Kate Kelly (feminist)


Kathleen Marie Kelly, known as Kate Kelly, is an American feminist, activist, human rights lawyer, and Mormon feminist who founded Ordain Women, an organization advocating for the ordination of women to the priesthood in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Kelly was excommunicated from the LDS Church in 2014. She is also a nationally-known advocate for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Early life and education

Kelly was born in Arizona to Jim and Donna Kelly and is one of five siblings. She grew up in Hood River, Oregon. Her mother is an attorney and her father a retired newspaper publisher and university administrator. Both parents were converts to the LDS Church, and her father at one time served as bishop of a local congregation.
Kelly graduated from Brigham Young University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science in 2006. While at BYU, she organized a campus free speech protest of nearly 100 students concerning the firing of a university employee for criticizing student elections. While at BYU, and for a time after she graduated, Kelly wrote for "The Mormon Worker," a Mormon left-leaning publication modeled after the Catholic Worker founded by Dorothy Day. In 2010 Kelly founded "Mormon May Day" as a day for liberal or radical Mormons to hold a collective fast and make their voices heard within Mormonism on progressive themes.
Kelly went on to earn a J.D. degree from American University Washington College of Law, a law school founded by two suffragists in 1898, and graduated cum laude in 2012. During Kelly's legal career she has worked for several human rights organizations including the Center for Constitutional Rights; the Inter-American Court of Human Rights; the United Nations Committee Against Torture in Geneva, Switzerland; Women's Refugee Commission; RFK Center for Justice & Human Rights; Legal Action Worldwide in Nairobi, Kenya; the United Nations High Commission on Refugees; Planned Parenthood; Columbia Law School's Human Rights Institute; Equality Now, and is the host of the podcast Ordinary Equalityfrom Wonder Media Network.

Activism

Ordain Women

In May 2013, Kelly founded Ordain Women, an organization advocating for the ordination of women to the priesthood in the LDS Church. Local church leaders requested Kelly to cease her campaign. Kelly subsequently demonstrated on Temple Square during the church's April 2014 General Conference, after which she was excommunicated in June 2014 in absentia after declining to attend a disciplinary council. She instead submitted a written defense through her representative Nadine Hansen, a fellow Mormon feminist attorney, and hundreds of letters on her behalf from supporters.
In the weeks before and after her excommunication, Kelly urged followers to stay in the church and "raise hell" if they could do so while maintaining their mental and emotional health. Kelly appealed her excommunication, first to her stake president, then to the church's First Presidency, all of whom rejected the appeal.
Kelly often states that “equality is not a feeling,” meaning gender equality is something that can be measured and does not depend on the individual feelings of worthiness or individual women feeling valued by their community.

Women's Rights

In January 2017, Kelly helped plan the Utah contingent of the Women's March on Washington and helped organize several hundred women to attend the march in Washington D.C. The following Monday she organized and emceed one of the largest marches in Utah's history on the State Capitol in Salt Lake City. At that rally, Kelly said, “I'm sick and tired of men making laws about our bodies and our choices and our lives without consulting us.”
While at Columbia University’s Human Rights Institute, Kelly provided training and technical assistance to local governments engaged in implementing issues from the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.
In May 2019, Kelly helped facilitate workshops in Uruguay and Argentina for the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, Dr. Ahmed Shaheed. Kelly then participated in workshops put on by the Rapporteurship in Geneva in September 2019 and New York in October, situations where the human rights of women and Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity minorities clash with the right to freedom of religion or belief. The workshops culminated in a report which was presented to the Human Rights Council in early 2020.
Kelly has long spoken out about sexual harassment and assault against women. In January 2020, with a group of other women and activists, she performed the viral anti-rape protest anthem "Un Violador en Tu Camino" outside the Harvey Weinstein trial in New York City. Kelly said of the action, “pointing the finger of blame for sexual assault at the appropriate target... was a cathartic experience, to feel our collective feminist power as a force for good."

