More than a
million people are expected to turn out for Saturday's
international rally to collectively raise their voices
against discrimination and inequality. JoinTheImpact.com's Amy Balliett says
she created the site and the rally just a week ago,
and the response has been immense.
Seattle-based
Balliett said she was inspired by her friend Willow who
wrote an email weighing how she could react to the passing
of marriage amendments in California, Florida, and
Arizona, as well as an ban on all unmarried people
(gay and straight) from adopting children in Arkansas.
She then launched a blog, putting out a call to action for a
national protest on November 15. Following the launch,
her server crashed twice from the immense amount of
traffic. Since then the site has been working off
donated server space.
She said that the
hunger for action is a result of so many people being
outraged at California's Proposition 8's passage, which
acted as a wake-up call to many.
The early
projections were 250,000 attendees nation-wide, she said,
but after two server crashes, and ongoing media
attention, the now-international rally looks like it
will reach well over a million LGBT protesters and
allies. Several local organizations in cities like San
Francisco, Cincinnati, and Boston contacted her to help
organize rallies in their cities.
The future of
California's marriage ban has a special meaning to Balliett
-- she married her wife Jennifer Trejo twice, once at home
in Seattle, and once in Los Angeles. Although they
also plan to marry in Canada and Connecticut, it's
still important to keep her California marriage legal.
"Our community
has been taught to think that we have to earn these
rights, and our community has been taught to think that
we're lucky to have the rights that we have," she
said. "Because of that, we become complacent when
legislation like the [Defense of Marriage Act] passes.
But Prop 8 wasn't DOMA. Prop 8 was them saying, 'we gave you
the rights for [five] months, and now we're taking the
right away."
