One step over the line
State by state, America is inching closer to the promise of justice for all
By Sally Sheklow 07/05/2007
Jeez that felt good. Nothing like a little Canadian marriage to lift a gal's spirits. What a pleasure to walk into a downtown Vancouver office, chat with the friendly notary public and walk out with an actual, legal, uncontestable marriage license. Just like that. No muss, no fuss. No God-Hates-Fags nuts screeching that you're violating the sanctity of one-man/one-woman marriage. No anti-gay county registrar scowling like you're some disgusting piece of crud stuck to the bottom of his shoe. None of that. Just a nice guy doing his job and happy to pop our wad of bills bearing The Queen's portrait into his cash drawer — and into the Canadian economy. Sweet.
My bride and I had crossed the border into a country where nobody treads on your right to marry. You simply set a date with any official marriage commissioner, show up with your notarized license and get legally married the same as any other couple can. Pretty cool. So remarkably, shockingly, unabashedly normal.
Not that I'm pushing assimilation. My message isn't that lesbian, gay, bi, trans and queer people are “just like” heteros. Why set the bar so low? LGBTQ folks have our own special contributions to make, questions to raise, comfort zones to tweak.
But still, queer as we are, British Columbia treated Wifey and me like everyone else, equals under the law. A shining moment of full equality — what a terrific feeling.
We were so happy. Although if you'd seen us that afternoon in the marriage commissioner's living room, you would have never guessed it. We both cried through the whole ceremony. I mean really — two big, tough dykes like us. A simple civil service and the two of us carried on like we were at some funeral. Tears of joy, I guess, but something even more than that. Something hopeful and affirming that honest-to-goodness justice — equal rights for everyone — is actually a living possibility.
So awesome. How amazing and surreal and wonderful to stand there in the kindly commissioner's modest home — Pachelbel's Canon playing not-so-subtly in the background — in front of impartial witnesses, hold the familiar chubby hands of my partner of 19 years and recite our vows. The same vows recited by every other couple married under Canadian law. Just like it was normal.
While we wept, our loving bond was sealed with routine sincerity by the power vested in the marriage commissioner, who pronounced us married. We laughed and hugged, first each other, then the commissioner and even the witnesses. The commissioner had us sign our names into the official registry, which — she told us over a pink Koala toast to our happiness — will be archived in the annals of national history forever. Oh! Canada.
Back here in Oregon, fair-minded people have been trying for some 34 years to end the state's reign of legal discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender expression. Just last month Oregon's Legislature passed the Oregon Equality Act and the Oregon Family Fairness Act. These long-awaited laws will protect our rights to equal access to employment, housing and public accommodation and provide legal recognition of domestic partnerships. It's not quite total equality, but it's a huge step.
Not surprisingly, the opposition is freaked. They're outraged at having to share the planet with us sex-crazed predatory godless queers and now they're hell-bent on overturning our new laws. They've already hauled out the tired old “Save Our Children” boogeyman — as if children aren't already desperate for salvation from homophobia and religious intolerance.
I guess the 'phobes figure that if they can't keep discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, the world as they know it will end — and not in a good, rapture sort of way. To their way of thinking, legal recognition of domestic partnerships could somehow cause irreparable harm and, I don't know what, maybe force fundamentalist Christians to read Dan Savage (as if they don't already). It's all so frantic and fearful and stark, raving wrong.
But just north of the border, across that thin geographic line, lies another, more peaceful, more accepting world where equality for everyone is already the law of the land. Here in the US, state by state, we're inching closer to the promise of liberty and justice for all. If our experience in Canada is any indication, equality's going to suit us just fine.
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