The Heroic Lesbian Couple of Oklahoma Who Fought for Equal Marriage—and Won

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/07/the-heroic-lesbian-couple-of-oklahoma-who-fought-for-equal-marriage-and-won.html

When Mary Bishop and Sharon Baldwin began the fight for marriage equality in Oklahoma, even gay rights groups wouldn’t support them. On Monday they savored sweet, hard-fought-for victory.
In 2004, against the advice of all the major LGBT rights organizations, Mary Bishop and Sharon Baldwin of Oklahoma took on the Defense of Marriage Act and President George W. Bush, whose call for a Constitutional amendment in his State of the Union address spurred the couple to action.

The conversations with their lawyer through the spring and summer of 2004 took on more urgency as the situation in their home state became even more dire—that fall, State Question 711 was put on the ballot asking Oklahomans if they wanted to ban marriage equality in their state. Polls indicated a resounding “Yes.” The couple told their lawyer: if this thing passes, we want to file the next day. “We knew that if we filed the next day that there was going to be hope for a lot of people, that this wasn’t just about us.”

On Monday, Mary and Sharon’s fight reached victorious fruition after gay marriage was finally legalized in Oklahoma, when the Supreme Court declined to hear legal appeals against it from five states (the others were Indiana, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin). Gay couples in six other states bound by the same rulings (Colorado, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Wyoming) should be able to get married shortly.

Mary and Sharon’s determination to fight for their rights began, however, years earlier, when they were told by a Tulsa bar owner that women of their kind weren't welcome. “We gathered our lesbian friends and protested in front of the bar for a number of nights until the owner decided that maybe we were the ladies that she wanted after all.” Mary, a soft-spoken editor at the Tulsa World, often speaks first when the pair are together while Sharon, for many years an editor at the same paper, pipes up to support their joint narrative. Side by side, they tell their story in one voice.


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