Mark Wallace:	Hi everyone, I'm Mark Wallace in the Religion department. I also direct the interpretation theory program here at Swarthmore. I'm really happy that you're here tonight. I got to meet my cousin, what did we decide it was? Once removed?
Jasmine Ferara:	Cousin-in-law, once removed. 
Mark Wallace:	My cousin-in-law, once removed, Jasmine Beach Ferara, for the first time today. My wife and Jasmine are cousins and so now I'm sort of related as well. Jasmine is an author of a wonderful book of short stories called Damn, Love. I highly recommend it to you. She is also a congregational minister and she's on the front lines of the LGBT Marriage Equality movement in the Southern part of the United States. 
	Jasmine is here tonight to talk about that work that she does as a person of faith in the public square on the question of marriage equality. She'll talk for a while and then would like to hear from all of us our questions and observations. Thanks for being here. 
Jasmine Ferara:	Thank you. Good evening. Can y'all hear me okay? Yeah. Great. It's wonderful to be here with you this evening. As I told Mark, my best friend from growing up went to Swarthmore, so when I was an undergrad I came here quite a bit to visit her. It's delightful to be back. I want to thank you all for sharing some of your evening with me. My style is very relaxed and conversational. I'll get things started by sharing with you some stories from the work we're doing right now in the South through the Campaign for Southern Equality, which is the non profit organization that I direct. Then hopefully some of those stories will be a launchpad into a conversation we can have together about how these issues are playing out in our country right now, in faith communities, in our families lives. Very happy that you all are here and look forward to spending the evening with you, or part of the evening. 
	We're going to start actually by, I wanted to share a video of the work that we're doing through the We Do campaign. This is an initiative we run across the South that involves LGBT couples requesting marriage licenses in their hometowns in order to draw public attention to current laws across the South and in a very embodied way, to stand up to those laws. I thought that one of the best ways to invite you into this work was to show you a video. We use video for storytelling a lot. This one is set in Hattiesburg, Mississippi where we have now run actions where with the We Do campaigns several times. This was from an action we did there in early January of this year.
	What we're doing today is about telling a story that our country very badly needs to hear. A story about what it means to be LGBT in the South.
Speaker 3:	Hey.
Speaker 4:	Hey.
Speaker 5:	Hello. We're here to apply for a marriage license.
Speaker 4:	I need your proof of age please.
Speaker 6:	We'd like to request for a marriage license please ma'am.
Jasmine Ferara:	A story about what it means to have been born and raised here.
Speaker 7:	And what state were you born in?
Speaker 8:	[Sumrall 00:03:30], Mississippi.
Speaker 7:	Okay, and what is your age?
Speaker 8:	31.
Speaker 9:	What state were you born in?
Speaker 6:	Mississippi.
Jasmine Ferara:	To have found this home as an adult.
Speaker 5:	I was born in New Orleans.
Speaker 3:	And have you ever been married before?
Speaker 5:	No ma'am.
Jasmine Ferara:	To proudly claim the South as our home.
Speaker 10:	How are you doing?
Speaker 11:	Hey.
Speaker 10:	How's Mr. [inaudible 00:03:50]?
Speaker 11:	He's good.
Speaker 10:	We heard you were under the weather. 
Speaker 11:	Yes, but I'm doing well.
Speaker 10:	I'm glad. I'm glad. It's good to see you.
Speaker 11:	Good to see you.
Jasmine Ferara:	And yet to also know that things need to change.
Speaker 12:	We would like to apply for a marriage license today.
Speaker 13:	Well you know that I can't do that.
Speaker 12:	Can we have an application to fill one out?
Speaker 13:	Well the law says that any marriage between persons of the same gender is prohibited and null and void from the beginning.
Speaker 12:	Allison is the one that I love and we've been together for 10 years, and nothing will ever change that. This piece of paper or anything like that. So we just want to do our part to get those laws changed.
Jasmine Ferara:	What we're doing today is drawing on a long, long legacy of the kind of work that's happened throughout the South.
