During the latter part of this week, dozens of cities across the country will host civil rights-style rallies and other events to stop the proposed anti-gay amendment to the Constitution. If passed, this would be the first time (with the temporary exception of Prohibition) when the Constitution was amended to TAKE AWAY rights. To find out about activities in your area, please go to:

Why protest? Civil rights for any group have never been won simply by winning good laws or court decisions. In order for legal gains to mean anything, a positive change in consciousness must be inculcated in society at large - public opinion must be changed. Most often, positive legal developments lag behind progressive changes in society's consciousness, as with the great Civil Rights legislation of the the 1960s, passed in the wake of a burgeoning Civil Rights movement when rank and file African American activists and their allies challenged racism at every level of American society. When positive legal developments PRECEEDED social movements, as with the great Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision mandating desegregation in the nation's schools, the legal changes were made moot until the social movements grew to such a size and strength that they could force the changes that had already been written into the law of the land.

Today we live in a mixed legal environment - great decisions like those of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and the US Supreme Court - and lousy decisions such as that upholding Florida's draconian ban on adoption by same-sex couples. Worse, the Massachusetts decision has prompted bigots in several state legislatures to pass very nasty "super-DOMA's." With the Presidential campaign heating up and Bush's religious right base clamoring for an outright Presidential endorsement of the proposed anti-gay amendment to the federal Constitution, the legal environment in most states looks likely to get considerably worse before it gets better. Most of the sitting Congresspeople passed Clinton's federal "Defense" of Marriage Act in 1996. Almost three quarters of the states, with largely the same legislators in office, passed various statewide DOMA's over the past several years. Clearly we have our work cut out for us if we are going to stop the anti-gay amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

How do we turn it around? Through mobilizing public, civil rights-style rallies and other events we can begin to change public opinion, and that changed public opinion can in turn lead to positive change in government. Some of us are old enough to remember how, just over five years ago, the outpouring of thousands of LGBT people and our allies in response to the hate murder of Matthew Shepard prompted a national debate about anti-LGBT hate crimes. When people saw us out in the streets of the nation, even bigoted people were forced to grudgingly respect the fact that if nothing else, we had the dignity and self-respect to stand up for our rights, rather than "just taking it." We began to sway public opinion, and political leaders followed and increasingly courted that sea-change in U.S. public opinion.

The Freedom to Marry Week events are aimed at being just a FIRST public step in mobilizing our community and allies around equal marriage rights. In almost every city where rallies are being held, they will be the first public equal-marriage rights protests those cities have seen in a long time, if ever.

Stand up for your rights - please join us at the rallies this week! If you are not LGBT, please stand in solidarity with us at the rallies - the rights LGBT people might lose today could affect yours tomorrow!

Please consider purchasing a t-shirt! Proceeds from the shirts benefit the national organizing of DontAmend.com. We have NO paid staff, NO office, NO fancy expense accounts, but we DO have expenses! These quality shirts, produced at cost for us by Don't Panic, are available in two designs. One reads simply, "DontAmend.com, Stop the Constitional Amendment to Ban Same-Sex Marriage." The other reads "Marriage is a Human Right, Not a Heterosexual Privilege." Take a look at them at the DontAmend.com website or go directly to: