Thousands attend gay rights rally
04/28/2006
BY PATRICK SWEENEY
Pioneer Press
Several thousand gays, lesbians and their heterosexual supporters demonstrated at the Minnesota Capitol on Thursday for equal rights and against a proposed constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage and civil unions that are equivalent to marriage.
Before and after a noontime rally, hundreds met with senators and state representatives in the lawmakers’ offices and in hallways outside the Senate chamber.
“We are all children of God, we are all equal,” state Sen. Scott Dibble told the crowd at the rally. Dibble, an openly gay Democrat from Minneapolis, called the fight against the marriage amendment the “civil rights struggle of our time.”
The gathering Thursday was the third major Capitol rally this spring to focus on the amendment, which has passed the House but not the Senate. An estimated 1,000 supporters of the amendment took part in a March 21 rally. About the same number of anti-amendment demonstrators attended another rally March 24.
There was no official estimate of the crowd size Thursday.
The rally came at a time — 25 days before the scheduled adjournment of the current legislative session — when both supporters and opponents of the proposed amendment say there is a growing likelihood the amendment will not be approved by the state Senate and submitted to voters in the November election.
“It’s never dead, but it would be very difficult to secure passage,” said Sen. Michele Bachmann, R-Stillwater, the Senate sponsor and most outspoken backer of the amendment. “We would have to have a number of Democratic senators’ votes. There’s no indication that Democrats are inclined to change their previous votes.”
On the other side, Ann DeGroot, the executive director of OutFront Minnesota, a 20-year-old organization of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people that sponsored Thursday’s rally, said: “We’re in good shape for the moment. … It’s not over, and we would be foolish to think we’ve won and we can go home.”
Bachmann said Minnesota needs her amendment as a guarantee that gay activists could not file suit and win a court ruling overturning statutory prohibitions against same-sex marriage. Such a lawsuit is under way in Iowa.
DeGroot and OutFront Minnesota’s chief lobbyist, C. Scott Cooper, said the high-profile, three-year debate in Minnesota over Bachmann’s amendment has encouraged gays and lesbians to be more vocal about their status, both with friends and neighbors and with their elected representatives.
“We have 1,500 people who have appointments with their legislators,” Cooper said of Thursday’s lobbying activities. “Ninety-two percent of the legislators will have constituents, their own constituents, meeting with them on this issue.”
In one of those meetings, 67-year-old Lyle Steinfeldt and 72-year-old Jim Hartsoe — former Lutheran pastors from Arden Hills who have been partners for 12 years — met with Sen. Satveer Chaudhary, DFL-Fridley. They thanked Chaudhary for his opposition to Bachmann’s amendment and urged him to support some kind of state-sanctioned civil unions.
Steinfeldt and Hartsoe are making plans to attend Steinfeldt’s 50th high school class reunion in June. Steinfeldt said he wanted his old classmates to meet and socialize with a gay couple. He said he hoped the classmates would “walk away from it saying ‘You know, what is the threat?’ “