Molly Goldberg is a Field Organizer for the San Francisco chapter of Pride at Work.

The San Francisco chapter of Pride at Work, an organization that seeks to mobilize mutual support between the Organized Labor Movement and the LGBT community, has taken on California's Proposition 85 this year. Proposition 85 is an anti-choice parental notification initiative on the ballot. It is a dangerous initiative that puts California's most vulnerable teens at risk, and seeks to undermine reproductive choice for all women. San Francisco's young LGBT activists are turning out across the city to do bar crawls and voter education against Proposition 85. Still more people are coming out to walk door to door in LGBT neighborhoods, and to call voters in these neighborhoods to talk to them about choice. But why is an LGBT organization organizing the queer community against Proposition 85? Why is this reproductive health issue also an LGBT issue?

Proposition 85 is part of the larger right-wing strategy to restrict people's control over their bodies. Its backers, whose right-wing political agenda targets both reproductive freedom and LGBT rights, include the Traditional Values Coalition, Evangelicals for Social Action, and Right to Life of Central California. Right-wing groups such as these seek to control sexuality, gender conformity, reproductive choice, and the legal definitions of family. They are working together to roll back the hard-won gains of both the queer and reproductive rights movements, attacking our individual rights at the local and national levels through the courts and through the legislature.

The reproductive rights community has allies in the LGBT community; we must stand together to protect choice because the movement for queer rights and the movement for a woman's right to choose are deeply connected. The Gay Liberation movement owes a lot to the gains in reproductive freedoms accomplished by the Feminist Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. It was the legal framework created by influential reproductive rights cases like Roe v. Wade that enabled the 2003 Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas and the eventual decriminalization of same-sex relations between consenting adults.

The pro-choice and queer communities of San Francisco are standing together against Proposition 85 because we understand that our struggles cannot be untangled from one another-we are up against the same opponents. The rights to control over our own bodies and to engage in sexual activity without reproduction as a necessary outcome are equally fundamental to the liberation of heterosexual and queer people alike. This November 7^th, we will go to the polls together to say NO to Proposition 85.