Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity, and Ingenuity Can Change the World by teve Crawshaw & John Jackson

Author:teve Crawshaw & John Jackson [Crawshaw, teve & Jackson, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry . . . I support the freedom to marry for all.

That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.

Mildred Loving died in May 2008, at age sixty-eight. Six months later, Barack Obama was voted into the White House. When the forty-fourth president of the United States was born in 1961, the

“miscegenation” of his Kansan mother and his Kenyan father was illegal in more than half of America’s states. Mildred and Richard Loving changed that.

Going Dutch

In 1994, when Boris Dittrich, a thirty-nine-year-old Dutch judge and one of the first openly gay members of the country’s parliament, began arguing in favor of marriage for same-sex couples, resistance to the idea was almost universal. In a time before the subject of gay marriage had been broached in many countries, not only did traditionalists oppose the idea, but many gays and lesbians complained that this was merely copying a heterosexual lifestyle. The Dutch prime minister, Wim Kok, also rebuked Dittrich for his outlandish idea, telling him, “We don’t want to seem like the world’s nutcase.”

But Dittrich persisted.

In 1998, Dittrich’s party held the balance of power in forming a new government. Dittrich and his party insisted that the government had to agree to support same-sex marriage to get Dittrich’s party to form a successful ruling coalition. Only if the majority partners in the coalition accepted Dittrich’s proposal for the legalization of gay marriage would his smaller party join the government. Faced with the prospect of power slipping away, the prospective coalition partners felt obliged to support Dittrich. Same-sex marriage became legal in the Netherlands three years later, in 2001.

The decision in the Netherlands paved the way for change in other countries. In 2003, Belgium followed the Dutch lead. A clutch of other countries, from Spain to South Africa, adopted similar laws in quick succession. At the time of this writing, same-sex

marriage has been legalized in five U.S. states. That number seems certain to grow.

Dittrich married his partner of twenty-four years, artist Jehoshua Rozenman, in 2006. He was knighted by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands in the same year for his contribution to politics. He now works for Human Rights Watch in New York, advocating for improved gay rights around the world.

The institution of same-sex marriage is increasingly taken for granted in those places where it has been made legal. And all because one country dared to be “the world’s nutcase.”

Trouser Power

Sudanese journalist Lubna Hussein was charged in July 2009 under Article 152 of Sudan’s criminal code, banning “indecent clothing in public.” What was the offense? While sitting with a group of women friends in a café, she had been wearing a pair of slacks.

The twelve other women who were sitting with her and who were charged together with Hussein all pleaded guilty. They were punished with ten lashes and a fine. Hussein insisted, however, that she had done nothing wrong and challenged the government to do its worst.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.