Here Comes The Bride

I went to a wedding a couple of weekends ago. A good friend from high school was finally settling down with a nice girl we all love. Despite the chancy time of year (I mean, really. Who gets married in August in Alaska? You know you’re bound to have rain), the weather was beautiful and the view from Alpenglow was pretty spectacular.

There weren’t enough chairs for everyone to sit (probably something to do with fire code), so a lot of us gathered standing at the back of the room to watch the ceremony, sipping beer and wine from Solo plastic cups in true Alaskan style. Then the band started to play and the bride appeared at the top of a staircase, as radiant as you could ask for, her arms linked with her parents’, smiling so hard her face must have hurt. The crowd cheered.

Then the crowd cheered louder: Behind her, escorted by another set of parents, came the second bride.

My dear friends got married that sunny Saturday evening at Alpenglow, in a room full of people who love them both, with a backdrop of late-summer greenery and die-hard berry pickers scaling the mountainside. The brides wore white and brown, and only one of them had to choke back tears during the vows, although most of the rest of us were weeping messes by then. By her late twenties, the average American female has been to enough weddings that they ought to all start to run together. But this one was different. Sure, there were bridesmaids in matching dresses and color-coordinated flowers and teary mothers-of-the-brides (three of them), but there was also this palpable sense of excitement in the room — like we were all colluding in some act of civil disobedience.

The officiant finally put into words what many of us were thinking: That these brides’ wedding, while validated by their love for one another, would not be validated by the State of Alaska. That what we were celebrating as a wedding had no actual legal impact on their respective marital statuses, at least as far as the state would be concerned.

A lot of people who don’t like homosexuality claim that gay marriage will destroy the country’s moral fiber by undermining the foundations of marriage. Personally, I look at a lot of heterosexual marriages and think, “What’s left to undermine?” Divorce, infidelity, polygamy, loveless marriages based on convenience or greed or ambition — straight people wrote the book on undermining the foundations of marriage.

I’m not gay. I know that just as surely as I know my own name. I couldn’t make myself gay if I tried. No more could the brides — or any of my gay or lesbian friends and relatives, for that matter — wish themselves straight. We can’t help who we fall in love with. That’s something we don’t get to choose.

I’m not married yet. But I will be someday. (Side Note: Somewhere out there, MLB’s blood pressure just shot through the roof.) Fortunately for me, because I am a woman and I’ll almost certainly be marrying a man, there aren’t any laws that will prohibit me from marrying the person I love. But if there were, I’d want them knocked down no matter what it took.

In 1958, two residents of Virginia (a black woman named Mildred Jeter and a white man named Richard Loving) were married in Washington, D.C. Upon their return to Virginia, the Lovings were charged with violating Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage. They pled guilty and were banished from the state for 25 years. The trial judge stated:

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

That’s right. God said interracial marriage wasn’t part of the plan for humanity.

The Lovings moved to D.C. and appealed. Eventually, the Supreme Court ruled in their favor. In his opinion in Loving v. Virginia, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote:

“There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. ... The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men. Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”

Once upon a time — well, actually, not that long ago — in parts of this country, it was just as impossible to marry a person of a different race as it was to marry a person of the same sex. A lot has changed in the past fifty years. A lot is changing today, and will continue to change.

I have to be perfectly honest: I’m not one hundred percent comfortable with the idea of homosexuality. I hope I can say that without hurting anyone’s feelings. I don’t understand how a man can fall in love with another man, or how a woman can want to be with another woman. But I don’t have to understand homosexuality to love my gay and lesbian friends and relatives, and to know that they’re not choosing to be gay anymore than I’m choosing to be straight. (Side Note: I have a handful of friends who, for some reason, are totally grossed out by the idea of pregnancy and childbirth. But someday when I have babies, they’re going to be there to support me and show me love. That’s what friends do.)

Standing in the back of that room a couple of weekends ago, watching my two dear friends up in front of everyone they care about, looking into one another’s eyes and saying, “I want you to be my family,” I knew it didn’t matter what anyone else in the world might think about their marriage. Those two women love one another and pledged themselves to one another for life. That’s a marriage, no matter what any government has to say about it.

Downstairs at the reception, a few of us sat around a table with tiny plates full of hors d’oeuvres, sipping wine and talking about the ceremony, and someone said something I’ve been thinking about ever since:

“The world needs more love.”

And even though it’s not the kind of thing any of us could probably ordinarily have said without rolling our eyes or using an affected voice to show how ironic we were being, at that moment it was the perfect thing to say. Gay marriage isn’t polygamy, or child sexual abuse, or bestiality, or any of those horrific things the homophobes out there would have us believe it is. How does the marriage of two women — who love one another very much — have any impact on anyone else’s marriage? The only thing I can come up with is the possibility that, seeing how in love those two were that day, it could have made some of the couples in attendance remember why they got married in the first place.

God didn’t gift humans with the power to choose who we fall in love with. Like it or not, love happens the way it happens. And I can’t believe God would rather see a million loveless heterosexual marriages than one loving homosexual union. Love — real love — doesn’t destroy anything that’s good.


*****

(Side Note: A pray-the-gay-away road show is coming to town this weekend, courtesy Focus on the Family. In response, a number of Alaska bloggers are posting about LGBT issues today. Visit Celtic Diva’s Blue Oasis for a complete list.)