Marriage Equality.

Last year for Pride Month I wrote a blog outlining my thoughts on equal/civil rights for LGBT's and was honored that it received several hundred views (106 just this past Tuesday!).  This morning, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in a vote of five to four that the institution of marriage legally extended to include same-sex couples, so I decided to speak up once more as a straight ally and advocate for equal rights for those who identify as non-heterosexuals.  Hear me out; it takes a minute to get there.

I got married nearly six years ago to an amazing woman.  In my own opinion or experience, marriage begins with that proposal, and the outside chance you'll get rejected slingshots into the joy of engagement so fast it made me dizzy.  Suddenly my world was ready to change for the better: I'd proposed that Kristy and I live our lives together, joining as one into something greater than ourselves.  We celebrated with family and friends and then started planning one of those "wedding" things you hear about.  I started planning it a few months later, once we'd gotten our announcements and engagement party taken care of; my wife started planning in the car on the way home from where I proposed (a hibachi restaurant in Newnan, Georgia).  We figured things out systematically, which was fun for the most part.  Our venue (the Ritz-Carlton at Amelia Island, Florida) was fantastic in walking us through everything step-by-step, using a coordinator and inviting us to a menu tasting to decide on food (filet and crab cakes, which rocked).

Now, there's a point at which someone receiving your money for some component of the wedding will ask you a question.  This question makes you realize just how absurd all the details are.  It's the reason people elope.  You'll have made, roughly, 150 or so decisions regarding "your special day" with no end in sight and some doe-eyed human will look you in the eye and need your opinion on something, and you will just snap.  It's a different question for all of us.  My Best Man, who just got married a couple months ago, never wants to hear the word "boutonniere" again as long as he lives.  My brain completely shut down when our wedding planner's assistant presented me with the options for napkin folds at the reception tables.

"If you want them on the tables, not in the wine glasses, they can be French Pleat or Single Fold."

"I'm...What?"

"Or if you'd prefer to have the napkins inside the wine glasses, which is the case for most weddings, we could do Flame Fold, Lilly Fold or Candle Fan Fold."

"I'm gonna be honest with you; I appreciate everything you're doing for me but I really don't know that I can convince myself that this will have any bearing on either of our lives."

"Well, there's also Crown Fold, Diamond Fold..."

"I don't...We're looking at napkins."

"Yes sir."

"Okay.  Ask Kristy."

But it got settled, and we ended up throwing ourselves the best party of our lives.  I had my grandparents talking to my college roommates, a young cousin being a junior bridesmaid and we picked out so much sweet music to play that people still ask me for our playlist/soundtrack.  We were married out back of the hotel, near the beach, and dozens of people sat on their hotel room balconies watching the ceremony and applauding for us when it was over.  At my wife's request, I wrote not only both our vows but the whole ceremony.  We hired a photojournalist I know to shoot the wedding and our pictures are fantastic.  The entire thing was the most fun I think I've ever had.

And I feel so wistful and dreamy looking back on it, I can't begin to reconcile that kind of unadulterated joy with someone like Rick Scarborough, who claimed this week he would light himself on fire if two men or two women were allowed to experience the same happiness in a lawful marriage.  By using such a dramatic example, Scarborough loosely implies a likeness between himself and Bồ Tát Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk who, in 1963, self-immolated as protest against Ngo Dinh Diem - a tyrant in Vietnam who made Buddhism all but illegal.  Thích Quảng Đức's public suicide shocked the world, catalyzing a coup and assassination of Diem.  For people like Scarborough (or Nick and Sarah Jensen, an Australian couple who vowed to divorce if marriage equality is passed by Aussie parliament), the unquenchable thirst to be martyred for their religious beliefs betrays Thích Quảng Đức's self-sacrifice.  It instead reminds one of the child threatening to hold his/her breath to a point of passing out unless Mommy or Daddy buys the child a new toy - an immature and morally reprehensible threat that sullies the ideas of the sanctity of life and marriage, respectively, just as much as those against whom they rally, if not more so.

Most religious people I know (including that wife of mine) are incredibly peaceable, live-and-let-live types.  Unfortunately, detractors of marriage equality almost exclusively try to use religion as the shield for their opinions.  It usually goes along these lines:  We're told by this small but vocal portion of the population that United States law is founded on Christian principles.  John Adams, on the other hand, is quoted as saying "The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."  Thomas Jefferson agreed - "Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the Common Law [of England, to which legal matters not covered by the Constitution defer]."  I've also been told that the Founding Fathers would've wished Christian law to reign over the entire American populace, to which Thomas Jefferson also said "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no god.  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."  In response to that, we're often told that The Bible forbids homosexuality (and The Word of God never changes); meanwhile we're absolved of other practices forbidden in The Bible (e.g. eating shellfish, mixing fabrics) because The Word of God does change.  The last point of discussion is that legalizing something forbidden in The Bible inflicts upon "religious freedoms."  Around this time, someone usually asks "Why isn't eating pork made illegal, to guarantee the same 'religious freedom' to Muslims?" and we're back to square one: because United States law is founded on Christian principles.  I've seen this train circle this track for hours on end.

The Supreme Court was established in Article III of The Constitution of the United States of America as the highest possible court of law to which any legal case could appeal.  Meant to be absolutely impartial to cases, their jurisdiction covers Constitutional Law, controversies involving matters between more than one state and so on.  Now, marriage can be seen as a complex legal contract since the Constitution doesn't explicitly define marriage but Former President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, restricting it to be a union between one man and one woman.  Clinton later decided he'd made a mistake and advocated for its repeal with support from President Obama, who declared in 2011 that parts of DoMA were unconstitutional and would no longer be an admissible defense in court.

So when the vote came in today, the four justices who sided against marriage equality were Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito Jr., Antonin Scalia and John G. Roberts Jr.  Their dissent from their colleagues' decision is as interesting as the judiciary gets:  Justice Thomas, an African-American judge, is married to a white woman, which would've been illegal if not for the Supreme Court's ruling of Loving V. Virginia in 1967 in favor of interracial marriage.  Many have been calling for him to abstain from voting on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act since 2011, when his wife Virginia Thomas was revealed to have supported a conservative lobbyists' group that rallied for the repeal of the health insurance law.  He voted against the ACA this week, but it was carried through anyway.

Justice Alito was appointed on Halloween of 2005 by Former President George W. Bush as a replacement for Sandra Day O'Connor.  His vote comes as less of a surprise, arising several years after attacking a school's anti-harassment policy - arguing that derogatory statements against gays is part of free speech.  Justice Scalia, alongside Justices Thomas and Alito, is the third of four Supreme Court judges who dissented from the ruling.  He's also the third of them to attend fundraisers supporting the Federalist Society, a conservative special interest group who were investigated less than 10 years ago for their influence over the Justice Department and over a half-dozen firings made by that office.

So, by the thinnest of SCOTUS margins, amid threats of suicide and divorce and accusations that marriage equality is the beginning of a holocaust against Christians - and waiting mere decades for the legal right - two members of the same sex can finally join together in a personal rite/institution that most of us have taken for granted our whole lives.

Better late than never.