A Little Collective Wedding Memory

Happy Anniversary to my husband, Martin. I'll have to tell him that some other way, as he doesn't read my blog.

It is not just our wedding anniversary. Over 320 couples were married on this day, two years ago. , Judge Friedman opened a window of Marriage Equality in Michigan, thanks to the first big victory in the DeBoer v Snyder case. That window lasted a bit less than 24 hours. The DeBoer v Snyder case was combined with three others, went to the Supreme Court, and ultimately won Marriage Equality across the U.S.

There are lots of wedding pics being shared on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter today.

To many people, weddings are about big extravagant events planned for years.

The "planning" for ours (and I don't mean Martin and I...I use a very big collective "ours") goes back to Evan Wolfson's pioneering work on Freedom to Marry, and many years of activism, and many disappointments. It goes back to April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse fighting for their kids, and a community full of people supporting their fight. And it culminated in Judge Friedman issuing a judgement full of empathy for the humanity of our community and scathing to a government preventing us from recognizing our relationships.

These pictures have people in jeans and jackets, as we had to wait for the doors to open on a cool spring day. They are pictures from a conference room in a county building, as we all had to move quickly before another part of the judicial system would slam the door on us.

We were surrounded by friends...but rarely family. Sometimes it was because our families shun us. But even those of us who had supportive family could not get them here quickly enough, whether across the state, across the US, or even around the globe.

These pictures which are being posted are not traditional wedding pictures. There is no wedding photographer, only friends with cellphones. Our wedding flowers were brought to us by friends like Kristin Schrader who realized, "It's a wedding. People will need flowers", and handing them out to whoever needed them.

Instead of a big wedding reception with an open bar we had Kevin Sharp stand outside the county building with coffee, keeping people warm and awake (many of whom had been waiting in line since before sunrise). Kevin and (his now husband) Rusty did not have the appropriate papers available to get married that day, but shared the day anyway.

Our witnesses, official and otherwise, were a community full of people experiencing something they never thought they would have.

Our weddings on that day are not the stuff for Modern Bride Magazine. (Is there such a thing as Modern Groom Magazine?) But our weddings were the heart and soul of what weddings should always be all about. Love conquering all.