Speaker 14:	R-O-L-A-N-D-A?
Rolanda:	Yes ma'am.
Speaker 14:	I want to make sure I spell it right.
Rolanda:	Yes ma'am.
Speaker 14:	And what is your race please?
Rolanda:	African American.
Speaker 14:	What is your race?
Speaker 16:	White.
Jasmine Ferara:	We're doing the thing we've been told our whole lives we have no business to do, which is to go into a public building and approach a counter where we know we will not be served, and we're told because we will not be served that we ought not be there in the first place, and that's simply not true. We're here to express truths that are higher than the limitations of the law. We are building a movement one conversation at a time one, step at a time literally as we profess through the streets of Southern towns, and this January we're starting a journey here in Hattiesburg, and there could not be a more perfect place to start this journey. This is a journey that's going to take us across seven Southern states over the course of the next few weeks. From small towns to larger cities, standing with couples like we are today, and you all are the folks were taking the first steps in that journey with us today.
	Trying to figure out how to minimize this here. So this gives you a sense of some of the work that we're doing in the South as we travel around with the We Do campaign promoting LGBT equality. I want to share some more stories from what happens on the road and talk a bit about what it's like to be doing this work in the public square, expressing our belief in equality, doing what we can to raise awareness about the impact of discriminatory laws, and all the while engaging with people on every side of the issue.
	Flash forward about six months from January and were back in Mississippi this July, you can imagine Gulfport, Mississippi for anyone who's been down to the Gulf coast region, on a July morning that the temperature approaching sweltering. As we process for these actions once we reach the courthouse's we gather her a prayer service outside of them where we share publicly why we're doing this. So you can imagine a group of people, LGBT folks, and ally, people of faith, standing in prayer outside the courthouse in Gulfport, Mississippi on a random July day, which in it of itself was something of an unusual occurrence. As we stood there a woman who was going about the normal business of something with the courthouse walked out and you could immediately see the sort of disorientation and surprise on her face as she processed piece-by-piece what was happening with us, and the first words out of her mouth were, "Those gays are praying." 
	The shock of seeing us in the act of prayer outside the courthouse and she began taking pictures with her cell phone, which for us was a good reminder that sometimes our work in a way is about being the public spectacle, the public spectacle that provokes the conversation or the surprise, or reorients a normal summer day in Gulfport, Mississippi to be a day on which on that particular day a couple named Candy and Sabrina along with four of their children entered the courthouse and went up the stairs to the clerk's office to request a marriage license. They were denied because of current laws in Mississippi, but in that moment we're in some ways treading into new territory in Mississippi, and starting a new conversation there.
	Flash forward again to just a few weeks ago as we continue growing the We Do campaign to Buncombe County North Carolina, which is where I live in Western North Carolina. We were at the Register of Deeds office there, this was the fifth time that we had stood with LGBT couples as they approach the counter in Buncombe County. We keep going back again, and again, and again, but this time something different was happening. We were gathered there literally before the office was opening, it was still dark, a crowd of a couple hundred folks there, and on this occasion the Register of Deeds who's a public official who issues licenses, had made a decision that instead of denying the licenses he was actually going to accept them, accept the applications and express publicly that he was ready to grant marriage license to LGBT couples pending approval from the Attorney General in North Carolina.
	That's the first time in the South to our knowledge that a marriage license office has not denied an LGBT couple a license, which sounds like and is a very incremental step in the journey towards equality, and yet at the same time was a courageous step for him to take. Later that day there was a bomb threat called into his office. His office has been flooded with literally hundreds of calls in the days since then of people expressing their opposition to that. That day they hand he accepted applications from about 20 couples and since then there's been a steady stream of couples submitting these applications that now sit in legal limbo in North Carolina.
