Sarah Longwell is the Communications Director at a Washington D.C. public relations firm and appears frequently in the media to discuss a variety of public policy issues. She is a 2002 graduate of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where she majored in political science.

Yesterday our group, the Civil Marriage Alliance (CMA), launched a new website, MarriageForward.com. Our first day up, we had 500 people sign up without doing anything other than forwarding along the URL to friends and family. Today the goal is to break a 1,000.

The Marriage Forward Team is a group of public relations professionals in Washington D.C. The CMA was born, not surprisingly, out of our election night frustration as we watched Arizona, Florida, and Arkansas hit us with more marriage/adoption bans, and the rights we had so recently been granted in California slowly slip through our fingers.

The obvious question is: Why are you any different from the many other gay rights groups out there? The answer is two-fold:

1) We are focusing on reaching out beyond the gay community for support and solidarity. Gay people are already convinced that civil marriage equality should be theirs. And more and more straight people are becoming, not just accepting of marriage equality, but vocal about it’s value. We must cultivate these allies aggressively–especially straight minorities. We have to provide them with compelling messaging and give them a place to send other straight people who want to show their support. So we created MarriageForward.com.

2) The fight for civil marriage equality needs a serious public relations shot in the arm. Despite the veritable alphabet soup of gay rights organizations (some of them effective, some of them decisively less so) there is still not enough being done to promote marriage equality in US.

For too long the strategy has been to fight for marriage rights through the court system. And while we have had occasional success, namely Massachusetts and Connecticut, we have seen even more public backlash.

While we must not abandon our efforts to achieve civil marriage equality through the courts, it should not be our only or even our primary course of action. As we have been made so painfully aware in California, decisions made by courts can be reversed–which is why we need a new strategy that focuses on winning the hearts and minds of the voting public.

We are going to do this by launching a national public education campaign explaining why civil marriage equality is not only good for gay people, but good for children, and good for our country as a whole. And we’re going to do it in the “off season” so to speak.

We cannot continue to only talk about gay marriage during legislative or court battles. If we continue to talk publicly only when a fight is raging, we will constantly be responding to the other side’s agenda rather than actively initiating our own. It is impossible to educate people about the innocuousness of gay marriage if we are forced to respond to asinine charges of “recruitment” or to the specious claim that churches could be forced to marry gay couples. If the conversation is going to be elevated, it’s on us to elevate it.

So go sign up and show your support for civil marriage equality. Read our five-point plan. Then forward the link to everyone you know on the planet. We currently have 658 people signed up. Wait…659.