Freedom to Marry Week Blog Carnival

It’s Carnival time! Here is a festive collection of posts on marriage equality to read while you nibble your Valentine’s Day chocolates. Personal, political, economic . . . we’ve got them all. Thanks to all of you who contributed, and to those whose posts I included just because I liked them.

I’ve noted straight allies below because I think it’s important that people realize marriage equality isn’t just part of the mythical “homosexual agenda.”

If you’d like to be added to the list, please leave a comment.

• Straight ally Rebecca at Adventures in Applied Math covers all the key arguments for marriage equality, from civil rights to religion. In another post, she asserts: “I still don’t think it’s right for [my lesbian relative] to be deprived of the rights that my husband and I enjoy purely by virtue of having different organs.”
• The ever-popular ally Bitch Ph.D relates an anonymous comment from one of her readers: “May I humbly suggest to whomever may be the naming-powers-that-be that name of this week be changed to ‘Freedom to have one’s marriage legally recognized’ week?”
• Ru at Hedda Dabbler reprints an article by her brother, in which he asks why we should “protect” the institution of marriage above the rights of individuals.
• The Independent Gay Forum looks at the increasing support of college freshmen for same-sex marriage and the tragic results of Michigan’s recent ruling that the state’s same-sex marriage ban prohibits public employers from offering benefits even to domestic partners.
• James at I Sleep in a Drawer weaves the personal and the political as he discusses his journey towards getting “domesticated” with his partner.
• Ally Kelly at O for Obsessive has been posting on marriage equality all week. I’ve linked here to her second post, which focuses on why marriage equality is needed to protect children of same-sex couples.
• At The Mouse’s Nest, Mouse shares how “the idea of ‘marriage’” has affected her relationship with her wife. She discusses how marriage inequality impacted their decisions on where to live, and how even now, married and living in Canada, “our status changes simply by crossing an invisible line.”
• Terrance at Republic of T dissects the proposed Washington initiative requiring opposite-sex couples to reproduce if they want to stay married. While those who proposed the bill were just trying to make a point, he says, the theocratic right is serious about the restrictions they want to place on relationships and parenting.
• Sfrajett at Sfragett’s City 2.0 writes a touching post about attending a lesbian wedding. It’s a personal post that is a better argument for marriage equality than many political rants I’ve read.
• Liza tackles the economic side of marriage inequality in her post at SoVo.com, and tells us why marriage inequality is ruining her fantasy of winning the lottery.
• Jay at The Zero Boss stands up for gay penguins and rips into those who would reduce same-sex relationships and parenting to “a sexual practice.”
• Wendy sent me information about Color Coded, an art exhibit at the RayKo Photo Center in San Francisco featuring work by Ed and Linda Calhoun. It “explores marriage discrimination as it existed thirty-nine years ago when 16 states had laws banning interracial marriage. Color Coded is a verbatim translation of each of these states’ anti-miscegenation laws, using a coded alphabet constructed by dividing the natural color spectrum into 26 distinct color squares and assigning each color square to an alpha character.”