>Just For Giggles

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>Art Wednesday: Gregos’ Street Faces

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from WebUrbanist:

Paris is a magical city where you’ll come across some colorful and unforgettable characters. But perhaps the most colorful character of all is Gregos, an artist who has decided to make his face one of the most recognizable in Paris and elsewhere in France. He installs castings of his own face – basically painted plaster masks – on the walls of buildings, on mailboxes, and just about every available vertical surface in Paris.

Tourists in Paris may have noticed the unusual but eye-catching faces staring at them from the walls all around the city. Gregos began his strange quest to plaster Paris with his likeness in 2006. At first, the masks were blank and unpainted, featuring only a stuck-out tongue as their message to passers-by.

But in the beginning of 2009, the artist decided to make his faces more visible by adding bright colors and painted designs. There are mime faces, Kiss faces, clown faces, and a number of faces that interact playfully with their locations.

Overall, Gregos has installed nearly 170 faces in the streets of Paris, Lyon, Lille, and Malta Island. He places them in tourist areas to let plenty of people see them for free. The interaction that occurs between viewers and the masks is fascinating. Some people are put off by the faces floating out from walls, but most are amused.

It seems that the majority of passers-by are delighted to find one of Gregos’ masks, as evidenced by the huge amount of photographs tourists take with the faces. People pose with the masks, make silly faces back at the plaster likenesses, and carefully photograph the visages with their surroundings.

Gregos’ fun and strange art project has created a wonderfully weird kind of scavenger hunt in the streets of the City of Lights. Tourists who know about the art project are on the lookout for the masks wherever they go, and it must provide a great feeling of accomplishment to capture several of them in photographs during a trip to this stunning city.

>It’s Been A Long Battle

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People think the battle for marriage equality began in California with Prop H8….or maybe in Iowa a year ago….in Massachusetts back in ’04, but the battle actually began almost forty years ago.

We need that reminder to tell us that this is worth the ongoing fight, and worth the ongoing struggle, and worth staying the course, if only to honor those who were there at the beginning.

Here are “Ten Key Moments in the Battle Over Same-Sex Marriage”.

1972
The U.S. Supreme Court dismisses Baker v. Nelson, an appeal of a Minnesota Supreme Court ruling that found limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples did not violate the state constitution. The Court finds the case does not ask a substantial federal question, and some argue that dismissal set a binding precedent that could influence the Court’s eventual consideration of Proposition 8.
1993
The Hawaii Supreme Court rules in Baehr v. Miike, finding that laws denying same-sex couples the right to marry violated state constitutional equal protection rights unless the state could show a “compelling reason” for such discrimination and sending the case back to trial court. The ruling was later credited with sparking a backlash in the form of laws and constitutional amendments defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Hawaiian voters later passed a referendum giving the legislature jurisdiction over marriage, bypassing state courts.
1996
Congress passes the Defense of Marriage Act, which is signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The law, popularly known as DOMA, allows states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages and unions performed in other states. It also created a federal definition of marriage as between a man and a woman.
1999
Ruling in Baker v. Vermont, the Vermont Supreme Court finds the state is constitutionally obligated to give same-sex couples the same rights, benefits and obligations as marriage, and orders the state legislature to decide how best to do so. 2000In response to the Baker ruling, Vermont becomes the first state to legally recognize same-sex couples with civil unions.
2003
In Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the Massachusetts Supreme Court finds that same-sex couples are entitled to marry under the state’s constitution.
2004
The nation’s first legal same-sex marriages are performed in Massachusetts in the wake of the Goodridge ruling. Public officials issue marriage licenses and perform ceremonies elsewhere, including New Mexico and San Francisco, but those unions will later be nullified.
2008
The Supreme Court of California issues a broad decision striking down the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. Roughly 18,000 same-sex couples married in California before voters passed a referendum — Proposition 8 — declaring it illegal. In November, the Connecticut Supreme Court also struck down a law banning same-sex marriage, making Connecticut the third state to legalize it.
2009
Same-sex marriage laws pass in Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire and Washington, D.C. Maine legalizes same-sex marriage, but voters later overturn the decision with a ballot initiative.
2010
In two separate cases, a federal judge in Boston rules July 8 that the federal Defense of Marriage Act violated the Constitution by denying federal benefits to married gay men and lesbians and by forcing Massachusetts to discriminate in order to obtain federal funds. Meanwhile, in California on Aug. 4, U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker rules that Proposition 8 violated gays’ and lesbians’ due process rights. The decision is currently on appeal before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

source

>Suing Wyoming

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David Shupe-Roderick and Ryan W. Dupree of Cheyenne, Wyoming, have filed a federal lawsuit challenging the Wyoming law that defines marriage as existing only between a man and a woman.

The two men attempted to obtain a marriage license, but the Laramie County Clerk’s Office has refused to issue them one, and so they are asking U.S. District Judge Alan Johnson to stop the state from enforcing any laws that block gays and lesbians from access to civil marriage.

David Shupe-Roderick:
“I’ve tried to kind of not rock the boat, so to speak, but there comes a time in everyone’s life when there are things that are wrong and you have a moral duty to stand up and you have to advocate for what’s right. I think Ryan and I agree that this is something that is wrong, and it’s something that needs to be changed.”

But there is an odd little hitch in their story: Laramie County Clerk Debbye Lathrop said she never met with Shupe-Roderick or Dupree on the issue and could find no one in her office who knows anything about denying a marriage license to the men, adding, “We’re totally in the dark about this.”

Even more odd, while Wyoming law says that only marriages between a man and a woman may be conducted in the state, Wyoming does recognize marriages performed in other states, some of which allow same-sex marriages and civil unions.

That is another odd thing. Two men, or two women, cannot legally marry in Wyoming, but if they legally marry in, say Iowa, Wyoming must recognize their union. It seems like an easy hop-skip-and-a-jump from there to legalizing same-sex marriage, doesn’t it?

And in fact, just last year the Wyoming Legislature rejected a proposal–a Wyoming DOMA, if you will–that would have let Wyoming voters decide whether to amend the state constitution to specify that the state wouldn’t recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere.

Come on, Wyoming, you’re almost there. You recognize gay marriages, so you ought to legalize them for your own citizens.