within 90 days.
The Courage Campaign has created a video called “Fidelity” with the permission of musician Regina Spektor, that puts a face to those 18,000 couples and all loving, committed couples seeking full equality under the law.
After you watch the video, please sign the letter to the state Supreme Court and passing this video along to everyone you know. The more people who see this video, the more people will understand the pain caused by the shameful Prop 8 legal proceeding.
February 9, 2009
Salon’s Jeanne Carstensen has a beautiful piece up profiling a couple, Brian Dietrich and Jay Redd, who recently married in California.
The story not only made me tear up over my morning coffee, but really shows the personal side of the marriage issue. Just yesterday I was struck by a someone’s comment that we should not focus on the personal so much in the marriage equality movement because its really a policy or civil rights issue. While it can be that, this is a deeply personal to many, many people. We need to tell our stories even more, so that everyone can see and understand the joy that Brian and Jay are feeling and that all couples can feel when they are able to marry.
A big gay Mormon wedding
The Church of Latter-day Saints has pumped millions into Proposition 8 to ban gay marriage. But for one devout family, the politics are personal.
By Jeanne Carstensen
Oct. 31, 2008 |
“Love each other, be selfless, negotiate,” George E. Redd III said to his son Jay on his wedding day recently. Gazing at his 36-year-old son standing next to his beloved, in the Swedenborgian Church in San Francisco, Redd III quoted Paul, Ringo, John and George: “All you need is love, love is all you need.”
It was hanky time inside the chapel, a cozy wooden Arts and Crafts building that could have been airlifted in from a village in Scandinavia, or perhaps the Shire. There’s nothing like the father blessing the son at a wedding, with Irish folk musicians strumming in the background, to get the tear ducts flowing. Especially when the son’s gorgeous spouse is another man.
A few weeks after the wedding, Jay, a movie director based in Los Angeles and San Francisco, told me that his father’s Beatles reference had taken him totally by surprise. “When Dad said, ‘And to quote the great Western philosophers,’ I thought for sure he was going to read from Scripture,” Jay said. But to his great relief, the advice his father doled out came from John Lennon and not John the Baptist. After all the pain Jay had endured, wondering whether his devout Mormon father would even attend his wedding, those Liverpool lyrics were music to his ears.
Read the rest of the story on Salon
October 31, 2008
