As a heterosexual female human, I wondered what I really had to contribute to the conversation of gay rights. It’s been a decade since I did grassroots organizing for the Human Rights Campaign, and since then I’ve been focused more on female reproductive and sexual wellness. The excerpt above helped me draw out why this is all interrelated, and why speaking on the topic is definitely in my wheelhouse.
I used to rally and stomp the streets, beside my campaign sisters and brothers in our little rag tag activist office in Salt Lake City. We campaigned to support the gay rights marriage acts, going door to door in Mormon country to get the word out and raise money for the HRC. In fact, I cared so much that I even got out there just weeks after a foot surgery, hobbling from home to home in a knee-high boot.
The Mormon communities in which we campaigned were kind to us, even when they didn’t agree. I remember feeling safe talking with people with opposing views, because we could do so civilly. I got into long conversations at doorsteps about how love is love is love, and despite the religious views they carried, we usually found common ground. I learned a lot about their culture, and I like to think I helped them become more tolerant of same-sex marriage. Often I walked away with a warm handshake and a home baked goodie for the road.
Back in the early 2000s this was a really big fight, since the right to same-sex marriage wasn’t written into law until 2015. In the years since, many friends I love have celebrated unions. So overjoyed, the thought never crossed our minds that this could be a short window in history when this right was actually legal. Now the time is here, same sex-marriage is being threatened with this supreme court draft to overturn Roe v. Wade.
I feel passionate about this issue, because I believe on principle that if some of us aren’t free, none of us are free. Because I can see how alt-sex rights are fundamentally intertwined with reproductive rights. The right to love who we love, how we want to love them, and when we want to bear fruit of that love: different fruit in the same fruit-basket.
I want my alt-sex kin to retain these hard won rights.
I am here and I care about your experience.
I am here to support your aliveness, because your aliveness supports my aliveness.
It’s spring where I live here in Northern Michigan, and life is bursting forth from every mossy crevice, poking through the duff of last year’s leaf mould, and peeking out over treetop nest edges. I took a walk in the woods today, and I noticed just how miraculous the biodiversity is. It’s incredible how so many species all over this planet are living together, cohabitating with one another, even in the middle of predator-prey dynamics, they coexist peacefully.
There’s no scarcity of care here. The living earth doesn’t discriminate and neither should we.
I go to the woods or the lakeshore to be reminded. I remember how to be a decent human being by ‘remembering my place in the family of things’, as Mary Oliver wrote. I spend more and more time outside these days, because I must.
I don’t have a fix. I don’t have a step by step plan or list of bullet points. I just have my hand on my heart in solidarity. I have a hope that somehow this swing of the pendulum has a point, and that we will come back to love at the center again, eventually.
If you are interested in connecting to your Living Pelvis, cyclic feminine lunar infradian rhythm and wildish nature, consider joining me for the Summer Module of my year long program called The Infradian Year.
“Even though we have only heard about, glimpsed, or dreamt a wondrous wild world that we belonged to once, even though we have not yet or only momentarily touched it, even though we do not identify ourselves as part of it, the memory of it is a beacon that guides us toward what we belong to, and for the rest of our lives.”
~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés
