The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [52]
A few months later, our mayor, Gavin Newsom, began granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The first to wed were Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, pioneering gay activists and advocates for women’s health, who had been waiting fifty years for that day. Newsom’s bold decision launched a firestorm of angry words about defending the sanctity of marriage from “activist judges” and brazen interlopers like Del and Phyllis. Gay people were accused of mocking the sacred institution of marriage with their flamboyant tuxedos and gowns. After a Texas court overturned a law against sodomy, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia unleashed a torrent of disdain from the bench. He equated homosexuality with “fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity.”
Suddenly Keith and I found ourselves at the flash point of a raging culture war. Did we have to call it marriage? Wasn’t that an unnecessary provocation for those who take that word to mean getting to the church on time? What about framing our commitment with a less confrontational term like “civil union”?
Certain words, however, have alchemical power. A humble noun or verb can become a transformative mantra. Embracing the word “marriage” had a subtle but profound effect on our relationship, like unlocking a door to a secret garden that only other married people know about. Now our job was to care for that garden together—to nourish it, weed it when necessary, and give it the compassion and space it needs to grow and flourish.
Knowing the way to that garden proved to be a great comfort shortly after that, when my seemingly healthy, vibrant father suffered a heart attack at a union meeting and died a few days later. My heartbroken mother moved to San Francisco to live near us. And that same winter, our beloved house in Provincetown was torn down by the guys we had rented it from for years.
We had planned to make our marriage legal, but we didn’t get the chance. In the months after dozens of couples like Del and Phyllis were wed, further court decisions put a stop to the celebration at City Hall, and retroactively stripped these couples of their marriage licenses. State after state began passing bans on same-sex marriage, and President Bush announced his support for inscribing such a ban in the U.S. Constitution.
My mother, my beloved, and I returned to our beach one more time. My mother leaned on Keith’s arm as the ashes and bones of her best friend for fifty-four years tumbled into the water.
Keith and I were finally able to get legally married a year ago, following yet another court decision. My mother was one of our witnesses, with a box of Kleenex in her lap. We already felt married, but it felt good to take those humble vows again in front of a county clerk. The corridors of City Hall were full of beaming gay couples who had been together for decades. My father would have been happy that day too.
The election season was upon us, and I was doing full-time volunteer work to help put Barack Obama in the White House. One day, we received a glossy brochure in the mail featuring smiling portraits of Barack and his wife, Michelle, urging us to vote for Proposition 8, an amendment to the California constitution to ban marriages like ours. I knew that Obama was on record as being against the amendment. But his statement, “I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman,” was emblazoned at the top of the brochure.
At the same time, the ads opposing Proposition 8 seemed to convey an extreme wariness of offending anyone. “No matter how you feel about marriage . . . ” they began. And there were no glowing couples in the ads, which struck me like running a campaign against school segregation while being afraid to show any minority kids with textbooks in their hands. But the pro-8 ads went straight for the gut, linking marriages like ours with the rape of children and compulsory sex ed for kindergarteners.
Postelection morning was bittersweet. Like most