Marriage Project, Day 1

So, I got my wife to kick off the Marriage Project:

Women in White

I am dreading the next few months because my State has passed a marriage equality bill through the House and Senate and, sometime next week amid much fanfare, the Governor will sign it. She’s already promised.

And it’s not that my jaded little heart can’t go all goosepimply over the prospect of all those his & his & hers & hers weddings. I positively weep whenever another state opens up their city halls and starts tying knots. Always first is some incredibly aged couple who have been waiting, waiting, waiting for decades to be told that their love is registered. Like an earthquake, on some cosmic scale.

And it is not because I won’t benefit directly from this sudden equality. I have already warned my co-workers that on the very first day that licenses are available I will be absent from my post and camped out in front of City Hall with my 58 dollars, picture i.d. and a video camera to document my giddy bridal excitement.

I am so ready to make it legal with the woman I call my Unlawfully Wedded. The fact that we already had a wedding in August just makes me feel superlucky. I could be twice-wed in a year. And to the same person!

I am just bracing for the hate. See, between the Gubernatorial signing gala and the nuptial extravaganza there will be a Referendum Drive. Holy troops of volunteers with God in their hearts and pocketsfull of ball point pens and talking points will descend upon us like plagues of locusts. Or toads. And they will assault us with their hate.

The work I do is rough. It tests the limits of what I can see and hear without giving up entirely on the human race. But I do manage to get up every morning and march off whistling. Because outside of my job, I live in a bubble where everyone I discuss and love and work with and dine with – yes, even the Republicans and yes, most lovely of which are the Christians – all of the people I see on the regular support my family. And this is by design. I am not built to fight all day in the public arena and then come home and scrap with the people who profess to love me. I like my bubble. I guard it fiercely.

But when I hear of this referendum fight, I keep picturing my local grocery store and how I will be walking the gauntlet week after week to retrieve my yogurt and school-lunch-friendly juice boxes. You know, the ones hippy enough not to induce instant diabetes, but not so hippy that the 7 year-old is too embarrassed to drink them in public. And the soy milk. (I am a lesbian.)

I will have to pass some dickhead with a clipboard, asking people to sign a petition to remove my marriage right from me. Some dickhead who actually believes he can accomplish that feat. I’d like to see him try.

“The state can’t give you freedom, and the state can’t take it away. You’re
born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you
assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it from you. The degree to
which you resist is the degree to which you are free…” Utah Phillips

There has been discussion, amongst my friends, on how to handle the solicitations of dickheads. My friend J.J. says he will take the petition and carefully print FUCK YOU in large letters across all the unsigned boxes. I suggested we all sign as “Rick Santorum” with a fake address – possibly one’s own local Planned Parenthood. There are many creative solutions.

But what I picture myself doing, what I see as really true, is standing at the entrance of the store right next to the dickhead. In my wedding dress. And just asking people. Please. Don’t sign this. Please?

Mary Malone
Spokane, WA

read more at her blog, Red Zorah