Kate Kelly (feminist)

In May 2013, Kelly founded Ordain Women,[8] an organization advocating for the ordination of women to the priesthood in the LDS Church.[9] Local church leaders requested Kelly to cease her campaign.[10][11] Kelly subsequently demonstrated on Temple Square during the church's April 2014 General Conference,[10] after which she was excommunicated in June 2014 in absentia after declining to attend a disciplinary council.[12][13] 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.[14]

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.[15][16] Kelly appealed her excommunication, first to her stake president,[17][18] then to the church's First Presidency, all of whom rejected the appeal.[19][20]

Kelly often states that “equality is not a feeling,”[21] 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.[22]

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.[23] 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.”[24]

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.[25]

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.[26] The workshops culminated in a report which was presented to the Human Rights Council in early 2020.[27]

In August 2012, the same year she graduated law school, Kelly attended her first ever rally for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) on the front law of the U.S. Capitol.[28] Kelly then helped revive the group Mormons for ERA founded by excommunicated Mormon feminist Sonia Johnson.[29][30]

In 2017, after the women’s marches worldwide turned attention to women’s rights, Kelly helped draft an ERA ratification resolution in Utah (one of 15 unratified states at the time) and helped recruit state senator Jim Dabakis to sponsor the resolution.[31] The ERA has not been ratified in Utah and is opposed by the LDS Church,[32] but Kelly continues to advocate for ratification there.[33] 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."[34] She is featured in the MSNBC documentary "This Happened: On Account of Sex" on the ERA[35] 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 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."[36] 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.[37][38][39]

Kelly has written about how the ERA will cover transgender people and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.[40] 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.[41] 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."[42]