My girlfriend and I are talking about getting married. We’ve wandered down Fifth Avenue in New York City looking at engagement rings and have spent hours trolling the Web studying wedding dresses.
Our friends are excited. They’ve offered us wedding books. Florist tips. The names of photographers and caterers.
We’ve also started imagining where, exactly, we’d get married. We split our time between New York and Chicago, but we’d like to tie the knot in Manhattan, where we fell in love.
We’re not even engaged yet, so probably all the dreaming about wedding-day specifics is a little premature. In fact, it’s a lot premature, because last weekend, New York state Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith said that equal marriage would not come to New York this year.
Despite a Democratic majority in the Senate, he doesn’t have the votes.
Smith told those at an HRC gala: “We are committed to pursuing [equal marriage’s] passage. And the question is not if; the question is when. So our work still needs to happen for it to happen this year. But I’m going to need your help, and I’m going to need your prayers … we all want marriage and family, and a home to raise our families.”
The delay of marriage in New York is a quandary for my girlfriend and me, because New York actually recognizes gay marriages performed out of state. So if we were to get married in Massachusetts or Connecticut — or Canada, South Africa, Belgium, Spain or another country that recognizes marriage between gay couples — then New York would happily list us on their registers as married.
This means that we could take a train to New Haven, get married in the clerk’s office, and then celebrate with a ceremony and reception the next day or next month.
But that’s not really what we want.
What we want is to have a wedding surrounded by our family and friends in the city we will make our home, and — when the preacher pronounces us “spouses for life” — have it be legal.
We’re not the only couple who feels this way, of course, which is why this is the 12th annual Freedom to Marry Week. All over the country, couples will be dropping in to their local city halls to try to get marriage licenses. They’ll be refused in most states, of course, but the point will have been made.
They’ll also be lobbying their legislators, attending rallies and — most importantly — talking to their friends, colleagues and family about marriage.
I myself will target brides.
We all know straight couples who are getting married this year. One of them is my baby sister and her fiancé. I don’t want to upstage their wedding planning or their big day, but I do want them to understand how painful it is for me that they can get married in New York City but my girlfriend and I cannot. It’s tough to have those conversations, but they’re necessary. We now know that merely knowing a gay person isn’t enough to change someone’s vote. But talking politics with them might change their thinking. And it is changed thinking that changes laws.
I also want wedding vendors to understand that gay-marriage laws affect them, because I believe that pressure from the market is one of the best ways to get unfair laws overturned.
So when I attend wedding expos with my sister, I want to start saying, “Hey, do you guys do gay weddings too? You do? Oh, isn’t it a shame that we can get married in Connecticut and not New York? Think of all the gay business you’d have … ”
The New York state legislature needs to know that the unions are behind us, businesses are behind us — and they should be behind us too.
In the meantime, my girlfriend and I are hoping that New York will see its way to equal marriage in 2010. We are waiting on the freedom to marry.
Jennifer Vanasco is an award-winning syndicated columnist. E-mail her at [email protected].