Scenes From the Gay Marriage Battle

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Here at Mother Jones, we’re all about keeping pictorial tabs on the United States’ ongoing wars. My contribution today is a photo essay about a different kind of fight, courtesy Geoffrey King and Sunny Angulo’s Such a Bittersweet Day: Marriage Equality in the Wake of Prop 8.

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera says that this collection of photos and oral histories about California’s marriage equality movement “brilliantly capture[s] the humanity and passion of what is perhaps this generation’s preeminent struggle for civil rights in America.” And what a struggle it’s been, even in just the last couple of years: The California Supreme Court legalized gay marriage, but then Prop 8, which bans gay marriage, passed thanks partly to meddling Mormons, so that now there’s the discrimination within the discrimination that some same-sex couples—those who got in under the wire—can be legally married but others can’t. And of course the battlefield exists way beyond California and beyond just the issue of marriage equality, with casualties like this and this and this every day.

Click on the photos below for captions.



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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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