Longest-Serving Openly Gay Lawmaker In The U.S. Can Now Marry Her Partner In Minnesota

[babylonsister]

Longest-Serving Openly Gay Lawmaker In The U.S. Can Now Marry Her Partner In Minnesota


Gay marriage sponsor, Rep. Karen Clark, left, and her partner, Jacquelyn Zita, leave the Minnesota House chambers after the Minnesota House passed the gay marriage bill Thursday, May 9, 2013 in St. Paul, Minn.
PATRICK CONDON May 15, 2013, 9:56 AM

snip//

Watching over Dayton’s shoulder as he signed the bill were the measure’s two chief sponsors, Rep. Karen Clark and Sen. Scott Dibble. For them, it was vindication for a long and sometimes demoralizing struggle for gay rights.

“I thought it would happen someday, but I didn’t know I would be able to be here to be part of it,” Clark said Tuesday, a few hours before the ceremony. Clark can now marry her partner of 24 years, in the only state she’s ever lived.

The longest-serving openly gay lawmaker in the country, Clark, 67, had already been out of the closet for a decade when she was elected to the Legislature in 1980. She grew up on a farm in Rock County, in the state’s southwestern corner, and came out to her parents, now both dead, in her mid-20s.

“The very first thing my mother said was, ‘I will always love you,’” Clark recalled.

In 1993, her by-then elderly parents marched with her in the Minneapolis gay pride parade a few weeks after she led the effort to extend Minnesota’s civil rights protections to gay people.

But by 1997, the same Legislature passed the “Defense of Marriage Act,” which restricted marriage to only opposite-sex couples. A year later, Clark introduced a bill to repeal it and allow gay marriage.

It took 16 years to get to this week, which comes two years after the 2011 Legislature — then controlled by Republicans — put an amendment on the statewide ballot asking voters to cement the existing gay marriage ban in the state constitution. Minnesota became the first state to reject such a ban after more than 30 states passed one, and is now the first state in the Midwest to approve gay marriage by a legislative vote.

more...

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/openly-gay-lawmaker-in-the-us-can-now-marry-her-parter-in-minnesota.php