10 days till Departure!

Hey Everyone, thanks for stopping by my blog!  Throughout this upcoming summer, I will post pictures, updates, and journal entries from my adventures at my internship with Equality California.  With less than 10 days until I depart Clark and my home in Maine, I am both excited and nervous to begin my internship and life in California.  

With the support of Career Services, Professor Kristen Williams from the Political Science Department, and Professor Sarah Buie from the Department of Visual and Performing Arts and Head of the Difficult Dialogues Program at Clark, I am about to embark on a life changing experience where I will be able to apply the knowledge that I have learned as an undergraduate on the human level.  

As an Intern for EQCA, I am looking forward to having dialogues with voters throughout Fresno County in order to help change hearts and minds on the issue of marriage equality for same sex couples.  Furthermore, I will be researching what persuasive messaging is necessary in order to shift the debate in a district that voted 65% for Proposition 8, which rescinded the right of same sex couples to marry in California.

My research thesis is:  A person's opinion of same sex marriage is correlated to their knowledge of people who are gay.  As people begin to know more same sex couples and why marriage equality is important to them, they will likely become politically supportive of their freedom to marry. 

As Harvey Milk once said, "they won't vote against us if they only knew one of us".  It is my hope that through my internship I will be able to uncover the stories of LGBT people in the deep-rooted Republican Central Valley of California.  Through this process, I want to help broaden people's perceptions on same sex marriage.