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.
