This Is What a (Marriage Equality) Movement Looks Like
A little over a week ago, same-sex couples from Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, and Kentucky filed briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court seeking the freedom to marry nationally. Just last Friday, hundreds of Fortune 500 corporations, faith leaders, Republican and Democratic officials, civil rights organizations, law professors, and the Obama Administration filed supporting amicus briefs. And the Supreme Court finally set oral arguments for April 28. For thousands of same-sex couples across the country, the day when their families might be fully protected and their love equally recognized seems closer than ever.

Arriving at this moment was neither an inevitability nor the work product of a few heroic individuals. Rather, it’s the culmination of a movement’s work over decades – careful strategy; individual story-telling; grassroots organizing; setbacks and recovery from setbacks; litigation, legislation, and ballot questions – involving all kinds of people and organizations putting in blood, sweat, and tears.

It’s notable, for example, that like most of the cases currently before the Supreme Court, the first significant marriage equality case was brought back in the early 1990s by a private attorney in Hawaii, Dan Foley, on behalf of Nina Baehr and Genora Dancel. While their initial victory in the courts was eventually overturned by constitutional amendment, their lawsuit catapulted the marriage equality movement to the national stage and, with the help of movement leader Evan Wolfson, kicked off a broader conversation about the injustices and harms of excluding same-sex couples from marriage.

Twenty years later, after a narrowly averted car accident, April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse of Michigan, visited their attorney Dana Nessel to ensure that both of them would be recognized as the legal parents of their four children. They were shocked to learn that without the ability to marry, they could not jointly adopt and ensure the security of their family. For April and Jayne, their journey to the doors of the Supreme Court has been guided both by their own moral compass and their parental instinct to protect their children.

And certainly, “the movement” writ large has come together in this moment. All four major LGBT legal organizations that have worked long and hard to get us to where we are today are co-counsel in the cases before the high court. GLAD’s Mary Bonauto, who won the first marriage case in the country in Massachusetts in 2003, is co-counsel in Michigan with Dana and a team of talented private attorneys, including Carole Stanyar, Kenneth Mogill of Mogill, Posner & Cohen, and Wayne State University Law Professor Robert Sedler. Lambda Legal, which won the first unanimous judicial victory in Iowa and later helped secure marriage throughout the 9th Circuit, is co-counsel in Ohio. NCLR, which won a game changing legal victory in California, helping reverse a string of judicial losses in the mid-2000s, is now co-counsel in Tennessee. Finally, the ACLU, whose landmark Windsor victory at the Supreme Court overturning DOMA last year set off the avalanche of federal judicial victories on marriage in the last year, is co-counsel in Kentucky and Ohio.

It’s also significant that the Supreme Court cases originated in states from the heartland and the south, thanks to the movement’s state-by-state strategy that began with Massachusetts and grew to 37 states just last month with Alabama. This strategy has succeeded through a mixture of judicial, legislative, and electoral wins. Statewide equality groups, as well as national organizations like Freedom to Marry, the Equality Federation, the National LGBTQ Task Force, and HRC, knew that to win nationally at the Supreme Court, we needed as many states as possible in the pro-equality column, and we needed to win those states by every means possible. And did. As a result, there are now only 13 states, all in the most conservative areas of our country, left that discriminate against same-sex couples in marriage.

This is what a movement looks like. Ordinary people exercising their ordinary rights with extraordinary courage. Private attorneys sacrificing their time and livelihoods for a just cause. Movement organizations planning a strategy of incremental progress to be included within one of society’s most cherished institutions. And the transformative power of LGBT people and families sharing their lives with their neighbors, friend, coworkers, and family. None of this profound change was inevitable; instead, every piece had to come together, along with a bit of luck and a lot of hard work, in order to climb to where we are today.

But this cannot be all that our movement looks like. Even as we reach the top of this mountain, if we fail to see the mountains beyond, then all we will be left with is a steep climb down. Even if same-sex couples begin marrying across the country in June, those same couples still face discrimination in their everyday lives, especially as our opponents seek to expand religious exemptions to undermine anti-discrimination protections. Even as same-sex couples gain greater acceptance within society, the same is not true for all in our community, including youth, elders, people of color, transgender individuals, and HIV-positive individuals.

The real test of a movement is whether it has the vision to imagine an even more just society for everyone, and the tenacity to get it done.

The marriage equality movement has given us the tools to tackle these new challenges. We have built shared values of love, respect and family that we can now use to fuel society’s greater understanding of all LGBTQ individuals, in all aspects of our lives. We have learned how to use personal stories to teach about the realities of our lives in a way that highlights our common humanity as opposed to our differences. And we understand the power of everyday actions by ordinary people – every person who has ever come out to a family member, placed a photo of their partner on their desk at work, or shared a story about their transgender child.

We may not know exactly what the movement will look like going forward, but the many faces of our ever diverse LGBTQ community is not a bad place to start.

www.huffingtonpost.com/janson-wu/this-is-what-a-marriage-equality-movement-looks-like_b_6822882.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

Obama Invokes Stonewall, Draws Comparisons Between Civil Rights and LGBT Equality in #Selma50 Speech

Kyler Geoffroy

www.towleroad.com/2015/03/obamaselma-1.html

WATCH: Joe Biden Compares Selma and Stonewall, Disses Ben Carson

In a speech to the HRC, Biden discusses the unity of all civil rights movements and shakes his head at Carson’s ‘ridiculous assertion’ that being gay is a choice.

read more

Trudy Ring

www.advocate.com/politics/politicians/2015/03/07/watch-joe-biden-compares-selma-and-stonewall-disses-ben-carson

Madonna: A Rebel With a Cause
Madonna is a sacred subject.

