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| Evan Wolfson (far right) has been pushing for gay couples to gain the legal right
to marry since 1983, when he wrote his law school thesis at Harvard on the subject.
Simon & Schuster released his first book, ‘Why Marriage Matters: America,
Equality, and Gay People’s Right to Marry,’ in July.
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Age: 47
Occupation: Executive director of Freedom to Marry
Place of residence: New York City
Partner: He and his partner, Cheng He, have been together for more than two years
Education: Graduated from Yale University in 1978; graduated from Harvard Law
School in 1983
Miscellaneous: In 2004, he was named one of the “TIME 100,” the magazine’s
list of the 100 most influential people alive today.
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HOME > ENTERTAINMENT > FEATURE
By: RHONDA SMITH COMMENTS
 
continued...
sloppy comparisons, nor can we say that our experience of discrimination
is “the same.”
But that’s really asking the wrong question. No group’s experience
with discrimination is the same as the others. The Latino experience with discrimination
is not the same. Jews’ experience with discrimination is not the same.
The Irish experience is not the same. Women’s experience is not the same.
But that’s not what matters. What matters is the harm discrimination
inflicts on the individuals affected, and on the society.
Also, there’s something we all take from the African-American struggle:
the real mandate and obligation to build on the work they did and continue
making our country better. That obligation doesn’t just fall on African
Americans and the successors of Martin Luther King. It falls on all of us,
and I take that legacy very seriously.
Where should gay civil rights advocates in this battle focus their
energy: on opponents to gay civil rights or more narrowly on just fighting
for equal marriage rights?
We have three concurrent tasks, and they are equally important. First,
we must secure marriage in as many places as possible to make it a reality
rather than a hypothetical. Nothing changes hearts and minds more than people
getting to see this for real, rather than just as some scary right-wing rhetoric.
When people get to see the couples en masse, or Del [Martin] and Phyllis [Lyon]
in San Francisco, and see real families helped and no one hurt, we move people
toward acceptance.
At the same time, we must repel attacks and efforts to roll back the gains
we have won. And we must do this at the federal level and is as many states
as we can. We’re not going to win every battle, just as there are some
states that will move faster toward equality where we are working, so our opponents
will succeed in getting some states to resist and even regress. But we must
work as hard as we can, and in as many places as we can, to repel attacks.
But it’s not enough to repel attacks, we must also have an affirmative
discussion about winning equality and what that means. We can’t just
rest on our success in preserving the status quo by defeating an attack. We
have to talk to friends, neighbors, family members, co-workers, legislators,
judges, opinion leaders, clergy, and ask them to support marriage equality.
Ask them to learn about how this discrimination hurts families and our countries.
We should not just ask them to be agains
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