Vol 5. Iss. 1: Defiant Connectedness: Same-Sex Marriage in This Election

by Michelle Cherry-Slack

Despite it being one of the coldest days of the season last year, I remember there being a warmth among those gathered. It was March 18, 2004, and my lovely bride, Montel, and I were all dressed up in our Sunday best, ready to sacramentally affirm, for the second time, our love before God. Two other couples waited patiently (and a little bit nervously, I suspect) with us for that moment to arrive. Then, without a lot of fanfare, more than 60 clergy members from various denominations, many of whom were Union alums, stood fully vested, shoulder to shoulder, on the steps of City Hall in New York City to demand that the State of New York set a new standard for marriage equality in this country.

March 18th was certainly not the first time community leaders had spoken out for equal justice for our various Queer communities: civil rights activists have publicly advocated for the legal recognition of same-sex marriage since as early as the 1970s. However, during the past four years – the period from the last presidential election to this one – this struggle for equality has both gained ground and become a wedge issue defining camps on the left and right. Beginning in Vermont and Hawaii in 2000, same-sex unions have been legally recognized, challenged, or expressly prohibited in some way in nearly every state. The US Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas accelerated this movement, which reached a feverpitch after the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ordered the state to cease denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Similar cases are now pending before several state supreme courts. On the other hand, 18 states have or will decide this election season whether to prohibit same-sex unions in their constitutions.

In the midst of this activity, for several weeks in early 2004, local government officials and clergy persons in San Francisco, California, Portland, Oregon, and several towns in New York and New Jersey began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples and solemnizing our marriages. They all took these steps with the threat of arrest looming; several of them, in fact, were. Although all of these marriages are now mired in a judicial process that will take years to sort out, the officials who performed them, whether or not they acted for religious reasons, helped force an issue of God’s love out of the closet – and for this, they are to be commended.

And in the midst of so much courage and witness, the current president has advocated writing discrimination into the U.S. Constitution by denying the recognition of marriage to anyone other than “one man and one woman.” It was a sad day because he positioned himself squarely opposite the Supreme Court’s majority opinion that “[a]s the Constitution endures, persons in every generation [should] invoke its principles in...search of greater freedom” (Lawrence v. Texas, 539 US___). It was a sad day because he scape-goated an entire group of people to distract a nation from his own failings as president, used that group to appeal to his core constituency, and did so with a false promise of an amendment that has little chance of passing in the next four years, regardless of who is elected. It was, finally, a sad day because the ultimate source of authority he claimed (as a Christian no less!) in denying same-sex love, was the same God whom the Bible names Love, and names everyone who loves as God’s own.

As Montel and I stood in line at the City Clerk’s office, knowing we’d be denied a marriage license application, and as we stood on the steps of City Hall before all the clergy members and all the press, we kept going back to the same questions. Why should we have to do this? Shouldn’t our love be given the same legal recognition as that of any other couple? Why is love not given the same respect in the law as issues of money or power? Why is it that a heterosexual couple can meet on the subway at 7 a.m. and receive a marriage license by 9 a.m., while the four years of love and growth Montel and I have shared does not hold enough weight to receive the 1,040 or so rights that so many heterosexual couples take for granted?

The answer to these questions is strikingly simple: there are those in power who absolutely do not believe in sharing the wealth of life and love that this nation has to offer. But what they fail to recognize is that every single one of us is a child of God and will be seated at the banquet table of life. That’s the promise Jesus makes. And this is the reason why marriage equality, or equal treatment of every sort, is important. It’s the reason why providing adequate HIV/AIDS medications to people of other countries is important. It’s why taking seriously the needs of the impoverished in this country is important. We are all connected . . . all of us, no matter what we each believe or how we each choose to worship. This basic idea should impact how we engage each other and the choices we make everyday, no less than the policies and decisions made in our name.

After all the couples said “I do” that day, it occurred to me that we weren’t just affirming the lives we are building together. We were also affirming God’s promise of human community. We, as well as the clergy, public officials and media present, were affirming our connectedness as a varied people. We were affirming the strength and breadth of our shared existence in this world, a connectedness that has been too willfully ignored, in large and small ways, over the past four years. Whatever the outcome of November 2, the struggle for same-sex unions will continue to be wrapped up in a broader struggle to create new bonds within our society and with our world. I, and all of us, can and must courageously pray and prayerfully act for a more wholehearted living out of our connectedness, in matters of politics, religion, and most certainly, in matters of love.