	What some of you in the room may know and some of you may not yet know is that all of what just what I just described in terms of that development in North Carolina, which is a tiny step forward in this long journey towards equality, actually has a lot to do with what's happening just miles away from here in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Anyone here following what's happening in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania with Register of [Wills 00:10:32] Bruce Hanes? No? Some, maybe? A little. Well just so you know, because it's happening in your backyard, that the work we're doing in the South is we're following as closely as we possibly can. Reading the local papers up here, watching the local news because there's a elected official just miles from here who made the decision to begin issuing marriage licenses to LGBT couples despite a Pennsylvania ban on that. I'm not an attorney, I'm a minister who's married to an attorney, so I know just enough to be dangerous about the law.
	My cousin Audrey is an attorney and judge, so you chime in here and correct anything that I might be about to say.
Audrey:	[inaudible 00:11:11].
Jasmine Ferara:	Yeah, so what happened was he opened the doors and 170 couples from all over Pennsylvania went to Montgomery County, and got licenses, and got married, and in their eyes they are married, and the Attorney General declined to prosecute, but the governor of Pennsylvania absolutely wanted to. So I think the Department of Health and Human Services brought charges and an injunction was brought saying, "You have to stop doing this Mr. Hanes." And he said, "Okay, we'll stop," but they're now appealing that, and the couple who have done everything in their power as citizens have their relationships recognized are bringing legal action as well about the validity of those licenses.
Audrey:	[inaudible 00:12:02].
Jasmine Ferara:	Yeah.
Audrey:	[inaudible 00:12:05].
Jasmine Ferara:	Right.
Audrey:	[inaudible 00:12:10].
Jasmine Ferara:	Yeah, and it's precisely that argument that we're using in North Carolina right now and that the register of deeds in North Carolina used in saying, "I've taken an oath to the Federal Constitution, and I believe the state the constitution of North Carolina, is in violation of that and I need direction about how to reconcile this." All of this, for those who are interested in the LGBT movement and interested in civil rights movement, and strategy, what I'm describing speaks to a spear of and a school of organizing that happens in the public square, and that happens in some cases as a companion strategy to what's happening in the court system, and sometimes they end up feeding into each other is happening in Montgomery County right now.
	So the work that we're doing with the We Do campaign and our broader work around LGBT equality around issues like employment, and transgender rights, and a much broader array of issues that affect LGBT folks, all this work that we're doing in the South right now is about trying to start a new conversation in the public square in the South. A place where if ... I know Brent is from the South, any other Southerners in the room? Okay, great a couple of folks. We got the South represented. Where silence tends to predominate around these issues. There tends to be a veil of silence around LGBT life, and a feeling in other parts of the country that the South is unwinnable territory when you think about LGBT rights. And in some cases, and this is something that we hear said to us as we're doing this work from other parts of the country is, "Why in the world would you work for LGBT rights in the South? You're never ever going to win. It's like a up hill battle times a million, so why would you do it?"
	For me that answer circles into what I hope to talk about tonight, which is why do something that seems at best difficult, if not impossible? And for me that answer a lot of it comes back to my faith and my own personal experiences as someone who grew up as a gay person in the South, and then has returned there as an adult, and also comes back to a belief that it is often in the places where discrimination is most firmly entrenched in laws, and in social codes, that some of the most interesting and creative liberation work is possible. Because it's in those places that the more traditional strategies, which are very important parts of treating social change, which is to say court cases or legislative efforts are not going to work as quickly if they're going to work at all. So for instance, right now in Mississippi or in North Carolina where I live, you could take every dollar you could find and throw it at the project of trying to pass a law that would be affirmative to LGBT folks. Any kind of equality bill in the state level, and it would be pretty much politically impossible to pass that bill, so when traditional channels are closed from a organizing perspective things get pretty interesting because you start to look at other spheres in which you can organize.
