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Saturday, Nov 21, 2009
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Seattle joins National Day of Action for Marriage Equality |
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| Seattle joins National Day of Action for Marriage Equality | ||
| Cyber organizing sparks National Day of Action for Marriage Equality
by Mike Andrew -
SGN Contributing Writer On Saturday November 15, Seattle's LGBT community and allies will join thousands of others across the country in a National Day of Action for Marriage Equality. In Seattle, the action will start in Volunteer Park with a rally at noon, followed by a march to Westlake Plaza at 1:00 p.m. E-mails have also circulated calling for a Saturday rally at Seattle City Hall, but that organizing effort has merged with the Volunteer Park event to create a large and unified action. More details, plus contact information for local organizers in most US cities, are available at the National Day of Action website at www.jointheimpact.com. The National Day of Action is the creation of young activists here in Seattle. Amy Balliet, 26, got the idea for nationally coordinated protest actions after reading a friend's blog post about the victory of Prop 8 in California. Balliett, who earns her living publicizing websites, turned her web experience into an organizing tool. "Why do we have to wait for someone to step up and say 'let's do a protest?'" she remembers thinking. "Over e-mail, we decided to do it." After exchanging e-mails with her friend, Willow Witte, Balliet used her lunch break to create the jointheimpact.com website, calling for Saturday actions at city halls all across the county. By that evening, Friday, November 7, the new site was visited 10,000 times. By the following Sunday, there were 50,000 visits per hour and the computer running the site crashed. Since then it has changed servers twice in an effort to accommodate the traffic. One of those contacting Balliet was 21-year-old Kyler Powell, also of Seattle. A member of the LDS (Mormon) Church, Powell says he was "outraged by the Church's involvement in Prop 8, and I wanted to do something about it." Drawing on his experience working with SOAP on Seattle's Pride March in 2007, he envisioned a march through Capitol Hill to downtown. The two quickly joined forces to plan a united Seattle march and rally. March organizers promise pre-rally "festivities" in Volunteer Park from 10:30 a.m. to noon, including music provided by DJ Ray Averle of Kalcema Productions. There will also be an opportunity for sign-making and "general hanging-out and getting to know other people in the community," Powell says. After the noon rally, marchers will leave Volunteer Park at 1:00 p.m., march down Broadway to Pine Street, and then to Westlake Plaza. As of this Tuesday, more than 1 million people have visited the website and dozens of marches and other actions are now planned for this coming Saturday. The site advises organizers to start MySpace and Facebook pages for their own cities to facilitate local action. The Facebook group "1,000,000 Million Strong Against Newly Passed Prop 8," whose creators identify themselves as high school students, reportedly has 68,000 members, for example. In Washington State, the call to action has elicited response from a wide range of activists, young and old, experienced and not. Besides Seattle, there will be actions in Tacoma, Bellingham, Olympia, Vancouver, Anacortes, Aberdeen, and Spokane. The Spokane action, for example, is being coordinated by 19 year-old Eastern Washington University student Taylor Malone. "I believe strongly in equality for everyone," Malone says, "and I'm glad to do something to try and change this society. I'm engaged and set to be married in June, after four wonderful years." In Olympia, the protest is coordinated by PFLAG veteran Alec Clayton and community organizer Anna Schlecht. Clayton's son committed suicide in 1995 after being assaulted in a hate crime based on his sexual orientation. The Tacoma action is being organized by the Micah Project, a social justice ministry of Tacoma's First United Methodist Church. Actions are also planned in a number of California cities, including San Francisco, San Jose, Fresno, San Diego, and Los Angeles, and in Washington DC, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, Detroit, and Cleveland, Ohio, among others. Willow Witte, Amy Balliet's friend, whose blog post sparked the idea for the National Day of Action, is coordinating the protest in Cleveland. Since California's Prop 8 passed on November 4, there has been almost continuous protest, at first centered in Los Angeles and San Francisco but within days spreading across the whole country. Numbers have ranged from several hundred to a reported 15,000 in New York on Wednesday November 12. In the immediate aftermath of the election, the protests were more spontaneous outbursts of community anger and frustration, but in the week since, they have taken on a more intentional and organized character. This Saturday's protests mark the first attempt to coordinate action at the national level. Many previous protests, including one in Seattle, have targeted Mormon churches because the LDS Church actively solicited donations to support Prop 8 from its members. Mormons are estimated by some No on Prop 8 activists to have contributed $20 million to the campaign to overturn marriage equality in California. California's Supreme Court has been asked to overrule Prop 8, and a decision is expected relatively quickly, perhaps by next week according to some reports. The American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal, the National Center for Lesbian Rights and other parties have filed a petition with the California State Supreme Court alleging Prop 8 illegally "revised" the state constitution rather than merely amending it. A constitutional revision requires a two-thirds vote of the State Legislature to be placed on the ballot for voter approval, while an amendment can be placed on the ballot simply by collecting enough voter signatures on petitions, and passed with a simple majority vote, as was the case with Prop 8. |
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