This week marks PGN’s first Wedding Issue since marriage equality has come to our entire country.
The PGN staff always looks forward to putting together this bi-annual issue; hearing the love stories, seeing wedding photos and getting to share in the couples’ excitement is a treat for us. This edition, in particular, carried extra meaning.
Nearly all of the couples we interviewed mentioned this summer’s landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage across the country. Some said they used it as the impetus for a proposal, others remarked that they didn’t think they would ever see national marriage equality in their lifetimes. Regardless of their ages, genders or the length of their relationships, all of the couples featured in our Wedding Issue were in some way impacted by the ruling.
And these are couples who already lived in a state with marriage equality, which made us consider just how meaningful the decision must have been for couples who lived in the more-than dozen states that had yet to legalize marriage equality prior to the ruling.
Before last year, we Pennsylvanians had gotten used to the assumption that marriage equality was a long ways off in our state; it was a sobering yet, we thought, realistic assumption. Couples in places like Tennessee and Kentucky surely shared that deservedly pessimistic view.
We had our own landmark day May 20, 2014, when a judge overturned Pennsylvania’s ban on marriage equality, upending years of cynicism and doubt in an instant. As we can all attest, the moment was surreal, especially because for so long it had been unexpected.
That feeling has now been magnified on a national scale. Even as marriage ban after marriage ban began to fall, the notion of living in a country where a same-sex couple can legally marry in literally every corner of every state still didn’t seem within reach.
And, as many of the couples we spoke with attested to, the full meaning of marriage equality didn’t really start to sink in until it became an accessible reality. But that gap has been bridged and same-sex couples afforded access to a right that had so long been denied them.
The impacts of national marriage equality will likely still be unfurling for years to come — on societal, governmental and even familial levels — but it has clearly already had an immeasurable effect on same-sex couples themselves. Some of the words we heard were joy, validation, confidence and optimism — all of which can only make our community and country stronger.