Zach Wahls
| Zach Wahls | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Zacharia Wahls July 15, 1991 Marshfield, Wisconsin, U.S. |
| Residence | Iowa City, Iowa |
| Occupation | Activist |
| Parent(s) |
Terry Wahls (mother) Jackie Reger (mother) |
Zacharia "Zach" Wahls (born July 15, 1991) is an American activist on behalf of LGBT equality.
Zach Wahls who is son of two lesbians was conceived using artificial insemination and was born on July 15, 1991, to his biological mother Terry Wahls, an internal medicine physician. He has a younger sister who shares the same sperm donor and parents. Terry met Jackie Reger in 1995 and the two held a commitment ceremony in 1996. The family lived in Marshfield, Wisconsin, and moved when he was nine years old to Iowa City, Iowa. He was raised as a Unitarian Universalist and identifies himself as a member of that church.
He has said that having lesbian parents caused occasional problems during his school years when he found it difficult to explain to his peers or found that some of them were forbidden to socialize with him. He was sometimes teased and sometimes bullied because of his parents' relationship. In 2004, as an eighth grader, he first realized that there was political opposition to the sort of family in which he was raised while watching the Republican National Convention on television. In high school, he wrote a series of columns for his high school newspaper about being raised by a lesbian couple. He played quarterback on the football team and participated in speech and debate. He graduated from Iowa City West High School in 2009. He entered the University of Iowa that fall, majoring in civil and environmental engineering.
While still a high school senior, following the Iowa Supreme Court decision in Varnum v. Brien that invalidated the state's ban on same-sex marriage, he wrote an op-ed piece in the Des Moines Register in which he advocated a complete separation of marriage from civil unions, calling for legislation "to completely remove government from the marriage process altogether, leaving a religious ceremony to religious institutions, and mak[ing] civil unions, accessible by any two people, including those of the same sex, the norm for legal benefits."
His mothers, who had been together since 1995 and had a commitment ceremony in 1996, married in 2009 following the legalization of same-sex marriage in Iowa.
...
Wikipedia