During the last week, LGBT couples in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi have taken a stand for marriage equality in their home states as the Campaign for Southern Equality travels across the South with the WE DO Campaign.
The WE DO Campaign involves LGBT couples in the Southern communities where they live requesting – and being denied – marriage licenses in order to call for full equality under federal law and to resist unjust state laws.
Yesterday, January 7th, 5 LGBT couples in Decatur, Georgia applied for and were denied marriage licenses. You can read more about the action here.
Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, Executive Director, of the Campaign for Southern Equality has written a piece for the Huffington Post about standing a for equality in Mississippi. You can read it here:
That denial is one of the main reasons for WE DO actions. Discriminatory laws that treat LGBT people as second-class citizens in the South are typically invisible because they are rarely enforced. But when they are enforced, something new happens: everyone involved must engage with the reality that LGBT people live in every town in the South, that we are fully human and yet second-class citizens under the law, and that we are calling for full equality under federal law.
The WE DO Campaign will stand with LGBT couples in Tennessee, North and South Carolina during the coming weekas this movement for equality across the South continues to grow.