TAKING IT TO THE PUBLIC Two groups seek votes on same-sex marriage.
months had moved in with Randy. They now live in a large home in the Overbrook neighborhood of North Little Rock, where they tend a vast garden in their back yard. Their neighbors, Randy said, welcomed them with open arms and they party together once or twice a year. The men were married last August in Central Park and took the name Eddy-McCain. The officiant was Jay Bakker, the son of the late televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, who some time ago had been invited to the church Randy leads, Open Door Community Church in Sherwood. There, Randy said, the scales fell from Bakker’s eyes and he decided he would no longer preach against homosexuality. Bakker affiliated with a progressive church in Atlanta and then New York, and has endorsed gay marriage. Randy was a plaintiff in Picado v. Jegley, the 2001 suit that overturned Arkansas’s sodomy law that made sex between homosexuals a crime. When he and Gary heard the Supreme Court’s ruling on DOMA, “we were ecstatic. We celebrated all day long.” With the language that Justice Kennedy used, he reasoned, how could Arkansas’s ban on same-sex marriage stand? “I love this state,” Randy said. “A lot of my friends want to move.” He doesn’t think they should have to.
CODY RENEGAR AND THOMAS STAED
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hen Cody Renegar was 17, he left the orphanage he lived in and at 18 he joined the Army Reserves, working as a mechanic in South Carolina and Maryland. At 20 he and his wife, a young woman he’d lived
BRIAN CHILSON
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n the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling overturning the federal ban on same-sex marriage, two groups filed ballot language with the state attorney general’s office that would put the issue to a vote in Arkansas. Arkansans for Equality seeks a 2014 vote to repeal Amendment 83, the state law that bans marriage between persons of the same sex and says such marriages made official in other states will not be recognized here. The Arkansas Initiative for Marriage Equality, a non-partisan group that formed in 2012, would put on the 2016 ballot an amendment to prohibit the state from banning marriage on the basis of sex or sexual preference. Neither of the groups’ proposed ballot language has passed muster with state Attorney General Dustin McDaniel. McDaniel found AFE’s language deficient in failing to mention the effect of repeal of Amendment 83 and because it was not impartial, and said that the AIME ballot language on “the right to marry” was ambiguous. On Monday, the AFE filed amended ballot language with the AG’s office. AIME plans to file a new draft next week. Judd Mann, a high school art teacher and co-chair
AIME TARGETS STATE LAW: Jennifer Pierce and others seeking vote on same-sex marriage.
of the non-partisan AFE with Christina Harrison, said the group has filed for a non-profit status that would allow them to take contributions. To get a ballot spot, AFE will have to get 78,000 names representing voters across the state on their petition. Mann said the cost of training persons to collect names is $250 a head. The group has had “scores of people who have stepped up” to help with the petition drive, he said.
with in the orphanage, had their son, Levi. The marriage didn’t last. Renegar is gay. Last summer, Renegar, 36, and Thomas Staed, 30, held a marriage ceremony on their farm in Elkins, where they raise rabbits and pheasants and fainting goats (a “heavy petting zoo,” Renegar laughed.) They moved to their three acres on a river after the son — now 17 — rode his motorcycle through the living room of their house on the square in Fayetteville. “He needed to spread his wings,” Renegar said. Renegar and his ex-wife are close friends and son Levi moves back and forth between their homes. Renegar is an artist — a painter of horses — and part-time hair stylist. Staed is a loan analyst at Arvest Bank. Renegar said he captured Staed’s attention when the math-minded man saw Renegar trying to help Levi with his math homework. That was four years ago. In 2011, the two decided to marry, though it would not be a legal ceremony. When they asked the Northwest Arkansas Times to run an engagement notice, the newspaper turned them down. That news — that they couldn’t announce their engagement in their hometown paper — was on Yahoo News within days. Groups that fight for equality took up the cause, and Renegar said “we’re changing over 50 different newspapers across the U.S.” The Yahoo story was the second on Renegar. The first was about an interview Renegar gave in the documentary “Hollywood to Dollywood,” in which he tearfully tells the story of how he told his son that he was gay. Though Levi took some guff when he started school in Elkins, a change in personnel and the fact that he’s
Mann, who said he was raised in a charismatic fundamentalist Christian home, no longer believes that “being homosexual is something that needs to be fixed or healed. … It’s an abomination as much as eating shellfish.” He said the group is encouraged that according to a bipartisan poll commissioned by the Human Rights Campaign, 60 percent of Arkansans age 30 and younger believe in marriage equality. “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” he said, “and it will all be taken care of with one sweeping decision” in federal court. While focused now on repeal of Amendment 83, the group’s mission is to take on discrimination however it occurs. Arkansas Initiative for Marriage Equality was founded by Trey Weir and Jennifer Pierce, both of whom were members of Occupy Little Rock. They had worked with Regnat Populus, a group that sought campaign finance reform, and so were familiar with the ballot process. Pierce, a history teacher, acknowledged that “a lot of people have said it’s too soon” to ask voters to approve of same-sex marriage. “I don’t see it happening anytime soon in the Southern states,” she said. But she said the public dialogue that a petition drive will engender will be important, and, as a history teacher, “it’s important to stand up and fight for equality.” Both groups have Facebook pages where they publish meeting notices, updates on their work, links to pertinent news articles and wry photographs such as the one from St. Mary Magdalene Episcopal Church: “We truly regret that gay marriage attacks the sanctity of your fourth marriage.”
“extremely good looking and dating the popular girls,” his dad said, has taken care of any friction he had. Despite the fact that they had held a marriage ceremony, the couple looked forward to the DOMA ruling so they could make their wedding official. Renegar said they felt a “responsibility to continue on the path we started” toward marriage equality. A friend sent them Cheryl Maples’ contact information. “We were looking for some sort of avenue of getting this going in Arkansas.” Staed, Renegar said, “is extremely passionate” about getting Arkansas’s same-sex marriage ban overturned. “We’re doing this for everyone else. We want to represent them.” Renegar said opposition to gay marriage “blows my mind. What does your religion have to do with my rights? … It’s really no one’s business.”
ANDRA ALSBURY AND AMBER GARDNER-ALSBURY
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ndra Alsbury, whose father was retired from the Army, was commissioned as a first lieutenant in the Army Reserves at her father’s gravesite. He had wanted her to join, but died before she could. Her mother pinned her at the ceremony. “That’s how close I am to my family,” she said. Her mother still believes that it’s wrong that her daughter married another woman, Amber Gardner. “My mother loves my wife,” she said. “But … I know and she’ll tell me, ‘you know I don’t think this is right.’ … but she absolutely CONTINUED ON PAGE 16 www.arktimes.com
AUGUST 1, 2013
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