It was just after 10am Friday morning June 26 — and a lot of people were still celebrating the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision the previous day that let them keep the health care they’d gotten under the Affordable Care Act — when word came that another Supreme Court decision made something happen many despaired of seeing in their lifetime: universal marriage equality in all 50 states.
High school teacher Rob Rivera (and president of the Cleveland Stonewall Democrats) and his fiancé Dan Seifried had been planning a wedding celebration for the weekend, with family arriving from all over the country. When the news broke, they dressed hastily and raced down to the Cuyahoga County courthouse. The license they got at 10:48am made them the first same-sex couple to be officially granted a license to marry in Ohio.
On Sunday morning at Trinity Cathedral, priests Tracey Lind and Kay Rackley invited the same-sex couples in the house to step forward, introduce themselves and say how long they had been together. Nearly two dozen couples (and individuals whose partners couldn’t make it that day) stood up and declared relationships that had lasted as long as 35 years.
The joy was dampened (literally) just a smidgen when Saturday’s Pride Parade and Festival had to be cancelled because of predicted heavy, daylong rains. Yet the dour-faced protesters who always stand in the shadow of the Free Stamp at Lakeside and E. 9th, clutching their biblical quote signs and suggesting that the revelers are going to hell, made it. They huddled under umbrellas oblivious to the cancellation (given that the average age was on the high side of 70, there probably wasn’t a smart phone in the bunch to check for updates), waiting for a parade that never came.
They may have been there an hour or two, but no matter how long they waited, this parade has passed them by for good. Hearts and minds have changed at rapidly increasing speed, although a sea change has been happening under the surface for years. But it was really only five or six years ago when even progressive politicians carefully came out for civil unions and maybe — maybe! — marriage sometime in the future when the time was right.
When a grassroots group called Freedom Ohio began collecting signatures three and a half years ago to put marriage equality on the Ohio ballot, repealing the 2004 “Defense of Marriage” initiative that banned it, they were repeatedly discouraged for acting too hastily. It was only a year and a half ago when a representative of Why Marriage Matters, a group formed by LGBT advocacy organization Equality Ohio, cautioned a Cleveland Stonewall Democrats meeting not to push too hard or too fast because people weren’t ready yet and there would be backlash.
There HAS been backlash but it’s surprising just how unhinged it sounds. State officials in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana are dragging their feet about complying. (That’s probably not going over well in the French Quarter, where I spotted a “Jindal is Satan” poster in May).
And the most extreme Republican presidential candidates — that would be Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz — are babbling incoherently. Santorum said we must stop gay marriage for “the survival of our country.” Huckabee called for civil disobedience and compared people who are anti-LGBT rights to Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement.
Cruz not only advocated throwing out the judges that offend his personal religious sensibilities or making Supreme Court judges (who are appointed for life) run for reelection. He also said that between people being able to get healthcare and any two adults being able to marry the person of their choice, “Today is some of the darkest 24 hours in our nation’s history.” Go ahead — start compiling your own list of darker 24 hours. Everyone else is doing it! All this because some other people got to form permanent relationships with people they love? It’s … inexplicable.
Meanwhile, back in the sane world, the White House was lit up like a rainbow Friday evening. By the 2012 election, President Obama had embraced full marriage equality, but like many people, he got there slowly, first advocating for civil unions and saying in 2010 that he was “evolving” on the issue. So has a majority of the U.S.
Huckabee and Santorum and Cruz can rail to their base about their religious rights somehow being infringed upon because somebody else gets to act upon THEIR own beliefs. But with nearly 80% of Americans under the age of 30 (along with about 60% of everyone) supporting marriage equality — and the age of the protesters at Pride — their base on this issue is rapidly shrinking. Welcome to the new world, guys, where you can have your version of marriage and every one else can have theirs as well.