[ + ] Text [ – ]

By Evan Wolfson: Thinking Anew

Freedom to Marry
September 13, 2006

September has always felt like the real start of a new year to a lot of us. For students, parents, and teachers, it means back to school. Important elections and ballot measures are coming up across the nation in November and many of us have participated in the recent primary elections. With summer slipping into memory, we turn back to the work and, we hope, renewal at hand.

This year, September is particularly bittersweet as we mark anniversaries of two of the most devastating events in our country's history — the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the Hurricane Katrina natural and man-made disasters in 2005. Both underscored our national and personal vulnerability, and showed the importance of protections for families, including those of us who are not gay and those who love us.

September also marks the fifth anniversary of the "blueprint" article I wrote laying out a vision of a sustained and affirmative campaign to win the freedom to marry, a call to action centered on focused work to attain a legal breakthrough in one and then more states; national public education, outreach, and organizing; and the creation of a climate of receptivity that would embolden and empower judges and legislators to do the right thing.

With a decision from New Jersey's Supreme Court due any day and crucial work at hand in California and other states, we need to ratchet up the voices explaining who gay families are, how the denial of marriage harms them and our country, and how non-gay and gay people can engage in this social justice cause.

In the face of much that has gone wrong for America over the past five years, we have made undeniable progress in explaining why marriage matters to gay Americans. With the blueprint still before us, let's renew and redouble our work for social justice and reap the harvest we've sown.

[Read the 9/11/01 article, All Together Now (A Blueprint for the Movement)]