	And what we're finding in the South is that there's tremendous room to run and to try new strategies, and new approaches by looking at the kind of organizing we can do in public life, and in public square, and very specifically the kind of organizing that's possible when you introduce a moral vocabulary into talking about LGBT issues, and put a human face on issues that tend to be debated and highly polarized political terms or debated theologically. And what we're doing with the We Do campaign, and you've seen it from this video as you were introduced to some of the couples who've taken part in this, is trying to situate an issue like marriage equality not as a highly partisan debate, but in the life of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Where local couples like Sarah and [LB 00:16:14] are directly impacted like this, and trying in this way to make a law that prohibits the recognition of their marriage. To make that law, rather than invisible, which it is typically every day, to make it something that's visible.
	A law like that becomes visible only when it's enforced. It affects people every single day, and people who are targeted by feel its power every single day, but for the general public that law is invisible because it never touches their lives. Unlike speed limits, which we're impacted by everyday as a law. So part of our project is trying to make this visible in a way that people can understand and hopefully relate to. The tricky thing is that to make it visible you have to provoke its enforcement, and to provoke its enforcement with marriage laws you have to go up to the counter and seek a marriage license specific. When we take this action we are reaching back into a very long lineage of civil rights organizing that's based on the concept of deliberately provoking the enforcement of a discriminatory law or system.
	Voluntarily suffering in that regard in order to shine a light on what happens when that law is actually enforced, and doing so from a clear ethical position of meeting discrimination or persecution with love. So some of the organizing models for anyone in the room who's studied civil rights organizing or different social change movement, we've looked at campaigns that were used in the Gandhian liberation efforts and movements, and certainly looked at the history of the civil rights movement in the deep South, and specifically tactics that were used in the late 50's and early 60's as people took direction action to confront and provoke discriminatory and persecuting systems in the very moment of their enforcement. And in that regard, what we're doing with the We Do campaign is asking LGBT people in the South if they are ready to take the step of being first publicly out, which in many communities across the South is a pretty big step in and of itself, but not just publicly out, but publicly out and directly confronting and provoking the enforcement of a law that from its very design and inception targeted them as a second-class citizen.
	You can imagine that for some people there's a lot of risk involved in an action like this, and what we also see is that there's a lot of empowerment when people take this step in their lives. The risk comes because of a kind of implicit social contract that exists everywhere I think in the country, but certainly is very pronounced in the South, which says, "As a LGBT person you'll be safe as long as you stay closeted or hidden in various ways, and as long as you don't call for or certainly don't demand equal treatment under the law. As long as you help perpetuate the status quo, it keeps you on the margins. Everything will be okay." 
	And there's a lot of pressure to sort of abide by that system and comply with that system frankly. Small acts that disrupt that system are fairly valanced in terms of the various ways that they ripple out in people's lives, and what we're asking people to do when we asked them to stand with us in the We Do campaign is to take a very public action to disrupt that system. To take a very public action to say, "Actually, this is my home. This is my family. This is who I truly authentically am in my own gender identity and my own sexual orientation, and the relationship with the person I love, and I'm going to go to this counter that I've been told I have no business ever to be at, and present myself as a full and equal human being," and in that moment create a stark contrast to the rather blunt tool of the law, which sees me or another of LGBT person not as a fully equal human being, but as someone who is lesser than. And who doesn't deserve even the most fundamental of rights that our country has established, which is that you do have a right to marry. You do have a right to create a family and for that family to be protected in various ways.
	So we have in a sense, and you saw it happening in real-time there at the counter, this moment that if you were in the room with us I think ... Everyone who's been in the room during these actions talks about this sort of intangible, but very powerful feeling that's in the room there as this ritual is sort of enacted, and on one side of the counter you have a couple who's been together say 40 years, like a couple we stood with recently in a small rural County in Western North Carolina, and on the other side of the counter you have the law being enforced. The other person that's in the room of course is the clerk and the staff who are asked to enforce this law, and this brings into play another element that's really central in the work we do. Not just in those moments at the counter, but essential in the work we do as we move around the South, in our relationship with people, which is that there are a lot of people who don't know what they think about LGBT rights in our country right now, and certainly in the South.
