{"id":15084,"date":"2015-06-27T12:28:20","date_gmt":"2015-06-27T19:28:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2015\/06\/27\/15084.html"},"modified":"2015-06-27T12:28:20","modified_gmt":"2015-06-27T19:28:20","slug":"what-changed-my-mind-about-mar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2015\/06\/27\/what-changed-my-mind-about-mar\/","title":{"rendered":"What changed my mind about marriage equality"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>In early 2004, I was opposed to attempts to legalize same-sex marriage. That's because I was scared of the backlash that I was sure would come. I thought that pushing too much would alienate so much of the American heterosexual public that it would take even longer to make change happen.<\/p>\n<p>And then, in February of that year, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2004\/02\/12\/1790.html\">opened the doors to same-sex marriage<\/a> in that city. And I went up and stood outside City Hall and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2004\/02\/15\/1795.html\">cheered and applauded<\/a> along with the rest of the crowd, and the joy in the air was totally infectious, and it changed my mind. After that, I became a supporter.<\/p>\n<p>I still feared the backlash, especially a few days later when I read a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2004\/02\/19\/1806.html\">poll<\/a> in which only 30% of Americans polled said that same-sex marriages should be legal, and 51% of Americans polled said that &ldquo;a homosexual relationship between consenting adults is morally wrong.&rdquo; But I could no longer bring myself to oppose making the attempt, not after seeing the happiness on the faces of the people who got married in San Francisco that day.<\/p>\n<p>And eleven years later&mdash;a far shorter time than I could ever have imagined&mdash;here we are.<\/p>\n<p>I don't think I've ever been gladder to have been wrong.<\/p>\n<p>Many thanks to all the people who didn't make the mistake I made, all the people who worked hard all along to make the change happen.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In early 2004, I was opposed to attempts to legalize same-sex marriage. That&#8217;s because I was scared of the backlash&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[120],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-samesex-marriage"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15084\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}