Equal Rights Amendment

In August 2012, the same year she graduated law school, Kelly attended her first rally for the Equal Rights Amendment on the front law of the U.S. Capitol. Kelly then helped revive the group Mormons for ERA, originally founded by excommunicated Mormon feminist Sonia Johnson.
In 2017, after the women’s marches worldwide turned attention to women’s rights, Kelly helped draft an ERA ratification resolution in Utah and helped recruit state senator Jim Dabakis to sponsor the resolution. The ERA has not been ratified in Utah and is opposed by the LDS Church, but Kelly continues to advocate for ratification there. Kelly said in Truthout that more interest in the ERA exists today because, "I think that women are realizing that nothing that we have is permanent. Nothing is too sacred to be rolled back, and things that we have taken for granted in the past are now up for grabs." She is featured in the MSNBC documentary "This Happened: On Account of Sex" on the ERA and attended the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties first official hearing on the ERA in almost 40 years on April 30, 2019.
In December 2019, Kelly led a group of ERA activists in a demonstration on Temple Square in Salt Lake City. The group sang new-twists on Christmas carols with lyrics about equality outside the Salt Lake Temple and then proceeded to project an "ERA YES" symbol, which was over three stories tall, on the LDS Church's Conference Center.
In January 2020, Kelly launched a podcast called Ordinary Equality on the past, present and future of the ERA, taking the title of the podcast from a quote by Alice Paul, the author of the ERA in 1923, who said of the amendment: "Most reforms, most problems are complicated. But to me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality." Ordinary Equality has been recommended by the Today Show and Marie Claire as well as featured on shows such as WNYC's All Of It with Alison Stewart.
Kelly has written about how the ERA will cover transgender people and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. She also co-wrote a piece with Virginia delegate Danica Roem, the first out-and-seated transgender state legislator in U.S. history, called "The Equal Rights Amendment Can’t Be Defeated by Anti-Trans Scare Tactics" about the role transgender women are playing to get the amendment ratified. Because of her zeal for the ERA, Kelly was featured in a 2020 Glamour Magazine piece where she said her excommunication "was a gift because it set me free to work on other causes and things I am passionate about and places that actually need me and value my work" and that "that freedom of religion includes freedom from religion."
On June 29, 2020, Kelly was co-counsel on an amicus brief filed on behalf of the ERA youth activism organization GenERAtion Ratify in the case Commonwealth of Virginia v. David S. Ferriero. The amicus brief argues in support of "the plaintiff states’ effort to resolve the century-long movement to guarantee gender equality in the Constitution, we urge the court to not view the Equal Rights Amendment as only our grandmother’s fight. Rather, we urge the court also to recognize its importance to young and diverse advocates of this generation that the Amendment be added to the Constitution. Young advocates have led the movement to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment since its inception. Supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment recognize the expressive function it serves and the important message it will send to young people: that gender equality is among our nation’s highest values... Both as an expression of our country’s values and as a means for change, the Amendment has the potential to further young Americans’ interests in a broader guarantee of gender equality in all aspects of American life.”

Personal life

Kelly served an 18-month LDS mission in Barcelona, Spain, and as a result is a fluent Spanish speaker. She has also lived and worked in San Jose, Costa Rica and San Cristobal de Las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico.
Kelly married J. Neil Ransom in the Salt Lake Temple in 2006. The couple were "childless by choice". On March 14, 2016, Kelly confirmed she and her husband had divorced. On April 15, 2019, Kelly came out as queer on Twitter. She is dating Catholic writer and theologian, Jamie Manson, who she initially met at a women's ordination conference in 2015. In January 2020 she was quoted for the first time in the media and identified as queer: "'As a queer woman, I cannot tell you how elated I am to finally see myself reflected in our nation’s most foundational document,' added Kelly."
In October 2015, she participated in the ordination of a female Roman Catholic priest coordinated by the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests, an organization claiming affiliation with the Catholic Church. Ordination of women to the Catholic priesthood goes against canon law and any known participants are automatically excommunicated.
Kelly no longer claims religious affiliation with any particular denomination, and in 2018 she founded her own feminist/womanist interreligious and inclusive celebration of women and nonbinary people of all faith traditions called Sacred Space, with Yale Divinity professor and Baptist preacher Eboni Marshall-Turman and trans Jewish activist Abby Stein.