	When you stop for a second and look at some of the polling that's coming out nationally, typically you'll see that polls show between 53 and 58% of Americans support marriage equality. When you look at voters under the age of 30 nationally, does anyone know the percentage of voters under the age of 30 who support marriage equality? Any guesses? What's that? 81. It's a pollsters dream. Like you never get any 81% on anything except maybe that like we are in America right now, I don't know. In the South you see trends that mirror that but are 10 to 20 points lower. So right now in North Carolina 68& of voters under the age of 30 support marriage equality. When you get to Mississippi, you're in the 50's, still majority, but in the 50's. So what we see is a social climate and a cultural climate in which there is growing support for LGBT equality broadly. When you talk about employment equality, the numbers are through the roof, even though we can't quite get there legislatively yet unfortunately.
	And you also see, especially as you dig a little deeper on what the polling data shows, that most people are conflicted on the issue, and they're conflicted in a very specific way. They're conflicted because they know an LGBT person somewhere in their network, their family, their life, and they've also been taught within the context of their own faith tradition they've been taught that homosexuality is a sin and ought to be condemned, and they're trying somehow to reconcile those positions, and frankly don't have a lot of resources for how to do so because there's not a lot of conversation about the topic. 
	If we're wrestling deeply with something that we're trying to figure out, unless someone is very highly developed internally, we tend to go out outside of ourselves to try to figure it out. We read, we talk to people, we asked for other people's opinions. If we're a person of faith we look at what our faith teaches us on the subject. This is an issue where my experience is that by and large in the South, the faith community isn't offering a lot of resources to people as they're struggling with this moral question, and yet there's a tremendous and extraordinary, and to me it's what makes me ultimately so hopeful, untapped reserves of what we could be talking about with people when it comes to this question.
	So when we do these actions around the South, one of our hopes is to start a conversation locally especially in communities like Poplarville, Mississippi or Morristown, Tennessee or Hendersonville, North Carolina. Small, more rural communities that tend to trend conservative in a lot of ways, and yet places where LGBT folks live day in and day out, and when you puncture that veil of silence that surrounds their lives, suddenly the folks who take part in these actions when they end up on the nightly news, and covered in the newspaper sharing their stories, become in a sense public advocates around the issue. And couples like the ones you saw on this video about Hattiesburg share stories of being in the grocery store and someone coming up to them in line and saying, "You know, I have a gay son and I hope he can stay in Mississippi. Thanks for what you did because of this." Or a family member who hadn't been heard from in decade reaching out to say, "It's probably time we had a conversation about all this, isn't it?"
	So our work, a lot of it, is operating in a sphere of trying to tell a story in such a way that it can be heard, and amplify it in communities so that people who might not typically have these issues coming across their kitchen table or getting talked about at the water cooler, have an opportunity to do so. From a strategic lens, the reason why we're doing this is trying to help do two things. One is build public support in the South for equality. Not specific pieces of legislation in the South, but just general endorsement of the concept that LGBT people are equal with an eye towards, if you look at where we are politically nationally right now, there's a kind of consensus that we need to probably get to at least 60% nationally support for marriage equality, and if people are there on marriage they're there on every other issue typically.
	So nationally if we can get firmly into the 60% realm, that that's the time at which we would start to see Federal legislation moving, although frankly right now no legislation is moving anywhere in DC, so not so sure about that. But fingers crossed on that. And then also as much as the judiciary, or the Supreme Court talks about existing in a bubble from public opinion, there's reason to believe, and Audrey chime in here if you disagree, that the Supreme Court's not immune to knowing where the country is on an issue. The Supreme Court doesn't want to get too far ahead of public opinion nor fall too far behind public opinion, and the mark that's talked about nationally is 60%. In the South we're probably not going to get to 60% soon. North Carolina we're at 43% support right now, so 60% a long way off, but if we can create a few bumps of percentage points in the South that helps us nationally boost support.
