July 11, 2024

Ten years ago this evening, Tommy and I stood before a King County judge in her criminal court room (right after the Grand Theft Auto case) and publicly said our ‘I do’s and exchanged rings, emerging legally married. We hadn’t really planned upon getting married, but after the Windsor decision which led to federal recognition of same sex marriages where they were legal and my having become a federal employee at least in part by picking up VA work to stabilize my UAB salary, it made a certain amount of sense to do so. It wasn’t possible in Alabama (Obergefell was still a year away) so on a trip to Seattle to visit family, we made arrangements to make it legal and binding under Washington State law and we got married for the sake of the income taxes.

Tommy and I both knew that we didn’t want any sort of wedding. We’d been together for over a decade at that point and neither of us was sure how to put together a ceremony that would fit who we were so we didn’t tell anyone other than my family, two of whom came to the ceremony as witnesses and the rest of whom gathered in my sister’s back yard later that evening for a celebratory dinner. We let the rest of the world know when we changed our Facebook marital statuses later that night, much to the shock and delight of our friend group. Thinking back on that day, from a decade’s perspective and with the loss of Tommy about four years later, I just remember a certain feeling of unreality. I had never expected marriage to be a possibility. I always assumed my life would consist of the kind of relationship I had with Steve. We considered ourselves married but there was no way to formalize the relationship in the eyes of the world but that made no real difference to us emotionally. It did put up certain barriers legally, especially during the years of his illness, but we weren’t all that concerned.

Once Tommy and I legally married, I think he relaxed a bit. He was always a little afraid that he wasn’t handsome enough, smart enough, wealthy enough, or anything else enough for me. He never quite figured out that when I make a commitment like I made to him, marriage or no, I mean it and he was enough for me in every way and I wasn’t ever going to go anywhere. I think he only began to truly understand that during those last weeks in the hospital. I fully expected him to come home but with serious health limitations and I was prepared to do everything necessary financially, socially, and career-wise to make sure he would have all the life his body would allow him. I never had to make any of those choices or sacrifices but I wouldn’t have thought twice about them had events taken a different turn.

All of this was brought up this past week when a historian working on issues related to gay marriage in the Deep South and how the Unitarian Universalist church was involved contacted me regarding an interview. How he got to me, I’m not quite sure but apparently a number of people told him that if he wanted to know about the interface between the UU Church of Birmingham and gay marriage, I was his go to guy. We had a very nice interview which is becoming part of some podcast (I’ll link to it when it’s done) and gave him some other contacts to help him round out his understanding, especially of the mass weddings on the Jefferson County courthouse steps when things were first legalized in which the local UU clergy played a significant role. I also broke out the sermon I wrote for the UUs back in 2014 on gay marriage. It’s a bit outdated in this post Obergefell world but still identifies what I consider the crux of the issue. We use a single word ‘marriage’ to cover two very different concepts. One is a a civil contract involving various rights and responsibilities granted by the state and the second is a sacred covenant within a religious tradition where there is a joining with the blessings of a deity. In most of the arguments about gay marriage, one side is fighting to gain the first while the other side is fighting to protect the second so there is much talking at and past each other rather than to and with each other.

The current Supreme Court, if brought the right case, may pull a Dobbs and throw gay marriage back to the states in which case it will quickly become illegal in the Red states and we will be back to where we were with marriages dissolving and reforming several times on transcontinental flights, depending on the flight path. It won’t make much personal difference to me but I worry about the young generation, growing up in a time where from their youth they have been able to see marriage as a perfectly ordinary choice should it be right for them. And will current marriages be instantaneously dissolved in the eyes of the state? That would be a whole can of worms legally.

For this and many other reasons, I know how I am voting in November. Neither candidate is perfect but they have both shown who they are over and over again in recent years and to me it’s a clear choice. Now if the Democrats would quit forming a circular firing squad…again. A conversation should have been had about Biden’s age and fitness but now is not the time to have it. The time to have had it was before the primaries. He has the delegates. They are pledged to him. They cannot legally change their votes. He is the candidate. All this talk of a last minute switch just empowers the other side. Knock it off. Did we learn nothing from Al Franken? Politics is a dirty game and we should never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.