We are Joe and Frank Capley-Alfano, and we are legally married. We were married during the 2004 Winter of Love, and we wed again last year, when California embraced Marriage Equality legally.

We are a part of One Struggle, One Fight and the March to Sacramento for three important reasons.

First, we believe that Prop. 8 is an unconstitutional revision and not an amendment to the California Constitution, and we stand in solidarity with the other 18,000 same-gender couples that legally married last year in California to ask our State Supreme Court to protect us and other minorities from the tyranny of the majority and to stand for fairness and equality for all.

Second, we want to articulate that Domestic Partnerships and Civil Unions are not the same as Legal Civil Marriage. Domestic Partnerships and Civil Unions are state or local ordinances that stop at the state line, and are trumped by federal legislation, so Domestic Partnership and Civil Unions are inadequate to address and most often don’t address tangible real-life issues like an employee’s union benefits, immigration, and/or taxes which are governed by federal laws. Same-gender couples simply can not and should not be burdened to create a myriad of ad-hoc legal contracts to provide a tiny percentage of the 1,138 legal rights, responsibilities, and benefits that are afforded through one stroke of a pen and an “I do” with legal civil marriage. In short, it is redundant and wasteful to create cumbersome additional institutions, when a perfectly functional one already exists.

Finally, on a personal note, we want to explain why national marriage recognition and civil equality is so important to us.

Frank explains, “Joe is disabled and he can only work part time. As a result, he doesn’t qualify for healthcare through his employer, and private health policies cost too much for our working-class family, because of his pre-existing condition. What is more, he is disqualified from public assistance, because the State of California counts us as legally married.”

He adds, “The situation is devastating to me, because I am watching my spouse slowly loose his ability to walk and I can’t do anything about it. I work for the International Union of Elevator Constructors and my union refuses to recognize my Domestic Partnership and legal civil marriage. They use the Defense of Marriage Act to justify denying equal treatment to my family. All of the heterosexual guys that I work for can add their spouses to their health plan and I want to be treated equally! I am sick of being a second class citizen, because of my and my spouse’s gender. I work just as hard as my co-workers; I humbly and respectfully represent the human face of IUEC in the field every day just like they do, and I pay my union dues just like they do.”

Lastly he said, “It is time that all people are treated with dignity and respect, and we are not going to stop fighting for civil equality until we achieve it: nothing more nothing less.”

Joe stated, “The march seemed sort of ridiculous but also kind of like a perfect fit for us, when we heard about it, because it may be one of the last times that I can actually be a part of anything like this, before I am no longer physically capable. In fact, I am not even actually walking in this event. I am following in one of the support vehicles. Frank is going to march for our family, because I simply can’t.”

He continued, “What I hope will come of this event, is that our group will travel through the heartland of California and through municipalities, where other historically discriminated against groups carved out a home for themselves against great odds. I hope that we learn about the struggles of those groups and from them personally. Further, I hope to understand, learn, and grow from their stories and experiences, taking those lessons back to my community in an effort to utilize the collective knowledge of those that have gone our way before, in our current struggle against Prop. 8. Finally, I hope that we can give back to the communities that we are passing through as well by volunteering, making donations, supporting local businesses, and by bringing light to their struggles, as our own. After all there is really only One Stuggle One Fight, and it is our collective human struggle and human fight to flourish in peace and harmony.”

Queers for Economic Justice produces bi-weekly videos. The one below is about HIV-AIDS in the LGBTQ community.

San Jose Mercury News, 2/8/2009: We are family, too: Vietnamese Gays and Lesbians join San Jose’s Tet parade, by Jesse Mangaliman: “Nguyen was one of 40 Vietnamese gays and lesbians from the Bay Area and other parts of California who marched during the traditional annual celebration of Tet, the lunar new year. It was only the second time in the parade’s history that gays and lesbians marched openly — and the first time that families joined them. For Vietnamese gay and lesbian groups, the event signaled a new kind of visibility and openness in a culture that traditionally views homosexuality as shameful — and something to hide.”

A recent Racialicious Blog post: When Xenophobia Meets Homophobia, by guest contributor Marisol LeBron, originally published at Nacla and Post Pomo Nuyorican Homo: “The Prop 8 fallout shows how much work remains to be done to connect the LGBT rights movement with other struggles for social justice across a spectrum of issues. Unfortunately, it may have taken the brutal murder of Ecuadoran immigrant Jose Oswaldo Sucuzhañay to highlight the invisibility of queer people of color – particularly queer immigrants – in LGBT rights discourse. His murder will hopefully provide an impetus for coalition building.”

This is an article posted on the Common Dreams website: Gay Woman Fights over Hospital Visitation Rights in Miami court, by Luara Figueroa: “A gay woman not allowed to visit her dying partner at Jackson Memorial Hospital in 2007 hopes a federal judge will allow her claims of emotional distress and negligence to go to trial.”

An article in the New Haven Independent: Camaign Puts the “T” Back in “LGBT”, by Melinda Tuhus: “Now that they’ve brought same-sex marriage to Connecticut, advocates took on a new mission to a downtown town hall meeting: protecting transgender civil rights.”