	So one thing we're trying to do strategically is create some of those bumps up in the South. And another thing that we're trying to do is help prepare the social fabric of the South for the time when federal laws finally do change. We know historically that when federal laws change, and a part of the country's not ready for it, there can be a tremendous amount of backlash and resistance to actual implementation of those changes. That's one of the harder lessons from the Civil Rights movement, was we got a good ruling in '54 with Brown V Education, it just people refused to implement it or in a systemic way refused to implement it. 
	So one hope is that we can help average how quickly things are moving in the South, which is how quickly people's hearts and minds are moving to help prepare for this political and legal moment that's now on the pretty near horizon, five to seven years out most people seem to think. So that that transition period can hopefully be a smoother one. One thing that, for me comes up again, and again, and again in doing this work, is how much we don't know, and simply can't know. And in some ways how much of this has to be a leap of faith. There's no shortage of if you were to bring in folks from five or six different LGBT organizations across the country some working in the courts, some working legislatively, some are doing grassroots work like me, you'd hear a lot of arguments for why particular strategies are going to be the one to get us there first, the most effective, and here's the particular case that will get to the Supreme Court, and here's how the justices will split on it. You'll hear no shortage of opinion about what's going to happen, but the reality is none of us quite know. We're living through a period that will come to be regarded I think as historic regarding how America figures these issues out, and we have, to me, excitingly kind of all the branches of our government deployed in the project.
	We have the Executive, the Legislative, the Judiciary elements of our democracy working on this question, and then we have the culture working on this question as well, and one of the things I'm reminded of constantly is we just don't know. We take our very best guess strategically about what we hope will work and then you have to be prepared to be wrong, and quickly adjust. The other, on a much more human level, is that you need to be prepared to be constantly surprised because you never ever know where someone is on these issues are what someone's capable of doing, and that one thing we should never ever do is underestimate what people are capable of doing. For instance, I didn't know that Bruce, I had never heard of Bruce Hanes before he did this thing, but I didn't know that there was a Register of Wills in Montgomery County Pennsylvania who was prepared to be frankly one of the boldest elected officials in the country right now regarding this issue.
	Some people would say what he did was wrong because he short circuited the traditional system. Other people would argue vociferously for it, but I think he's doing one of the boldest things we're seeing happening anywhere in the country right now. He's a county official here in Pennsylvania. I didn't know until we launched this work how ready LGBT folks in the South would be to stand up and to say, "I'm ready to walk through the streets of my town, holding my partner's hand, and approach this counter knowing that I will be denied, and I'm ready to do it not just once, but again, and again, and again, and again, and to keep telling this story." I knew that it would be hard for someone to do that and I wondered whether people be ready for it, and what amazes me again, and again is how already people are to do that and so much more. When you start to see people standing up to these laws as citizens, as clergy, as people of faith, increasingly we're moving into a climate where elected officials are starting to make some moves. It puts pressure on these laws from new directions and from unexpected directions in a sense.
	Part of I think how discriminatory laws maintain their power is by perpetuating the idea that our hands are tied as citizens to change them. That what we can do is perhaps bring a legal challenge that will take years, and years, and years to matriculate through the court, and during that time we should sit on the sidelines quietly and wait for the courts to act. Or that sure we can call our congress person introduce a piece of legislation, but the chances of that actually moving through and getting past are quite slim, and so we sit on the sidelines again, and again, and again. It's a remarkably powerful thing to see in real time as we're doing this work on the ground in the South, what starts to happen when we directly confront them and say, "Our hands actually aren't tied because we're moral actors here." And when we convenience of ourselves not just as citizens, but as morale actors in a moral world, who may have a call to act in response to and in opposition to laws that are discriminatory and unjust, the conversation changes and the paradigm changes pretty quickly.
