What is the point of applying for a marriage license you knew you would be denied? You could direct that question at five same-sex couples, all women, who applied for marriage licenses in Hattiesburg, a town in Forrest County in southern Mississippi. In 2004, 86% of voters in the Magnolia State endorsed a state constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage. But over eight years later, lesbian couples in Mississippi still aren’t taking that standing down, as those ten women demonstrated when they showed up at the Forrest County City Clerk’s office on Wednesday.
The campaign had the blessing of the organization Campaign for Southern Equality (CSE), an LGBT rights group based in Asheville, North Carolina. A quick glance at the organization’s home page shows that they’re focusing majorly on the marriage license applications in anti-equality states, encouraging visitors to send the couples messages of support, follow the campaign on their Facebook and Twitter pages and send donations. The protest is part of the latest stage of the group’s WE DO Campaign. CSE describes the campaign as follows:
In January 2013, the Campaign for Southern Equality (CSE) will be traveling across seven Southern states for Stage 4 of the WE DO Campaign. The WE DO Campaign involves LGBT couples in the Southern communities where they live requesting – and being denied – marriage licenses in order to call for full equality under federal law and to resist unjust state laws.
via wlox.com
Yet for many of the couples involved in the WE DO Campaign, their reasons for participating are more personal. As WLOX 13 reports, one couple, Sara and Lynn Bell, “are legally married in the state of Connecticut, but they feel it is important to stand for the right to marry in their home state of Mississippi.” Sara Bell herself says, “We struggle with healthcare benefits, we struggle with housing issues, and mortgages and insurance. There is [sic] so many things that a marriage grants to couples that we don’t have the rights to.” She notes that they are a family already but “this piece of paper would protect my family.”
Rolanda Boyd, who tried to marry her partner of nine years Dawn Edwards, put it as “We just wanted to make a stand to let everyone know that we are here too. We are Americans just like everybody else.”
There was a common theme in the stories on the CSE website of other couples who’d been a part of WE DO campaigns, of people who had strong connections to their communities, who may have had the option to leave for a more accepting state – or, like the Bells, actually got married there – but chose to stay where they already were. From a previous stage of the WE DO Campaign, there’s the story of Kathryn Cartledge and Elizabeth Eve, who currently live in Asheville, NC:
We’ve been a couple – a family – for 30 years. We met as volunteers at the Open Door, a homeless soup kitchen in Atlanta…We have worked hard at creating “home” for our daughters, Mary Hart and Bess, our four beloved grandchildren and our community. We live on a small farm in Asheville and are caretakers of 30 dogs, 2 cats, 2 llamas, 2 goats, 5 chickens, a goldfish and 2 pygmy turtles. We live a blessedly simple and ordinary life….We both grew up in the Deep South in the 50’s and 60’s and we lived with the turmoil of discrimination. We learned early on that discrimination hurts those who are discriminated against as well as those holding to the tenants of hate. For us, having equality for the LGBT community is a human rights issue – plain and simple.
This video from CSE specifically details the stories of those involved in this week’s Hattiesburg campaign:
Boyd’s statement that “We are Americans just like everybody else” is likely intended for homophobic politicians and voters in her own state, but could just as easily be applied to urban, coastal gay people who are dismissive of the needs – both political and cultural – of Southern and other red-state queers. As Fonseca reminded us in her fantastic article about being allies to small-town queers, way too much of the gay cultural narrative is about getting out of your small, conservative town – or even state – for a seemingly more liberal, accepting place. This message was apparent from the very beginning of the It Gets Better Campaign, where so many of the videos were about leaving “small-minded” hometowns and states for the big, ostensibly-queer-friendly coastal city. But what if you don’t want to leave? There should be an alternative cultural narrative, for those who don’t want to choose between the place they’ve lived forever and learned to love and acceptance/equality. Especially if the reason one wants to stay is specifically to fix the injustice that’s there.
So having a group like CSE that focuses specifically on equality in the South is a great thing, because national LGBT organizations often ignore Mississippi and similar states under the notion that they are “lost causes,” forgetting that the queer people who live there matter as much as those in coastal cities like New York, Boston or San Francisco. And indeed, an analysis by Nate Silver back in 2009 that projected when each state would have majority support for marriage equality put the Magnolia State dead last, only supporting it in 2024. Granted, Silver’s predictions haven’t entirely held up, evidenced by Maine voters’ decision to ban gay marriage the year (2009) that he projected majority support for it. Regardless, though, Mississippi isn’t exactly leading the way on support for gay rights.
via city-data.com
But queer Mississippians don’t necessarily have to wait until 2024. The comparisons to the civil rights movement in the stories on CSE’s website were frequent, and that was one movement where equality often came before a state’s voters wanted it, by focusing federally. Similar to how the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement focused on Supreme Court battles and federal legislation like the 1964 Voting Rights Act, eliminating DOMA, enacting ENDA and overturning unfair state legislation via the Supreme Court could help to ensure that queers in places like Hattiesburg, MS have the rights they deserve without having to wait for their fellow voters to grant them to them. There is no reason for the LGBT rights movement to leave Southern queers behind, and luckily groups like CSE will fight to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Future protests for this month’s “Stage 4” of the WE DO Campaign are planned for Mobile, AL, Decatur, GA, Morristown, TN, Greenville, SC, various locations in North Carolina, Arlington, VA and Washington, D.C.
Well said!
Rose,
Thanks for diving deep into the LGBT Southern experience on this piece. Looking forward to checking out more of your work.
Take care,
Jasmine
Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, Executive Director
Campaign for Southern Equality
Thank you so much!
Thank you so much for this article.
I am so proud of these women.
I believe that going for what you want even if they tell you it is wrong or you can’t is just what we all need to do in order to obtain equality.
I’m from the South, and I think MS is probably the worst of the Southern states. This is the same state that has segregated proms for crying out loud. lol
Eh, just because it isn’t as immediately obvious as a segregated prom doesn’t mean that other states don’t have their own big issues with racism. I come from a city (Detroit) that’s so north we drive south to go to Canada, and yet it’s one of the most racially-segregated metro areas in the country – partly because the racism there is a lot more insidious and, thus, harder to fix than a segregated school dance. A lot of it has to do with the fact that so many people there think they’re “not racist” because they realize things like segregated dances are bad, and yet teach their children (explicitly or not) to feel afraid every time they’re in a majority-black area and think that’s OK.
I know exactly what you mean. It’s the same thing here in Seattle. We have a long history of racially-discriminating neighborhood covenants that still aren’t removed from housing contracts. As a result, Seattle is massively segregated. And a lot of it continues through the mistaken belief that Seattle is a liberal coast city so it couldn’t possibly be racist.
Amen to that. I had a student from Chicago tell me she didn’t realize there was still so much racism until she came to New Orleans. Luckily one of my other students from Chicago raised his hand to point out that Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the USA.
I’m from The Middle of Freakin Nowhere, MI, and I’d have to agree… Until my family and I moved to Flint (after the smalltown factory shut down and Daddy lost his job, of course), I’d only met a handful of people who weren’t white, straight, conservative and Christian. And when it comes to gay rights, we can’t adopt or even get a civil union and we can still get fired for being gay. So I feel like Michigan is a very conservative, prejudiced and segregated place. I’ve always struggled with the decision to leave and find a place where I’ll be more accepted, or to stay and make a change.
Michigan is on par with Mississippi and Utah as having the worst (state-wide) laws in terms of LGBT rights. I do think Michigan is different than those states though in that there is a lot more voter support for LGBT equality and the laws in place are more of relics of the time when that wasn’t the case. I think the laws in MI will get changed a lot sooner, especially since there’s bound to be a backlash against Republicans in the coming years thanks to stuff like the emergency manager and right-to-work laws.
At least, this is me being optimistic. On the downside, most people I know from there who are somewhat liberal seem to be have left the state already (including me – sorry!) or want to leave soon.
I’m actually from Hattiesburg, and went to high school there. My best friend was out and dating (very, very, visibly dating) the only other out lesbian. The worst they got were people trying to “save” them through prayer, and occasionally glares directed at my friend’s girlfriend, because of how butch she was. MS has (a lot of) flaws, but HBurg is actually fairly accepting by comparison to the rest of the state.
Thank you for this, Rose. I am constantly struggling with whether to leave my home state for the promise of equality, or to stay here and try to fight. But campaigns like this give me a little bit of hope that maybe someday I won’t have to choose.
As I detailed in my last article, I’m someone who chose to leave my home state (Michigan), but that was something I’d planned to do long before I realized that I was bi, and politics overall played a very small part in that decision. The main reasons were educational/career-wise as well as a long-held desire to live in a large city (and most of what I like about urban life, Detroit doesn’t offer).
Even then it was still pretty hard for me to do, and initially I was really homesick – especially when my parents also decided to leave the state for similar reasons, and then I suddenly didn’t have anyone to go back to there and felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me.
That’s why it really bugs me when people like me who DID leave insist that should be the solution for everyone, when even with someone like me who had a strong desire to leave, it was still hard. Insisting that people who have a strong attachment to a particular place should also leave is very irritating and wrong. People shouldn’t have to choose between an identity they didn’t pick, but can’t change, and a home they’ve grown to love.
My partner is from Laurel, MS, which is really close to Hattiesburg, and we both are so proud of these couples for standing up for what they want.
I am the person in the article. Thank you for such great reading!!!
Rolanda Boyd