Some of you are well aware of the site, Join the Impact, as a resource to go to to find out about Anti-Prop 8 activism taking place around the world. What you may not know is how quickly and remarkably this website has become a rallying cry and how it did by using the empowering aspect of the internet and new media to spread the word.
Meet it's founder Amy Balliett.
"Join the Impact" began as a blog post and email template by Willow Witte, a friend of Balliett’s who had sent the missive to inspire friends after the passage of California’s anti-gay marriage Proposition 8.
The success of similar propositions in Arizona and Florida, as well as an anti-gay adoption measure in Arkansas, only added gravity to the situation. Witte encouraged contacts to forward the note to their local LGBT groups to solicit plans of community action. Balliett responded to her friend’s email saying, according to a post on the site, "We shouldn’t wait, we need to mobilize now, and we need to on a national level, at the exact same moment, throughout the country."
And mobilize they did: this past Friday, Nov. 7, ‘"Join the Impact" hit the web. Five hours later, the site logged 10,000 visitors. Apparently a lot of other people shared the young women’s desire to turn despair into resolve.
By midnight, 20 cities’ worth of young volunteers had signed on to organize protests against the discriminatory propositions.
The next evening, Nov. 8, the site had tripled its hits.
See that, the movement started as an email and blog and has blossomed into a National day of protest this Saturday.
Note the timeline here, this has all happened AFTER the vote on Tuesday. The website went up on November 7th.
...by Nov. 11, over one million visitors had come to the site.
How did this happen? Craig's List, Facebook, MySpace, ListServs and all the other weapons of mass dissemination available to the grassroots.
Who is Amy Baillett? Nobody special, daughter of a Methodist Minister, living in Seattle, working a routine job, and married.... married to Jessica Triejo. Nobody special except with an overwhelming sense that something had to be done. Nobody special except the desire to be treated with respect and dignity annd the inability to stand idly by while those rights were voted away.
"It’s ludicrous," she fumes, "that after 10 months of the right to marry, they had their rights taken away. When there are no legal binding rights to a commitment, that commitment loses credibility.
"When we’re backed into a corner," she continues, "as we have been with these propositions, we cannot let ourselves be silenced. Protest is a way to bring that conversation back to a national level."
Interstingly, as someone who finds herself thrust into the middle of the LGBT movement, as soemone who got so fired up over Prop 8 she helped organized the county, she seems to be a fairly calm voice of reason.
She argues, "The minute we say we are going to boycott the LDS, for example, we stray. It is time we take back the conversation and do it responsibly. There is already too much finger pointing.
"Not to be get Barack Obama on you, but we have to reach across the party lines. Obama won because he met John McCain with respect. And John McCain lost because he did not meet Barack Obama with respect"
AMy wants to make sure the debate is framed in a way that repsects those who have a moral dilemma with same sex marriage...
"In marriage, God and family keep us accountable. But government is supposed to provide the rights to help us stay accountable. If we are outside of Washington state, for example, and one of us goes into the hospital, the absence of those rights makes it impossible to be able to take care of each other and to live up to the commitments we have made to one another," she says.
In other words, how can honor God if the law won't allow me to be accountable to the one I love?
One person can spawn a movement, please, on November 15 help us move forward for LGBT rights