Why You Should Give A Damn!

Newsletter Archive

Newsletter #15, June, 2007

Marriage equality is kind of like popcorn (really)

by Davina Kotulski, Ph.D.

When you first put popcorn in the microwave, or for those of us living before microwave popcorn used to do, put the popcorn kernels in hot oil in the pot on the stove, nothing happens.

You wait patiently for the kernels to pop, for something to happen. That first pop takes forever, followed some time later by the second and successive pop. Then the kernels start expanding rapidly changing shape into big white fluffs. Explosions everywhere change the tide and the pot of oil and kernels grows into a big fluffy pile of popcorn. Little attention is paid to the unpopped kernels although there is some sadness about their missed potential. Stay with me.

At first, there was nothing, but a slow growing dream... (you know how the song goes).

In the 1970s same-sex couples in Minnesota and Washington state went to the marriage license counters and asked for marriage rights. They were denied, so they sued. They lost. The kernels went unpopped.

A decade later, a domestic partnership law was introduced in San Francisco in 1982, but it was vetoed by then mayor Diane Feinstein. The same idea caught fire in West Hollywood and the city council created the first domestic partnership in the country. The first kernel was transformed-for the first time in the U.S., LGBT people won legal validation, albeit minimal, for their relationships.

There were a few more false starts like in Hawaii in 1996, that created reciprocal beneficiaries heating the pot further. In 2000 Carole Migden created the statewide Domestic Partnership registry in California and paved the way for LGBT people to gain equal access to all state marriage rights (with the exception of the license and the right to call oneself married).

Not far behind, civil unions popped up in Vermont and same-sex marriage became legal in the Netherlands, Canada and Belgium. All these little pops ricocheted around shifting things, heating things up and creating possibilities in other regions.

The popping really took off in November 2003 when the Massachusetts Supreme Court declared marriage discrimination unconstitutional, same-sex weddings were allowed by mayors in San Francisco, Portland, New Jersey, New York, and New Mexico, and Spain became the 4th country to legalize marriage equality for same-sex couples.

Since then the popping has steadily continued: marriage equality in South Africa, civil unions and domestic partnerships in Maine, Connecticut, New Jersey, Mexico City, New Hampshire, Washington, Oregon, and many more places throughout the world, most recently Columbia, creating an explosion of equal relationship rights for LGBT people.

We are all waiting for the next location to pop open- granting equality for all couples regardless of sexual orientation. We won’t be satisfied until the hard kernels of discrimination in all countries have popped open and everyone has equal rights!

Please buy a copy of my book and send it to your friends and colleagues in small towns and countries that don't have equal marriage rights. You can start the popping!!