	Citizen ... It's an empowering, I think, framework to be operating from and one that leaves me extraordinary hopeful because it taps into people's courage, and the strength of peoples spirits, and it taps into this realm of the intangible that we don't always have a quick and ready vocabulary for. That we certainly can't always measure quantitatively. I wish we could conduct a polar focus group to measure the strength of the human spirit that's required to walk through the streets of Hattiesburg, Mississippi with your partner and request a marriage license. I know of no way to measure that and yet having witnessed that again, and again, and again I believe very, very deeply in the ultimate impact of something like that. That seeing others act with courage emboldens us to do the same, and that the more people who feel prepared to take steps like this, or comparable steps in their own lives, the more we create a climate in which laws that are discriminatory, which in their very construction are fragile. They're fragile because they don't have a constitutional basis typically, and they're fragile from a moral perspective because they're immoral. So they're fragile, but they're also buttressed. And part of our work is figuring out how to tack and attack them from many, many different angles simultaneously to put enough mounting pressure on them that their fall seems inevitable, and that the urgency of that cause seems obvious.
	Now I want to circle back to something I touched on and then ... I have ADD, so I get diverted easily. Sort of touched on then was swept away from, which is as we're doing this work how we engage with those who oppose LGBT rights or are conflicted about LGBT rights. I talked for a while about my experience as we travel around that the majority of folks are conflicted and open to conversation, and ready, and primed for conversation, but lacking an opportunity to talk about these things. There's another group of people who are adamantly opposed LGBT rights. In no way conflicted, at least at this point in time. They're as set in their mind as I am on the issue. So every time I think about them I also try to pause for a moment to think about my own rigidity on this. In my own certainly that we've got it right on our side of things, which can be humbling even though I also think it's true. So, both at once.
	But is thinking about how we engage and position ourselves and be in relationship with folks on that end of the spectrum. And for me this is, as a person of faith and as a minister doing this work, this is one of the places where faith comes most alive because I'm coming out of the Christian tradition, but every major religion teaches some version of the called to love ones enemy, call to love ones opponent. What we get less of it how to do that. There's not an instruction manual for how to actually do that in your life, and the work of doing that is hard, and I find in the work that we're doing that it creates a constant occasion to be posing and looking at that question, and interrogating it, and trying to live into the ideal of that value.
	The easy thing to do, and what tends to happen in our country, is that people on both sides of the issues just condemned each other or demean each other, and never really engage each other or have much human encounter. In this work we're doing, we have made a commitment two try and always to approach those in the other side of the issue from a position of empathy. The reason for this commitment, there's many reasons for this commitment, but one of them is our belief that at the root of discriminatory laws that say a same-sex couple can't marry or that failed to protect a transgender person from employment discrimination, at the root of these laws is a form of spiritual violence that says this group of people is less than this other. And demeans LGBT people.
	Our belief is that the starkest contrast in response to spiritual violence, which demeans one's humanity is empathy, which recognizes the humanity of the other. So as we act, and as we're at the counter, and as we meet people who oppose our rights or who are after enforced these laws, we try to do so from a position of empathy, which is recognizing the humanity of the other in this moment. It doesn't solve that moment, no one's mind gets change per se, but it's a clear piece of ground to stand on as we do this work, and I have found it to be a very steadying compass as we do this work, and part of what I mean by that is that this is a contested social issue. One of the most charged social issues of our time. It's an issue that I think the volume will continue to go up, and up, and up on until it reaches some form of resolution nationally. And in the South, in some ways, the conversation is just getting started. So it's likely to get quite a bit louder I think before we reach any kind of resolution.
	And so we have choices as we enter into and move through this conversation about the rhetoric we'll use, about the tone we'll use, about the nature of the of the actions we'll take. And as we're kind of continuing to grow the We Do campaign the choice we're making is to try to be staying in this realm of empathy, and also of clear resistance to laws we believe to be unjust. Now what that looks like on the ground in practice can be interesting and funny. I shared with some folks over dinner this evening that just this past week the largest anti-gay organization in North Carolina responded to the work we've been doing by issuing a statement saying we were waging guerrilla warfare on the state of North Carolina, which we kind of found funny in part because a lot of the people involved in our work are, like this couple I mentioned in Henderson County who'd been together for 40 years, and are in their 80's, and not who you typically think of when you think of guerrilla warfare tactics.
