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By Evan Wolfson: Many thanks on this 10th annual Freedom to Marry Week

Freedom to Marry
February 14, 2007

The Freedom to Marry office is filled with glowing smiles, pure elation, and sighs of relief as our biggest week of the year, Freedom to Marry Week, has been a stunning success thus far. Throughout the country, people are seizing this opportunity to engage the public in the conversation about the need for marriage equality.

On Monday, Freedom to Marry Day, our staff hosted an extraordinary event celebrating both the 10th anniversary of Freedom to Marry Day and, gulp, my 50th birthday. I was moved and honored by the hundreds of supporters, friends, and family who attended, and was deeply inspired by those who offered their words of reminiscence and encouragement. Thanks go to New York Governor Eliot Spitzer for his letter, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn for sending a City Council Proclamation, Senator Russ Feingold for the letter he sent, and Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum and Lambda Legal Executive Director Kevin Carthcart, who offered tributes that meant a great deal to me. I then had a chance to offer my own thoughts and thanks on this special occasion:

Ten years ago, when we began marking Freedom to Marry Day on February 12 — a date chosen to coincide with my hero, Abraham Lincoln's birthday and Valentine's Day, to invoke our message of equality and love — we had just won in Hawaii a first-ever ruling that the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage is unjustified, unfair, and unconstitutional.

Back then, Bowers v. Hardwick remained a shadow on our lives and the law — and nowhere on the planet could same-sex couples marry.

Back then, we had not yet invented the term, let alone the reality, of civil unions.

Back then, young people had only just begun to dare dream of a life of full inclusion with a committed partner, and those of us who, even then, were older did not yet dare believe that we would live to see our movement's work reach an end.

Back then, most Americans, including most gay people, were first learning to put the words gay and marriage in the same sentence. Few thought we'd see marriage equality in our lifetime.

Look at us now.

While there is much, much still to be done — including undoing the harms inflicted under the worst Administration in American history — together we have won the freedom to marry for some gay people, and are within reach of winning it for all. We have changed the world.

Forty years ago, another of my heroes, Martin Luther King, Jr., preached a sermon entitled Ingratitude. "Ingratitude," Dr. King said, is "one of the greatest of all sins [because it is a person's failure] to recognize his dependence on others."

I have always taken this seriously in two ways. First, our civil rights movement has an inheritance from, an obligation to, and commonality with, those who went before us and the work for justice led by others.

And second, personally, what I have, and have achieved, I owe to so many others who have preceded, accompanied, assisted, guided, and sacrificed for me.

In that spirit, though mindful of not repeating, tonight I do want to give my heartfelt thanks to the people and organizations already mentioned by my friends, Brondi Borer and Jeff Campagna — and add my appreciation to them and to the other chairs of tonight's spectacular event, Brian Ellner, Richie Jackson, and our own Steering Committee member, Jordan Roth.

I also want to acknowledge two other Freedom to Marry Steering Committee members here tonight: Fred Humphrey, and our co-chair, the Rev. John Buehrens, sometime President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, joining us tonight from Massachusetts.

Thank you again to Asher and Marc for welcoming us to their remarkably beautiful home.

I thank the Host Committee, our generous sponsors, Sonya and her team, the volunteers, and all who worked so hard and fast to make this very rare fundraising event for Freedom to Marry such a night to remember.

And there are some others I would like to single out with my gratitude tonight.

First, please join me in acknowledging Freedom to Marry's talented and hard-working staff:

• our newest staffer, Researcher/Writer Megan Kinninger
• Executive Assistant Kiyana Horton
• Office Administrator Jason Almodovar
• our Senior Web Producer, Heather Jensen, who makes our www.freedomtomarry.org website so happening
• Freedom to Marry's Communications Director Samiya Bashir
• and our Deputy Director, Charles Ignacio, who patiently and skillfully shepherded this evening to completion and held me to my promise not to micro-manage.

I am truly moved to have so many old and dear friends here from various chapters of my life — college roommates, fellow campers, movement colleagues. How sweet it is!

I have abiding gratitude for my loving family, represented here tonight by my sister, Alison, and her partner, Patty, and my brother, Michael, and his wife, Jane.

And I want to thankfully acknowledge my beautiful sweetheart, Cheng, who brings my life fullness, a little balance, and, always, laughter.

George Bernard Shaw wrote:

"This is the true joy of life: the being used up for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clot of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can."

Thank you, each of you, for sharing this vision of being part of something mightier than any of us, something hard, but right and good and timely and within reach.

You have connected with, and contributed to, Freedom to Marry — and together we will use what we have gathered, summon others, bend history, and make and leave a better world.

And while we will not finish our work of winning marriage equality nationwide before next year's Freedom to Marry Week, together we will do it before another half-century passes.

Thank you.

As I reach you on Valentine's Day, a day we celebrate love, I feel overwhelmingly surrounded by love and support especially following such an exceptional event. I look forward to the day when we can all have the choice to show our love and commitment through marriage.

— Evan Wolfson

To learn even more about the event, check out Immigration Equality founder Lavi Soloway's blogpost which has more pictures and an excellent event description.