The Southern push for marriage equality

When state Sen. Kasim Reed ran to become Atlanta’s mayor in 2009, he faced significant backlash from the city’s LGBT community for supporting civil unions but opposing gay marriage. He “wrestled” with his personal beliefs until December 2012 — six months after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Defense of Marriage Act. His views, Reed said, had evolved. Now the mayor wants to arguably become Georgia’s most vocal straight ally in the fight to end the state’s gay marriage ban.

At the Phillip Rush Center in Candler Park on Monday, Reed pledged he was joining a $1 million media campaign that will attempt to drum up support for marriage equality in Georgia and throughout the South — and end the state’s same-sex marriage ban.

National marriage equality advocacy group Freedom to Marry launched the effort, called Southerners for the Freedom to Marry, to unite more than 12 Southern LGBT organizations, including Georgia Equality. According to the group, more than 200,000 couples and its families face legal discrimination in 14 different states stretching from Texas to Virginia.

“Hundreds of thousands of couples have fallen in love, have made a commitment in life, and deserve a commitment under the law,” Freedom to Marry Founder Evan Wolfson said. “That commitment is called marriage.”

Wolfson said that the nonprofit initiative — which tapped Reed and Atlanta Congressman John Lewis as honorary co-chairs — wants to make marriage equality an easier issue for politicians and hesitant members of the public to support. The $1 million spend, he said, would include a variety of formal press conferences, forums, the documentation of marriage license denials, litigation, and legislative battles.

During the press conference, where numerous same-sex couples and local advocates spoke in support of the effort, Reed said he’d work to help end marriage discrimination in Georgia. The mayor said he would work to overturn a Georgia constitutional amendment approved by voters in 2004 that made it illegal for the state to recognize or perform either gay marriages or civil unions.

“Some patience will be required,” Reed said. “But patience should not mean forever. We need to be about the business of removing discrimination from Georgia’s Constitution, which must be done not yesterday or tomorrow, but right away.”

Reed’s remarks come at the same time GOP state lawmakers have introduced a measure that could allow businesses to discriminate against gay people and other groups in Georgia.

The mayor also intends to push for the state to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. Reed said he has already had conversations with several state lawmakers, whom he declined to name, about authoring legislation to repeal the gay marriage ban.

Congressman John Lewis, D-Atlanta, was not able to attend the event but said in a video that he urges people to speak out against discrimination toward LGBT couples — including laws that wrongly uphold those practices.

“I see the right to marriage as a civil rights issue,” Lewis said in the video. “You cannot have rights for one segment of the population and one group of people and not for everybody. Civil rights and equal rights must be for all of our children.”