(no subject)

Apr 04, 2006 03:58

Okay.

So here in Wisconsin, on the November ballot will be an amendment to the state constitution stating:

Only a marriage between one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in this state. A legal status identical or substantially similar to that of marriage for unmarried individuals shall not be valid or recognized in this state.

The first sentence is bad enough. Marriage in this state is already defined as being between a husband and a wife, and you only have to look in the dictionary to conclude that that's pretty gender specific. So really it ends up double banning gay marriage, which I don't quite understand why that would be worth the energy. And of course that on top of the fact that I am in favor of gay marriage makes me go grrrr. But that's not really the big problem with this.

The second sentence is likely to wipe out all civil unions and domestic partnerships, for everyone. And it's really not just gay people who need and use that sort of thing. In other states that passed similar bans, not only are people using it to prevent people from sharing their health insurance with their partners - gay or straight, doesn't matter - in Ohio it's getting used to dismiss domestic abuse cases if the couple isn't actually married.

Anyway, that's the basis of it. I'm doing a lot of volunteer work with the group (Fair Wisconsin[1]) that's working to get the ban defeated at the ballot box, which mostly consists of talking about it as much as possible with as many people as possible, which means lots of phone calls, door to door canvassing, mailings, and that sort of thing.

And of course the question now is, why is Kathleen, person who for most purposes sort of went and fell off the earth, now telling you about all this. Hrm. Well, you people are sort of less scary to talk to than others I can think of.

That and so this weekend I'm going to Milwaukee to the Power Summit (is that a funny name? Yeah) which is a big intensive volunteer training that's being put on by The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and as homework to do before I get there, they say I'm supposed to come up with 75 people w/phone numbers to call for the purpose of learning how to do fundraising.

Nevermind that I signed up for the field part of it, not the fundraising part, they want everyone to know how to do everything. Did I mention I hate phones? And that calling people I've known for awhile but haven't mentioned the whole I'm gay thing to because I was terrified when I met them a couple years ago and have felt kinda scared/silly about mentioning it since, the idea of calling them about this sort of sends me into a panic? Um, yeah.

So if you bothered to read this far, and want to discuss this more, or would be into donating money, or even if you just want to be a friendly non-scary person to talk to who will nicely say they can't/won't give me any money and will help me look good by actually managing to pull together a list anywhere near 75 people, and wouldn't mind being called somewhere between 9am-12pm CDT Sunday...

will you email me and tell me so and give me your number? I promise promise promise that this gives your number to no one but me, and that no one other than me would call you on this subject, and if you say yes to me here I will in no way expect you to give money (although my job on the phone would be to talk you into it, I promise you can say no and that'd be fine), and that I'm only going to call you with it once. Unless of course you decide that a good condition of this concept would be that I have to call you and talk for real sometime after this weekend since I'm such a slacker about long distance these days. Hee.

Anyway, email is kathleen at nbtsc.org, and um, hi.
Love,
Me.

[1]So usually we would use nifty HTML to insert a link to their website here. Unfortunately, some of us have been offline so long we forgot how to do that. Shame shame. So posting it the other way. http://www.fairwisconsin.com
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