March 19, 2004 - The Jewish Week: After graduating from Yale College, Evan Wolfson went to Togo as a Peace Corps volunteer. It was there that Wolfson first began to grapple with what being gay would mean for the rest of his life

Peace Corps Online: Directory: Togo: Peace Corps Togo : The Peace Corps in Togo: March 19, 2004 - The Jewish Week: After graduating from Yale College, Evan Wolfson went to Togo as a Peace Corps volunteer. It was there that Wolfson first began to grapple with what being gay would mean for the rest of his life

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After graduating from Yale College, Evan Wolfson went to Togo as a Peace Corps volunteer. It was there that Wolfson first began to grapple with what being gay would mean for the rest of his life

After graduating from Yale College, Evan Wolfson went to Togo as a Peace Corps volunteer. It was there that Wolfson first began to grapple with what being gay would mean for the rest of his life

After graduating from Yale College, Evan Wolfson went to Togo as a Peace Corps volunteer. It was there that Wolfson first began to grapple with what being gay would mean for the rest of his life

The Right To Marry
Debra Nussbaum Cohen - Special To The Jewish Week

Evan Wolfson was really little — so young he doesn’t remember exactly how old — the day he sat in his parents’ bedroom watching television with his mom and announced that he never wanted to get married.

Little did he know then that he’d build his career fighting for the right to do just that.

Wolfson, 47, is founder and executive director of the advocacy organization Freedom to Marry, which is playing a central role in the effort to win the right to wed for same-sex couples.

Civil marriage brings with it a host of legal benefits — 1,138 federal protections alone, according to a recent count by the U.S. government’s General Accounting Office, Wolfson says — from the right to receive more Social Security benefits if the higher-earning spouse dies, to health insurance through the plan at a spouse’s employer.

It is a fight being undertaken state by state across the country. Though the first major legal breakthrough came in 1993, when Hawaii’s Supreme Court ruled that refusing marriage to gay couples is discriminatory — a case on which Wolfson worked as co-counsel — the movement recently began picking up steam.

And in the last several weeks, same-gender couples have applied for marriage licenses and in some cases gotten married from San Francisco to New Jersey to New Paltz. N.Y.

The backlash has also been picking up steam, with the recent pledge by President Bush to push for a constitutional amendment that would make the definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman.

“When you try to shove a group of Americans outside the Constitution, that is a radical act,” Wolfson says, sitting in his Chelsea office. “To see the president try to cement discrimination into the Constitution, that is a declaration of war. It’s a war on people’s commitment to the equality of all.”

When Wolfson told his mother he wouldn’t marry, “I was really saying that even before I knew the word ‘gay,’ I knew there was something about the image of marriage I was being shown that didn’t fit with who I was,” he says.

“Now I realize that just because I’m gay it doesn’t mean I have to reject marriage. Rather marriage should be something that gay kids can dream of, too.”

Wolfson, a Brooklyn native, grew up with two brothers and a sister in Pittsburgh, Pa. His family belonged to a Conservative synagogue there, but the center of their Jewish life was camp, he says.

Every summer he and his siblings would come east to Camp Boiberik, a Yiddish camp in upstate Rhinebeck, where his parents had met when they were campers years before. Wolfson says his summers there were a magical time in “a little promised land.”

After graduating from Yale College, he went to Togo as a Peace Corps volunteer. It was there that Wolfson first began to grapple with what being gay would mean for the rest of his life.

But it was at Harvard Law School that his personal mission was shaped. He read John Boswell’s “Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality,” and “it changed my life,” Wolfson says. “It showed me that how our society treats gay people is not how it always was. Like many social injustices, this too could be changed, and the book showed me that being gay had political and historical dimensions.”

His 1983 law school thesis was devoted to exploring marriage for gays. After graduating Wolfson worked as an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn. He wrote amicus briefs that helped win the New York State high court’s elimination of the marital rape exemption and the U.S. Supreme Court’s ban on racial discrimination in jury selection.

In 1989 Wolfson joined the Lambda Legal Defense & Education Fund, the country’s leading lesbian and gay legal advocacy group, as director of The Marriage Project.

He left in 2001 to establish Freedom to Marry, which now has a small staff in Chelsea. The group has helped frame the effort to win marriage for gays and lesbians as a matter of civil rights. And change in that direction seems to be happening relatively quickly.

“It took 60 years from the start of the civil rights movement for blacks to win the right to an education equal to that of whites, and 70 years from the start of the suffragette movement for women to win the right to vote,” Wolfson notes.

“Our effort is going faster in part because we’re building on the strength of these allied civil rights movements.”

As for Wolfson himself, a former member of New York’s gay and lesbian synagogue, Congregation Beth Simchat Torah — “I’m still a member in my heart, though I don’t know if I’m paid up on my dues,” he says, chuckling — he’s got no immediate plans to marry his boyfriend, Cheng He. They met on the Internet two years ago.

“Somebody’s got to ask,” he says with a laugh. “But I certainly want the choice to get married. And when I’m ready, it should be my choice, not the government’s.”




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Story Source: The Jewish Week

This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Togo; Gay Issues

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