Each week on Defining Marriage, hosts Matt Baume and James Morris chat about what's happening with marriage equality, featuring frequent digressions into pop culture, silly banter, and the jokes and quibbles that have kept them together as a couple for over a decade. The first eighteen episodes of the podcast contain the complete audiobook version of the book Defining Marriage, which traces the decades-long evolution of marriage through the personal stories of those who lived through it, featuring personal insights from the lives of Evan Wolfson, Dan Savage, Ken Mehlman, Dustin Lance Black, and many more.
https://www.mattbaume.com/defining-marriage-shownotes/
Chapter 14: If not … Great
If you wandered down to a Midtown union hall in Manhattan one night in 2011, you might’ve encountered an unusual sight: Broadway stars, decked out in tuxedos and cocktail dresses, calling voters all over New York. They’d just left an awards dinner early, and without stopping to change they had descended on a marriage equality phone bank — as they had been doing for weeks.
It was the work of Jenny Kanelos, a small-town girl who’d moved to the big city just a few years earlier. In her wildest dreams, she couldn’t have envisioned herself leading a movement. But just a few years earlier, she’d volunteered to work on the Obama campaign, and discovered within herself an untapped well of power. Jenny found that she possessed two secret weapons: an intense commitment to justice, and a community of allies ready to follow her into battle.
She teamed up with her friends Gavin Creel and Rory O’Malley — themselves stars of the stage — and before she knew it, they were leading a rally in the middle of Times Square, drawing massive crowds to phone banks, and delivering boxes full of signatures to the Capitol.
But organizing alone wouldn’t be enough to win equality. Despite the groundswell that Jenny and her friends led, legislators dismissed the public support and voted down a marriage bill.
Now New York was about to find out what happens when Jenny gets pissed.
Music:
Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/