Pat Gozemba
Debi Hartmann was not always a friend of the Hawaii LGBT community. In 1998, she helped craft the Reciprocal Beneficiaries bill that supposedly gave LGBT people all the protections that we needed. She worked with the Catholic Church and fundamentalist Protestants in this effort. But she was always open to dialogue. Today she  finds that [...]

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Pat Gozemba
Jerry Sanders, the Republican mayor of San Diego, has testified in the Prop 8 federal court case in support of marriage equality.  Sanders stunned the nation two years ago when he came out in favor of marriage equality. Now, according to the Bay Area Reporter, he has taken another bold step and added his [...]

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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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Swift-Boating Gay Marriage
Pat Gozemba
A look at the election maps for California shows how the LGBT community blew it on Proposition 8.
First of all, we ran TV ads that did not include LGBT people and our families. Jonathan Rauch called us “invisible.” No loving families smiling at each other on their wedding day, at the breakfast [...]

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by Pat Gozemba
Shortly after the Goodridge decision affirmed marriage equality in Massachusetts on November 18, 2003, Rev. Lou Sheldon of California mustered his troops declaring, “Massachusetts is our Iwo Jima.” Well, the Rev. Sheldon and his ilk lost that battle and now Iwo Jima has come to him in California—the land of sequels. Sheldon’s Yes [...]

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 by Patricia A. Gozemba
Equality is a core value in Massachusetts. More than two weeks have passed since our Massachusetts borders fell to the further expansion of equality. When Governor Deval Patrick signed the repeal of the 1913 law that prohibited out-of-state same-sex couples from coming to our state to marry, our state borders became more [...]

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by Pat Gozemba
Rep. Byron Rushing (D-Boston) first alerted me that the 1913 law prohibiting out-of-state gay and lesbian couples from getting married in Massachusetts would soon be history. Rushing the great African American leader of all civil rights causes in our state was out in front of even the gay movement in announcing [...]

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Brian Jewell is right when he notes in his Bay Windows article, The bliss off, the Peabody Essex Museum “Wedded Bliss” exhibit doesn’t explicitly address same-sex marriage. Nonetheless, it does an exceptional job of including art that both celebrates and critiques this central social institution. One of my favorites is a piece by Robert Boyd [...]

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by Pat Gozemba
Karen and I had a great time at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem on a panel focused on same-sex marriage that was part of the educational program of the beautiful exhibit “Wedded Bliss.” Here’s what The Salem News had to say about the panel.
 
Expert panel discusses same-sex marriage
By Joe O’Connell
Correspondent
June 27, 2008 [...]

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