Nicole's speech on LGBT equality at Boise City Hall at noon Saturday, January 10th 2009.
Friends, Idahoans we have struggled for decades and millennia up a steep hill toward the doors of the house of justice….
In small towns we’ve lived quietly hoping to pass unnoticed.
We’ve been taunted, harassed and demonized.
Millions of us have cried in school hallways, alone in bathrooms and school yards.
We’ve taken our lives as teens and adults broken in half unable to bear a life alone in hostility.
We’ve lost jobs, families, churches, children.
We’ve been told we deserve hate, deserve loneliness
and only rarely from above in the house of justice has anyone shone a light into the darkness for us, has anyone tried to help us up that hill from above
—only rarely from that place of power has anyone ever even said our names.
Friends, five years ago from his speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004 Barack Obama said our names. Unlike any politician speaking to a prime time audience on a national stage he spoke to us, his “gay friends in red states,” including us then in his vision of American.
From drag queens standing up to police brutality on the shores of the Atlantic to Harvey Milk dying at the hands of hatred in a marble building in another city far away on the Pacific…… we have worked toward justice again and again only to be sent back down the hill yet further time and time again into the mire.
Friends, today as we stand here in the cold, Soldiers, men and women serving in Iraq face worse consequence for living as human beings than they did twelve years ago. They are told today that it is dishonorable to be both patriotic and honest. They are told in US law, something no American should ever be told. They are told that to protect their livelihood, their careers and their families, they must lie.
What kind of a nation holds up gay Americans as heroes in the arts, in sports, in entertainment and even politics, and then with laws tells us that in one place we can marry, can have all the rights of our straight brothers and sisters, but that on the other side of a boarder, on a different date in the same city that those rights and duties and privileges, the very keys of full personhood are not ours to have.
Friends we have climbed up the hill for a long, long time and we have slid back in the mud of hate, greed and partisan politics, but today we stand here in Boise, Idaho, ten days from the day that Barack Obama, a community organizer, state legislator, US Senator, writer and diplomat…. one who has struggled for decades beside us…. we stand here ten days from the day that he will walk through those doors of justice himself.
He will bring part of the nation with him through those doors on the 20th of January.
Friends, we are there almost to those the doors ourselves today. It may not be this month or this year that we achieve full equality but I’ve looked three times into the eyes of the man who will be our new president and I know he has a fire in him for justice.
If any man can sit in that white house on that hill and ask a nation to change not just its laws but its minds for us, it will be him.
We know he can not do it alone. All across the nation today and over the next months and year we will be gathering on the lawns of houses of justice and asking not just a man, but a nation to hear us. We will be standing here as long as it takes, with our families and co-workers, church members, neighbors and class mates beside us, now, for the sake of justice, equality and all that makes us a nation, it is time for Congress and for our state legislatures, our courts and our neighbors to speak our names in respect and in law…… and to finally let us in.