	We see escalating rhetoric on the other side of the issue, and our challenge becomes how not to be baited by that, and how to kind of stay focused on on what it is we're doing. So I talked quite a bit now about the work we're doing and kind of the strategic backdrop of that, and situated a little bit in terms of what's happening nationally. For those ... Just to spend another minute kind of doing a little bit of the aerial view just because we are living through such interesting dynamic times right now related to LGBT equality, I'll share a few things are going on across the country that might help situate what's happening in the South a little bit as well.
	Currently right now there's 14 states and the District of Columbia that recognize same-sex marriage. The Federal Government also does. There is about five states that are wrestling with the issue. Hawaii, right now, is having special session about it. Illinois is coming up soon. Oregon, I think Nevada may be in the mix, and I'm blanking on the 5th one right now, but in the next year there's probably five more states we'll see take up the issue. There's a whopping 34 cases in Federal courts across the country. Over 17 states challenging laws or state Constitutional Amendments that ban same-sex marriage. Some combination of those cases will probably ultimately make their way to the U.S. Supreme Court. No one knows the specific timeline for that or which case or which groupings of cases it will be, but for anyone following legal developments in the room it sort of an astonishing number of legal challenges happening across the country and moving through the federal courts.
	I shared with you a bit about what sort of national polling looks like right now. The Senate is about to bring to a vote ... The Federal Senate is about to bring a vote on the Employment Non-discrimination Act, which would protect people from employment discrimination on the basis both of sexual orientation, and gender identity. There is 73% public support for this measure, but it's been unable to move through Congress or Senate because of the political climate in those chambers today. So there's hope that it may be able to move at least out of the Senate and then it will probably get tied up in a Congressional vote. But that's something to keep an eye on.
	All this to say, and in summary, that we are country in flux on these issues. As I said before, we have all our bodies of the Democracy engaged on them, and we see that mirrored in what's happening in the religious world right now. Our religious communities are also in flux on these issues. You have, within the Christian world, denominations like the United Church of Christ that have been affirming and progressive on these issues for decades. Now you have denominations like Methodism or Presbyterianism that are in various stages of debating the issue, or moving through it, or having just recently debated it. You also have denominations that are not showing any signs of moving on it right now, and so we see the full spectrum of opinions that happen culturally also happening within the religious world.
	We do see more and more religious leaders being ready to speak publicly about their beliefs that homosexuality is a natural expression of sexuality, and their readiness to bless same-sex marriages. Just this past week in Birmingham, Alabama a Methodist minister, and Methodist Bishop performed a marriage ceremony for a same-sex couple, and in doing that basically broke with the teachings of the Methodist church and risks his job. There's a group of Methodist ministers in the Philly area who are taking the same stance. There's actually a lot happening within about 20 miles of y'all around these issues right now on the level of County government and faith leaders. So if you're interested in either of those, this is sort of a hot box right now, the Philly area Montgomery County.
	So we see more and more people stepping up to say, whether it's from a religious position or moral position or legal position, "This law is simply wrong, and I will not enforce it or defend it or become compliant with it any longer. I'm prepared for whatever the consequences of that are. Actually losing my job, personal risk involved in that." These are not small simple questions to put on the table. As we're talking with Clerk's across the South, many of them will say, "I support you, but if I grant a marriage license I will lose my job and this is the only income coming into our house right now. I can't risk my job in this way."
	That's not a small question to pose to someone and as we posed that question we need to be very delivered about it, and we also need to remember that when an LGBT person shows up at work in the morning in the South because they lack employment protection, they could be fired because their boss doesn't like the fact that they're gay. So complicating some of our risk analysis is important in this as well. I'm going to wrap up the talky part of this right now. I know that some of you are in a class in the room that may need to go back to the classroom at some point so whenever y'all need to do that you should do that, but want to open up the floor and invite any comments, or questions, or feedback, or hear more about kind of the climate here on campus, or anything at all really.