Gay Charlotte - Drew - Day 6

Around 10AM this morning, we headed over to the LGBT Center to work with Campus Pride on their new website. The current website uses static HTML (I’m going to pretend like I know what that means…), so they are in the process of changing over to a site that will be much more open to collaboration. We were able to convert more than 50 pages of the site into posts for the new site in less than an hour. We also met Shane, one of the main advocates for Campus Pride, who graduated from Emporia State University. He knows Reuben Perez really well, so the group had an instant connection with him and the organization.

After finishing that project, a few of us had a long discussion about the implications of federalism and the Supreme Court on marriage equality. We concluded that there are basically two ways that the Supreme Court could invalidate the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The first is through the 10^th Amendment, reserving rights not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution to the states. The second would be through the 14^th Amendment, using the Equal Protection Clause. However, only a decision through the latter convention would overturn state constitutional amendments like North Carolina’s Amendment One that just recently passed. It appears that in a matter of months, the Supreme Court is likely to hear a challenge of DOMA, so this debate is just getting started.

Back at St. John’s, we played telephone Pictionary. Long story short, one of the clues ended up like this:

Ashley's interesting interpretation of a telephone pictionary clue.

That evening we went to a concert put on by the St. John’s choir entitled “Sacred and Profane”. It featured several hymns and a few more contemporary pieces, all performed beautifully.

That night, however, we decided to live it up on the town. This largely turned out to be us walking around downtown until we stumbled upon a frozen yogurt shop J. Then, for surprisingly the first time, we met our first opposition to the LGBT movement and the work we have been doing at the Center. The social butterfly of our group, Leah Charles stood her ground despite the man’s awkward statements.

Then, we watched X-men: First Class.

The end.

-Drew Harger