ACLU Volunteer

“Mandy, I don’t have enough people to staff the booth at OutFest!”

That's the email I received one day from the ACLU’s volunteer coordinator, Mary Bejian. “But one of the reasons I joined the ACLU was to meet eligible men!” I replied in a whiny tone (if emails can have a tone). “We’ll get you a button that says ‘Introduce me to your straight, single brother!’” she promised. Yeah, we’re big on buttons at the ACLU. And bumper stickers, don’t forget bumper stickers.

I staffed the ACLU booth on Non-Profit Row during Art Fair and thoroughly enjoyed myself, so a couple hours at OutFest promised to be easy – preaching to the choir, after all.

Friends asked me if I got into any heated discussions in the booth during Art Fair. Most people just wanted the aforementioned bumper stickers or buttons, but I did get into the weeds with a fundamentalist Christian couple. They spent about 15 minutes enlightening me on the following:
1) Textbooks in the 1800’s included prayer and taught God’s word, and the education system has gone down hill ever since.
2) The publication of Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” in 1859 was a travesty.
3) The founder of the ACLU was a Communist, and the organization has been supporting a secret Communist agenda ever since.
4) And if the ACLU supports the separation of church and state, why doesn’t it “stay out of our religion and let us put the Ten Commandments wherever we please.”
And those are just the "issues" I can remember!

My neighbor and her 11-year-old daughter were standing waiting to talk to me as this diatribe was playing out, and the girl’s eyes just kept getting bigger and bigger. Her mom, on the other hand, was having a hard time containing her merriment at my predicament.

In contrast to that God-fearin’ pair, a quiet retired couple stopped to visit. I gave them the standard spiel about how now, with Constitutional freedoms imperiled right and left, we need an organization like the ACLU more than ever. Both seemed to be nodding with me in agreement, until the lady said “I know what you mean – ever since the Democrats were elected last fall, everything seems to be going wrong.” Her husband (wearing a VFW cap btw) turned and looked at her incredulously. “THAT’S not what she’s talking about!” he said to his wife, exasperated. And they wandered off arguing, forgetting about me entirely.

And then of course, there were the oddballs. One woman stood quietly studying the brochures when she noticed my ring. Without so much as a hello or howdy do, she pointed at it and blurted “Is that a cubic zirconia?” “Um, no,” was my eloquent reply. As she wandered off I turned to Susan Fecteau (above), “did that woman really just ask me if my ring was fake?” Susan just shrugged her shoulders. A volunteer veteran, she’s seen and heard it all.

I had not met Susan before Art Fair, but it turned out that we have friends in common. And her daughter shares a relatively uncommon first name with my teenager. Susan and her partner have three children, and while all remain covered by insurance, it was clear that the domestic partner issue is on the minds of many of the folks who stopped by. And obviously this was a big topic of discussion at OutFest - a photo of our table there is pictured at right. Jay Kaplan, seated to the left of volunteer Mike Wenzel, is an attorney on staff with the state chapter and he’s responsible for the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) Project. Michigan is one of only two states where the ACLU advocates at the regional level for the civil rights of that group.

Jay seemed very knowledgeable – perhaps I should have asked him why there were belly dancers at the Fest? But, then again, why not?