LGBTQ-Logue 005.
You know, the sense of the historic moment hanging over these cases is incredible, and the atmosphere is really electric…As my husband said, it really feels like our very lives are before the court. But there’s no mistaking this historic moment. The momentum leading up to these hearings is incredible. Every day, when we turn to the headlines, there’s some new polls showing increasing majority support nationwide for equal marriage rights.- Stuart Gaffney, interview on Democracy Now!
That is a quote from Stuart Gaffney, media director at Marriage Equality USA, describing what it felt like, both as a married gay man and an activist, to be in the Supreme Court watching the arguments about the constitutionality of DOMA. For those who don’t know, DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) is a federal law enacted in 1996, that denies federal benefits to legally married same-sex couples.
Our LGBTQ-logue pays homage to this historic moment (the Supreme Court discussing the systemic discrimination of sexual orientation is landmark!) by hearing the family story of Stuart Gaffney and his husband John Lewis, together for 25 years. You can watch a full interview with them at DemocracyNow.org
What follows in an excerpt of Stuart and John’s family story that was originally written for the Marriage Equality Quilt for National Freedom to Marry Day (PDF) in Feb. 2007.
Stuart and John’s Story…
is significant because it directly connects with the history of laws banning interracial marriage until the Supreme court deemed them unconstitutional in 1967. This issue came up in the Supreme court when Justice Scalia asked attorney, Theodore Olson, when it became unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage.
Listen to Clip [sc_embed_player fileurl=”https://condommonologues.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/12-144-Hollingsworth-v.-Perry-trimmed.mp3″]
For the entire Supreme Court argument on March 26, 2013, listen here.
John and Stuart’s very own family story draws parallels of racial discrimination and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in marriage law. As an interracial couple, Stuart’s parents- mother Chinese-American and father English/Irish American- faced the same barriers that Stuart and John face today. Read below:
For nearly as long as we can remember, we each wanted to meet someone to fall in love with and start building a life together. For us, it happened in 1987, when we met at a neighborhood election party. When we met, John felt as if he had already known Stuart forever. To this day, when we visit old places from Stuart’s childhood, John feels like he was there with Stuart. And even before our second date, Stuart had already told his best friend from college, “I’ve met my future husband.”
When we married at San Francisco City Hall on February 12, 2004 after 17 years together as a loving and committed couple, we felt for the first time in our lives that our government was treating us as equal human beings. Subsequently, the court ruled that our marriage was null and void. Since then, we have been working to educate our fellow Californians about the importance of equal marriage rights.
This is not the first time our family had found itself in the center of a historic civil rights struggle for equal access to marriage. Stuart’s mother, who is Chinese American, and father, who is white, were only able to marry over 50 years ago, because the state’s ban on interracial marriage was overturned. Stuart’s mother remembers how one of her classmates at the University of California had to leave the state to marry her white fiancé before the law was changed.
After their wedding, Stuart’s parents traveled across America and lived in many different parts of the country. When they moved to Missouri, they were disturbed to learn their marriage was illegal and void in Missouri because that state still prohibited marriages between Chinese-Americans and whites.
But everywhere Stuart’s parents went, they educated people about interracial relationships by their very presence as a loving couple. We too have traveled across America as part of the coast-to-coast Marriage Equality Caravan to do the same — to show that our common humanity is the basis for marriage equality across the land.
Like our parents before us, we simply want the freedom to marry the person of our choice and to have the same rights, recognition, and responsibilities for our family that all other loving and committed couples enjoy. Today, all of our parents want nothing more than for their son and son-in-law’s marriage to be legally recognized, just as their other children’s marriages are.
To read their story in full, visit the website Marriage Equality USA.
