“Anniversaries bittersweet for gays who wed last year.”
Bittersweet indeed. My wife and I have debated our first anniversary in the wake of Proposition 8. While we originally had planned to have a party it no longer feels right. We’re official second class citizens, and a very strange breed of second class citizens at that. It would feel odd celebrating that, and downright rude doing so considering how many third-class citizens there are who don’t have access to what limited rights we do.
Joseph Weems and Randall Won celebrated their first anniversary with a low-key weekend barbecue for friends at their Land Park home. Ellen Pontac and Shelly Bailes sipped mango mimosas, then took a walk around Davis and had a quiet dinner. Laurie Warren and Seanain Snow didn’t celebrate at all.
“Until everybody who wants to has the legal right to marry, it’s a very small token to us that our marriage is legal,” said Snow, 39, a stay-at-home mom who lives in Davis.
A bittersweet season of first anniversaries began last week for an estimated 18,000 same-sex couples across California, married during what turned out to be a five-month legal window before voters passed Proposition 8 in November.
For the state’s gay and lesbian couples, getting married depends more on the courts and the electorate than on romantic proposals and elaborate wedding plans.
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Vermont, which legalized civil unions in 2000, recently passed legislation sanctioning same-sex marriage, as did Maine and New Hampshire. Gay and lesbian marriage is also legal in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Iowa. New York and Washington, D.C., recognize same-sex ceremonies performed elsewhere.
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While we may end up having a small get-together with a few friends it won’t be nearly what we’d hoped for thanks to Proposition 8 and the intolerance of people who insist on forcing their hatred into law. Ultimately if California doesn’t undo this hideous mess one way or another we’ll head east when feasible and leave CA to the bigots. I’ll gladly marry my wife as many times as it takes, in as many places as it takes. Eventually we’ll have a real anniversary party, when the time is right.
