Attending the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on Respect for Marriage Act (7/20/2011)

Thanks to our friends at the Courage Campaign, we were reserved seats at the first-ever Senate Judiciary Hearings on the repeal of DOMA, which would require the passage of Senator Feinstein's Respect for Marriage Act (I know it is a Wikipedia link -- but it is pretty good). The Respect for Marriage Act is simple -- it ERASES the Defense of Marriage Act from the United States Code. Robin and I left our hotel early on such a blasted hot day! The night before we went out to eat at Circa in DuPont Circle and when we were walking back to our hotel, the air was completely hot and still -- there was no breeze, no movement and we could not wait to just get back into our air-conditioned hotel room.

The morning was a little cooler and so we took a taxi to the Hart Senate Building, on a mission to meet Adam Bink at Senator Feinstein's office because he said that he needed some assistance with something. I snapped this shot in the taxi -- such a beautiful sight! When we arrived at the Senate Building, we were in the security line with this lesbian couple, their four children and their lawyer. I, of course, turned to them and asked them if they were here for the hearings and they said yes and we told them a little about why we were there. Little did I know that they would be in the front row at the hearings. When we met Adam in Sen. Feinstein's waiting area, we found out that he wanted our assistance in distributing "DUMP DOMA" pins to all the people attending the hearing. Once we got in line outside the hearing room, I worked the line and made sure that everyone had a button. Check out the photo stream from San Francisco Chronicle. The pictures #4, #9, #11 0f 13 is the couple we met in the security line.


We were not in the waiting line very long -- Rick Jacobs joined us and then we were soon in the hearing room in our reserved-ish seats. We were close to being VIPs, but not entirely :). We were just overjoyed to have a seat in the room. The room filled up quickly and there was no wasting time, the hearing were underway and we were witnessing history!
One of the heroes of the hour was certainly Rep. John Lewis. A pioneer of the civil rights movement, his impassioned testimony moved Robin and I to tears. Below is a link to the entire hearing:

National Press Club Press Conference - 7/19/11

Robin (pictured above) and I were asked to participate in a national press conference that was held at the National Press Club. We were so excited to be standing with Senator Dianne Feinstein, Courage Campaign Founder Rick Jacobs (pictured here in the front on the left) and two other couples (pictured here on the right) who have suffered hardships due to the Defense of Marriage Act. At the top of this pic on the left is Adam Bink who is the Director of Online Programs for the Courage Campaign. What follows are a bunch of links to the press that we got and a few personal pictures too.

We first made the scene on CNN, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Washington Times. The National Press Club featured our event, and because Robin mentioned Spain in her remarks, we ended up in many Spanish language media sources, the first of which was El Pais.

We had an amazing lunch at the National Press Club's historic clubhouse -- amazing artifacts and stories there. During lunch, everyone was so excited at the amount of press that attended and the fact that there were interesting developments afoot. During the conference, one of the reporters had asked Senator Feinstein if she knew where the President stood on her bill, S. 598 - The Respect for Marriage Act. In ways unknown to this lowly college professor, that question led to this:


We had it on pretty good authority, that our press conference set the stage for the President making this historic announcement which, according to Rick Jacobs was extremely rare given the fact that the legislation has yet to pass either house of Congress.

All in all it was a very good day!

Starting a blog...

So on the flipside of participating in an historic event, thanks to the Courage Campaign, I decided to start a blog as a means to organize all of the links to media sources that I have been posting to Facebook but also to make this a little more of a public venue as we continue our fight to Erase DOMA. Let's see how this goes. :)