I'm ready to "make them do it" as they say on the Defense of Marriage Act repeal. I'm thinking of starting a daily action series with phone numbers and email addresses for Congress so that people can call in and tell them it's time to work on passing the Respect for Marriage act, to repeal DOMA.
This would be mostly a campaign to keep the idea in the public consciousness and on Congress' mind rather than an attempt to say that they need to do it now or we won't vote, or "we want our ponies" or anything. I want to organize a campaign to do LTEs and those sorts of things.
I am open to any ideas.
I want to do a different theme for the letters, too. I'm sort of ripping off that idea from Something the Dog Said's weekly Torture Letters. I want to go very public with this, each of us individually, I mean. I obviously don't think that we're going to make the news or any such crazy thing but it'd be nice to at least get people talking and get Congress thinking.
It would show how serious we are and how much it would benefit gays and everyone else. We could highlight all the 1,138 rights that are guaranteed federally for heterosexual marriage but denied to gay couples. We could highlight the stigma on us, even on those of us who are single and probably wouldn't get married.
We could talk about kids and stability. I'd even be open to mentioning the fact that a lot of us are fully aware that DOMA is unconstitutional, that's why the Supreme Court doesn't like to hear cases on it. We could mention that Scalia famously said in his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas that there is now no legal justification to keep gays from getting married.
I want to let people know about the blatant unfairness of DOMA and the fact that states which allow gay marriage are growing by the day but only local benefits are allowed and if gay married couples move they're screwed. I want to discuss how in California if you got married in the window between the legalization and banning of gay marriages, your marriage is legal, but if you didn't it's not and if you want to get married now there you can't. And if you get divorced or widowed you can't get married again.
There are so many things that are unfair about DOMA and I think the only way to make sure they repeal it, whether it's this year or sometime before President Obama leaves office, is to put constant pressure on them and to remind them, and more importantly the American public, how terrible this law really has been to everyone.
I definitely get that there's health care, climate legislation and all that going on, which is why I'm not trying to make this a "pass now or I'll get so mad I won't help you get re-elected" campaign. I know this might turn off some people here who are rightly focused on these issues. I just see no reason we can't start building consensus on this one day at a time.
As a community we could do so much to win hearts and minds and to keep America forward-moving on the path to full equality for GLBT people.
This will be a serious, maybe even long-term effort, so I'm asking you guys if a significant amount of you will be interested enough to help organize this and fight with me.