Saturday 3 January 2009

Carl Tashian: US marriage equality flag

In 1902, the Women's Suffrage movement created their own version of US flag with only four stars, one for each state that allowed women to vote. The Cali Garmo reports that following this historic example of women’s right movement, New York-based engineer and designer of Armenian origin Carl Tashian started a protest flag for equal marriage rights. The flag was made before the Prop 8 passed in California, so originally it had 3 stars. However, after the Prop 8 passed, the designer had to remove a star.

Currently, as Carl Tashian writes in a specially established Facebook group – The flag of equal marriage - “The flag only has two stars, for Connecticut and Massachusetts (the 5th and 6th state in the union), the only states with legalized same-sex marriage. The suffragists did the same thing in 1902, and it seemed to work...”