I learnt this last week when I penned an op-ed piece for Advocate arguing that Madonna’s latest album Rebel Heart was in itself an achievement. I wrote that whether or not the album had any musical, aesthetic, or cultural impact in today’s music scene was not important. The sheer act that Madonna (at 56) was releasing her thirteenth-studio album was enough for me.

Rebel Heart would demonstrate Madonna’s ability to subvert and break existing cultural narratives about women, music, and ageing. For me, it would be another watershed moment for the legendary singer.

Now that the actual “official” release of the album is only days away, it may be worth briefly backtracking the hype around Madonna’s 2015 record.

Although Rebel Heart has attracted much media attention because of the multiple leaks that has plagued it, Madonna has persevered in maintaining official dates for its release. Sometimes an online music “leak” is a ploy to generate interest and media attention in an artist’s forthcoming song or album.

In Madonna’s case, it was obvious that this was far from true. The singer took to Instagram to describe the experience as “artistic rape” and discussed the trauma in follow-up interviews, including a revealing one given to Rolling Stone.

Rebel Heart has been marked by multiple controversies, including Madonna’s reappropriation of images of civil rights and religious figures. This is not unfamiliar territory for the singer who has, for instance, been on the Roman Catholic Church’s hit list for decades. But her use of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King on Instagram was seen as disrespectful and offensive. Some saw it as a poor reappropriation and one that was more an attempt to publicise her album than commemorate the deep and meaningful legacy of these humanitarian figures.

But the conceit behind Rebel Heart is really about the singer challenging the status quo. Madonna’s Instagram images have profiled a number of figures from history who were rebels who fought for political and social injustices and became heroes because of their civil and religious campaigns.

For fans of the Queen of Pop, the meaning of the album’s title is self-evident. Many of us have known the singer’s history of challenging and complicating the existing social, political, and cultural norms around women and sex and then injecting her own brand of transformative and performative style into these conventions.

Indeed Madonna has been a major “rebel” — the only? — of the music scene for the last thirty years. Just scanning the track list of Rebel Heart we see the album make explicit references to her rebellion with songs including the title track “Rebel Heart,” alongside “Bitch I’m Madonna (feat. Nicki Minaj),” and “Joan of Arc”.

While her previous two albums, 2008’s Hard Candy and 2012’s MDNA were apparently chasing the cultural and musical zeitgeist, Rebel Heart is not as preoccupied with emulating the existing musical and aesthetic energies of today’s music scene. Instead it feels more like self-reflective essay from the legendary singer, with dance tracks, ballads, and electro-pop songs marking each new “chapter” of her confessional dissertation.

Some fans cite 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor as her last great piece of musical triumph. Its disco-inspired sound, continuous flow from track-to-track, and iconic “Hung Up” music video offered fans a side to Madonna that took us back to her musical roots and revisited a defining moment of twentieth-century music.

But Rebel Heart is Madonna’s next masterpiece in the making.

The title track of the album “Rebel Heart” is striking in that many of the leaks of this song had more of an electro dance sound. (Sorry for listening to the leaks Madonna!) But the finished version of “Rebel Heart” opens with a series of strumming guitar sounds. This lends the song a sense of candour and intimacy as though the songstress is telling us that she is really opening up on her struggles and pains as the only iconoclast of modern music. She is telling us that she has always had a rebel heart and will continue to break the rules that others won’t.

In the same song she admits, “I’ve spent some time as a narcissist/…trying to be so provocative.” Madonna’s history of transgressing the traditional trajectory for pop stars and musicians has made her one of the singular icons of dissidence and female defiance in twentieth-century music. Compare “Rebel Heart” with “Unapologetic Bitch” and we see Madonna have some fun with this metaphor through the blendings of a reggae sound as she sings “sometimes I got to call it like it is”.

Other tracks like “Wash All Over Me,” “Ghostown,” and “Joan of Arc” are really moving and uplifting songs as they prioritise Madonna’s raw vocal talents and the singer’s desire to be more direct in communicating her intimate confessions to fans. Madonna is telling us that she is and has been a rebel of the music, art, and culture scene for decades and that sometimes she has hurt, ached, and burned with painful emotions.

But because she is Madonna she will continue to break the boundaries set on her identity as a singer, artist, and woman.

It would not be a true Madonna record without some Catholic symbolism thrown in for good measure. We find her “tast[ing] holy water” before encouraging us to genuflect and to “confess”. Madonna here returns to religious symbols she originally exploited in the 1980s (who can forget her greatest hits record The Immaculate Collection?), reminding us other disobedience toward the Roman-Catholic church and her own religious upbringing.

To me, whether or not the album itself is well received by her critics is unimportant. The very existence of Rebel Heart is exciting and gratifying enough.

With this thirteenth record, Madonna is telling us she has not, does not, and will not ever stop her campaign against breaking the rules of gender, sex, and the limits placed on her own humanity.

www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-smith/madonna-a-rebel-with-a-cause_b_6804412.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

HRC National Corporate Partners Support Historic Amicus Brief

The 379 signatories represent a Who’s Who of American companies and organizations
HRC.org

www.hrc.org/blog/entry/hrc-national-corporate-partners-support-historic-amicus-brief?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss-feed

CNN Looks at the Executions of Gays by ISIS, Interviews Gay Couple Who Fled Syria: VIDEO

Andy Towle

www.towleroad.com/2015/03/isisgays.html