By Pat Gozemba “Powerful, handsome, rich people like JFK Jr. and Princess Di are dead so now it’s up to me to take care of the world.” So saith Republican Scott Brown, candidate for the US Senate seat once occupied by Ted Kennedy. Don’t believe me? I know it’s pretty unbelievable. On December 11th , [...]

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Tambry arrived in Massachusetts from Honolulu, HI, a week ago to help out with Maine’s “No on 1″ campaign. Then she realized, she could do more than fight for the right to marriage—she could marry her partner of 28 years here in Massachusetts. So an elaborate proposal was put together long-distance, that included the above [...]

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Pat Gozemba The “No on 1: Protect Marriage Equality” effort is a civil rights movement to support and protect all Maine families. In contrast, the conservative religious fundamentalist, “Yes on 1: Stand for Marriage Maine,” movement is an effort to limit the rights of families to the heterosexual one man one woman variety. Despite high [...]

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Pat Gozemba November 3rd in Maine is nearly upon us. As we close in on yet another election that will determine if LGBT people are really deserving of the rights of all other citizens, I turned once again to literature for insight and solace. Sarah Orne Jewett’s American classic The Country of the Pointed Firs [...]

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Pat Gozemba September 9, 2009 On April 22, 2009, I watched with awe as pro-marriage equality forces gathered to testify before a legislative committee in Maine. The breadth and depth of the testimony, coming as it did in the 3 minute segments allotted to each speaker, ably represented the wide diversity of voices in Maine [...]

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Pat Gozemba The sky has not fallen. Heather still has her two mommies. The religious right is still predicting dire consequences. Thus far their crystal ball has been very murky at best to downright wrong at worst. As of September 2008, 12, 350 same-sex couples have married in Massachusetts. The latest reports by UCLA’s Williams [...]

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Pat Gozemba It seems hard to believe that as of May 17, 2009, we’ve had marriage equality in Massachusetts for five years. Part of the reason for disbelief is that we had to fight off constitutional amendment efforts until June 14, 2007. And then we had to fight off, until July 2008, a racist 1913 [...]

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Pat Gozemba The marriage equality victory in Iowa was greeted with heartfelt cheers on our side and an attempt to rain on our parade with a 60 second homophobic commercial, “The Gathering Storm,” from a Mormon front group, the National Organization for Marriage (NOM). They want all Americans to be afraid—like them. NOM claims to [...]

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Pat GozembaIf you spend time reading religious objections to marriage equality, watching ads like the National Organization for Marriage blockbuster “The Gathering Storm,” or tuning in to Brian Camenker’s MassResistance blather, then you might enjoy a straightforward rebuttal to the anti-equality messaging.   The same old objections to marriage equality are recycled through all the [...]

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Kath Sands, former professor of religion at UMass-Boston, and her partner Linda Krieger, an attorney, have a marriage license in Massachusetts. But last year, they moved to Honolulu, where they both teach at the university–Kath in American Studies, and Linda at the Richardson School of Law. Linda grew up in Hawaii, and so it was [...]

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