My parents got married this summer. Not because they’d only just decided to make such a commitment–they’ve been together over 35 years now–but because, for the first time in California, the law allowed them to. They didn’t want to wait to plan a ceremony–they’d been waiting for decades already–so I wasn’t able to be there for their quick ceremony in front of a justice of the peace in San Diego.
But I was able to watch the recording that they took. I smiled when both my parents, who had insisted this was “just to show support for the community” (”After almost 40 years, what real difference can a marriage certificate make to us?”) had to blink back their tears.
I watched the recording with my wife and my 2-year-old son. I wanted him to see it because it was an important event for his family, but I didn’t really expect him to get anything out of it. I mean, what does a 2-year-old know about marriage? It was just a one-take, stationary-camera shot of his grandmothers standing in a fairly boring room, saying things he couldn’t possibly understand. But he must have gotten something out of it, because after it was over, he burst into a big grin and said, “Gammommies got married!”
I’m not looking forward to the conversation I’ll have to have with him (maybe not immediately, but someday soon) if CA Prop. 8 passes tomorrow, about how his grandmommies are no longer married and about why.
While I certainly have my political opinions, I’m not what you’d call a political activist. I’m certainly not part of a “gay agenda,” whatever that even means. I’m just a dad who wants his kid to have a family he can know is normal, a family he knows is not officially dismissed by the government he lives under.
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The above is an essay I wrote on my professional blog the day before the election. I’ve never posted personal stuff in my professional blog, but the internal pressure I felt from this story was simply too great for me not to put it out there. I think that that was the event that really tipped me over the edge in terms of starting a new blog with no pre-determined topic. I took it down the day after the election, because it really was wildly off-topic for that blog, but I’m putting it back up here, even though, of course, time has moved on.
So, what’s happened since then (other, of course, than the history-making news that Barak Obama will be the 43rd President of the U.S.)? Proposition 8 passed, and the California Constitution now defines marriage as between a man and a woman. The state Attorney General has assured us that existing marriages won’t be annulled, so I’m probably spared that conversation with Nilakash, at least for a bit. A lesbian couple in L.A. (friends of my parents, actually) and the City of San Francisco are asking the California Supreme Court to overturn the amendment on procedural grounds (an interesting argument, but a topic for another post). Fingerpointing among my fellow opponents of Proposition 8 has broken out–was it poor anti-8 campaign leadership that allowed this to happen? the African-American community? white gays and lesbians who were too out-of-touch with the African-American community? the Mormon church?
I do want to apologize to the people who commented on the post when it was on the other site; I couldn’t figure out how to gracefully migrate those comments over. Some were supportive, some were not, but they all involved effort and I’m sorry that they’re lost here.
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