Anniversary Reflections On Marriage Equality

Okay, here’s the overly-cute truth of it: I love being married.

Now, I don’t think marriage is for everybody. I don’t think it’s part of God’s plan for all of us to be cutely married to some cute person and have a bunch of cute kids. As you can probably tell, that’s all a little too cute for me.

More importantly, it doesn’t fit what I know of God and God’s call: we have gifts that differ, and we have calls that differ. In relationship just as in profession.

But I love being married. I love that my lover is not only someone that I get to live with, to celebrate and mourn with, to share all kinds of things with, but also someone that I’ve publicly proclaimed and promised with, someone who stood up with me in front of all our family and friends, and said that we are going to be married. That we promised to always seek one another’s well-being. It’s powerful. And the tax breaks and insurance benefits: also great, it’s true.

I’m thinking about my marriage both because we’re about to celebrate our tenth anniversary (of dating, anyway) and because we’re debating same-sex marriage in my state and the Supreme Court.

I love Rachael a ridiculous amount. I love her all the time, and if someone tried to stop me being married to her, I would reconsider my commitment to non-violence. She is someone that I absolutely go to the mat for—she’s someone for whom I pull out all the stops.

Some of my friends can’t get legally married in Illinois.

I am hopeful that will change soon, and I’ve been working and praying hard for that to change. In addition, people I love and trust have been working way harder than me, for way longer than me, to bring about this reality.

Sadly, I know that even if my friends can get married in the state of Illinois, it will be a while until their marriage is recognized at a federal level. And it may be longer still until all my friends in every state can marry any person to whom their heart is called. 

Here’s how I’m thinking about it these days: I am called by God to be a pastor. Trust me on this, I argued it out, and wrote papers, and fought it myself for years and years, but here I am.

Similarly, I am called by God to be married to Rachael Weasley.

I argued that out too, with myself and with other people. (That “committee,” of myself and Rachael and the people I trust, was much less formal than my ordination committee, but the stakes felt even higher!)

If you tell me that I’m not called to be a pastor, I will probably just laugh at you. If you tell me that I’m not supposed to be married to Rachael, I will tell you you’re wrong. And so will a lot of other people.

As it turns out, there are people who would tell my friends that God doesn’t want them to be in a committed relationship.

These people would say it is not God’s will for my friends to publicly proclaim their love for each other or to share such simple minutia as chores and tax returns and dinner and health insurance.

I love my partner, in a full and complicated and wild kind of way. And our tenth anniversry makes me sappy.

But this year, as we debate marriage equality in Illinois and in the Supreme Court, my anniversary also makes me angry. 

This year, my anniversary makes me want to get to work. 

Photo via David Weasley