I am muddling my way through an egregiously overdue post on this topic (specifically, what do you say to your kids about love, relationships, and marriage) for BlogHer’s Cribsheet. It’s well-timed — the topic, not the post — since next week is Freedom to Marry Week. Founded by longtime LGBT civil rights activist and attorney Evan Wolfson, Freedom to Marry is the gay and non-gay partnership working to win marriage equality nationwide, and the organization has been taking this week, always around Lincoln’s birthday and Valentine’s day, to raise eleven years now.
This year’s Freedom to Marry Week theme is 7 Conversations in 7 Days, which, needless to say, they’d like to encourage people to have. Why? Perhaps it’s obvious, but it’s also worth reiterating: Face-to-face conversations with people in your life make the biggest difference in changing hearts and minds on this topic. (I recall reading that this was confirmed by post-election research but just can’t put my fingers on the link.) The Freedom to Marry website has loads, and I mean loads of fantastic resources to read and distribute, so if you haven’t perused it, I highly recommend time there. But here’s a fine place to start if you want to fill your pockets with answers for any of those seven conversations. Fallacies, underestimations, and false equivalencies abound in this debate, and the quicker and more comprehensively we can clear them up the better.
In addition to participating in the broader activities of Freedom to Marry Week, you can read and/or contribute posts to Robin Reagler’s second annual blog carnival, Some/thing, to coincide with this week, beginning on Tuesday:
Tuesday, Feb. 10: Something Old (here’s my last year’s “Old”)
Wednesday, Feb. 11: Something New (here’s my last year’s “New”)
Thursday, Feb. 12: Something Borrowed (here’s my last year’s “Borrowed”)
Friday, Feb. 13: Something Blue (here’s my last year’s “Blue”)
Saturday, Feb. 14: Valentine’s Day: Celebrate Love (here’s my last year’s “Love”)
The phenomenal, whopping, hugely consequential difference between conditions around last year’s carnival and this year’s, of course, is: same sex marriage became legal in my home state, for a dizzying six months, and then got snatched back by a slim majority of my fellow Californians, for reasons which one could make complicated, and split hairs over, but really it’s just plain old fashioned xenophobia and ignorance. Which it’s everyone’s job to help dismantle. Weeks like this upcoming one are meant to help give us all a boost to work a little harder.
So. Read Robin’s rolling update of the blogs participating in the carnival, and check back through the week to see what people have been writing. Join in, yourself, if you got yourself a bloggie shop!