From The Interim Pastor:

What Difference Does It Make?
 

To tell you the truth, I didn’t think it would make much difference. We already lived together, shared financial responsibilities, and spent holidays with each other’s families, what difference would it make if we were married or not?

Honestly, having weathered so many battles just to beg the majority of voters to decide that homosexual people were at least entitled to basic civil protections over a twenty year period in Oregon, marriage seemed like a political mission to Mars.

Then, incredibly, marriage was happening. First in San Francisco and then…in Portland, my hometown? My sweetie and I looked at each other in shock. “Whaddya think?” I couldn’t even answer the question because marriage, real live marriage to my partner, not some kind of ersatz covenanting ceremony or limited domestic partnership registration, had never occurred to me.

I remember driving on my way to choir rehearsal on a rainy Thursday night and I asked myself the question, “Do I want to ask Ellen to marry me?” As I was driving, a song came into my mind, not one of the top one hundred that intrude into my thoughts on a regular basis, but a song from the back reaches of my mental iTunes folder, Kate Wolf’s “Give Yourself to Love.” My inner ear heard and then my outer voice started to sing along, “Give yourself to love if love is what you’re after. Open up your hearts to the tears and laughter and give yourself to love, give yourself to love.”

After rehearsal that night I proposed and she accepted.

The next day, we got in The Line. The Line was made up of gay and lesbian couples, families and friends stretched two to six abreast. The Line was a living celebration of love coiling through the county hearings room, weaving through queuing lines, then wrapping outside three walls of the Multnomah County office building in a giant hug. People passed through The Line carrying buckets of flowers and slices of wedding cake to give to the expectant couples. Musicians came and played wedding music, one woman stood in the middle of the wedding license office handing out free disposable cameras so people could record the joy of the day. And ministers, my pastor in particular, set up instant wedding chapels in pubs, at the local civic center and on the sidewalk in front of the County building.

We knew we didn’t have much time before one court or another would stop the weddings. The sense of urgency overrode most of our plans for a major wedding event, but I refused to get married in a bar or on the street. My pastor kept the church open the following Sunday afternoon. With marriage license and best friends in hand, we were married.

I didn’t think it would make much difference, but it did. For a few weeks, we had all the rights and privileges that married people have. We were actually equal citizens in every way. Even more than that, though, somehow the solemnity and sacramentality of the marriage rite began to make our relationship more substantial and more liberating. We settled into our relationship more deeply and took the minor irritations of living together more lightly. We were married now. It was different and it was wonderful.

A few weeks later, the County offices were told to stop issuing marriage licenses and a few weeks after that, we received notices that our marriage licenses had been revoked.

We are still married in the eyes of our church and our community; the difference marriage makes still matters. If marriage matters to you, I invite you to take part in the class on Marriage Equality that starts this month and continues throughout this year. I pray that the discussions that occur during this class deepen our faith and our care for each other.

Amen.