Nothing But "I Do" Will Do

[FrancoDiSantisxxx]

From the Los Angeles Times; the full article can be found here, although registration will be required to view in its entirety:

 

http://www.latimes.com/la-et-marriage21mar21,1,2885624.story

 

SAN FRANCISCO — Lowell Selvin and Gib Winebar have spent the last 25 years as a couple. Every January, the two men celebrate the night they met. Still, until last month, they never found themselves yearning to be married.

 

"We thought, do we really need the piece of paper?" recalled Selvin, now the 44-year-old chairman and chief executive of PlanetOut Partners. "Aren't we already way past married after 25 years?"

 

Imagine their surprise, then, when last month's same-sex wedding boom happened and they found themselves standing in line for two days, desperate to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, for as long as they both shall live.

 

Until that moment, they say, they had viewed marriage mainly as a sort of package of legal protections, severing it from its deeper power as a communal rite of passage.

 

"It's difficult to describe," Selvin said. "Before, what I wanted was the thousand and forty-something rights" that the law confers upon married couples.

 

"But when all of a sudden it was a reality in our own backyard, something crystallized in my thinking," he added. "Marriage had been so far away and distant, it hadn't even been on our radar. Now anything less feels like second-class citizenship."

 

The same-sex wedding boom that, for 29 days, ignited this city and the nation may leave no one legally married by the time it works its way through the courts. But for at least one swath of society, it has permanently changed expectations.

 

Goals that once seemed sufficient — health benefits for domestic partners, say, or spousal rights in child-custody matters — now seem like tepid half-measures to many gay people. Meanwhile, from its tax deductions to its merest terms — "my wife," "my husband" — marriage has become the new line between the haves and have-nots.

 

It's an evolution that social conservatives had warned of almost from the first moments the licenses were issued, giving, in the view of state Sen. William "Pete" Knight (R-Palmdale), for example, "false hope" to gay men and lesbians.

 

But it's also a change that, on a national scale, may not bode well for the long-term acceptance of compromise solutions, such as civil unions, which are legal in Vermont and have been proposed as an alternative to the marriages that are expected to begin as soon as May 17 in Massachusetts.

 

"Before all this, I probably would have entered into a civil union — in fact, I did enter into a domestic partnership, because it was available and better than nothing," said James Krause, 53, a retiree who lives near New Paltz, N.Y. Krause and his partner of 15 years, Brendan Daly, 54, married during that town's brief flurry of same-sex weddings.

 

"But 'available'? 'Better than nothing'? How can you ask someone to settle for that?" Krause asked. "That's like telling Rosa Parks, 'Well, OK, you can move to the middle of the bus.' "