I am muddling my way through an egregiously overdue post on this topic (specifically, what do you say to your kids about love, relationships, and marriage) for BlogHer’s Cribsheet.  It’s  well-timed — the topic, not the post — since next week is Freedom to Marry Week.  Founded by longtime LGBT civil rights activist and attorney Evan Wolfson,  Freedom to Marry is the gay and non-gay partnership working to win marriage equality nationwide, and the organization has been taking this week, always around Lincoln’s birthday and Valentine’s day, to raise eleven years now. 

This year’s Freedom to Marry Week theme is 7 Conversations in 7 Days, which, needless to say, they’d like to encourage people to have.  Why?  Perhaps it’s obvious, but it’s also worth reiterating: Face-to-face conversations with people in your life make the biggest difference in changing hearts and minds on this topic. (I recall reading that this was confirmed by post-election research but just can’t put my fingers on the link.)  The Freedom to Marry website has loads, and I mean loads of fantastic resources to read and distribute, so if you haven’t perused it, I highly recommend time there.  But here’s a fine place to start if you want to fill your pockets with answers for any of those seven conversations. Fallacies, underestimations, and false equivalencies abound in this debate, and the quicker and more comprehensively we can clear them up the better.  

In addition to participating in the broader activities of Freedom to Marry Week, you can read and/or contribute posts to Robin Reagler’s second annual blog carnival, Some/thing, to coincide with this week, beginning on Tuesday:

Tuesday, Feb. 10: Something Old  (here’s my last year’s “Old”)

Wednesday, Feb. 11: Something New (here’s my last year’s “New”)

Thursday, Feb. 12: Something Borrowed (here’s my last year’s “Borrowed”)

Friday, Feb. 13: Something Blue (here’s my last year’s “Blue”)

Saturday, Feb. 14: Valentine’s Day: Celebrate Love (here’s my last year’s “Love”)

The phenomenal, whopping, hugely consequential difference between conditions around last year’s carnival and this year’s, of course, is: same sex marriage became legal in my home state, for a dizzying six months, and then got snatched back by a slim majority of my fellow Californians, for reasons which one could make complicated, and split hairs over, but really it’s just plain old fashioned xenophobia and ignorance.  Which it’s everyone’s job to help dismantle.  Weeks like this upcoming one are meant to help give us all a boost to work a little harder.

So.  Read Robin’s rolling update of the blogs participating in the carnival, and check back through the week to see what people have been writing.  Join in, yourself, if you got yourself a bloggie shop!  

Above, a little recent hand writing from my daughter, who cannot be stopped in her quest to render the alphabet (in no particular order) on every stationary surface she can find.  And I don’t mean “stationary” in the office supply sense of the word.    

This is not to be confused with hand wringing, which is what we all will be doing from here to March 5th, when the California Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case against Prop 8.  I’m sure you’ve heard.

If the kids weren’t likely to miss me (or rather, likely to FREAK OUT because they’d be left alone at home for hours on end in my absence), I would volunteer to spend the next month positioned behind the various chairs of the small army of NCLR, Lambda Legal, and ACLU folks, administering shoulder massages  (them, and the folks in the law offices of David C. Codell, Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP, and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP).  ”Latté?  You bet!  You want that foam, no foam, lowfat, nonfat, caf, decaf? In five minutes, or three?  Sir.  Ma’am.  Sir.”

These people are all working their ASSES off right now, on behalf of all of our asses. I will add, on behalf of my own ass, that it has felt very much in a sling since ’round about November 5th (you might have noticed).  So I couldn’t be more grateful for their work. 

[If you feel as grateful as I do, you could make a gift to the National Center for Lesbian Rights to help support their work this next month.]

After hearing the oral arguments – which will be live broadcast via the California Channel, and I do hope their server can handle what is sure to be a load just a tad heavier than that they get for, oh, say, the Food and Agriculture Committee meetings – the justices have ninety days to issue a ruling.  Which means we will know by the end of the first week in June at the latest.  Just in time for us to either (a) dye all our Pride outfits jet black, for what’s sure to be a march of outrage/mourning/you name it, or (b) make a run on bubble gum cigars, feather boas, and those paper extending party horns, because the LGBT Pride following such a ruling will be a celebration like no other.

California Supreme Court info page on the case is here.  Behold on that main page, if you haven’t seen them listed already in various news pieces, the range of entities filing Amicus Curiae Briefs in support of the Petitioners (that would be us). It’s a who’s who of justice lovers well-known and less-known, national and local.

 Our Family Coalition and COLAGE. CA National Organization of Women and The Feminist Majority. San Francisco La Raza Lawyers Ass’n, the Asian Pacific Americal Legal Center et al. and that “al” includes the NAACP and MALDEF (the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund). Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles. Human Rights Watch, et al. 

Professors Bruce Cain (Berkeley, Political Science) and William Eskridge (Yale, Law) include references in their brief to The Federalist Papers, Hobbes’ Leviathan,  and Locke’s Second Treatise of Government.  Right fine reading, that; makes you proud to be an American.  If Obama’s election didn’t already finally do it for you.

There’s even a brief on behalf of the town in which we live:  Berkeley, et al.  People’s Republic of Berkeley, long may it wave!  Flap! March! Gesticulate! The “al” also includes the cities of Cloverdale, Davis, Fairfax, Humboldt, Long Beach, Palm Springs, Sonoma, and West Hollywood, hereafter prime family day trip destinations the lot of ‘em. (“C’mon, kids, we’re going to Cloverdale today!” “What’s in Cloverdale, Baba?” “Who the hell cares, sweetie, hop in the car!”). 

Read some of these briefs, read ‘em all.  I dare you not to feel a flutter in your heart about the whole quest for civil justice thing, and its long, checkered, ultimately unflagging history in this country.  You may even feel tempted to become a lawyer.  Or at least hug one.