Wedding Reception Speech on May 22, 2004

Thank you all for coming tonight to share with Susan and me the joy of this occasion and the making of history. Susan is the kind of person you dream of marrying. She is cute, smart, kind, and loving, and she plays the clarinet like Sabina Meyer. I am proud to call her my spouse for life.

After we had been going out for a while, Susan brought up the topic of marriage. I said it was an anachronistic institution that needed to be abolished and anyway it's illegal. On February 12 when Mayor Gavin Newsom ordered Assessor Mabel Ting to issue the first gay marriage license here in San Francisco to Lyon and Martin, two women who have been together for over 50 years I wept with joy and pride. When I passed City Hall in the days following Mayor Newsom's bold decision I was again moved to tears when I saw the gays and lesbians lined up in the rain for hours waiting to get their marriage license. Susan brought up marriage again and I said, "Susan we don't need no stinking piece of paper to ratify our relationship." However, one day I turned on the radio and heard first that Laura Bush was "shocked" to see San Francisco giving out gay marriage licenses and later that George Bush was supporting a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. It was then that I decided not only did I want that stinking piece of paper but that I had to have it. I proposed and Susan accepted. When I told my mother that Susan and I had married my mother informed me that I was not married because marriage is a sacrament between a man and a woman for procreation. Almost as an afterthought she said she guessed that gays could have civil unions.

After our wedding I was contacted by a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor. Some of you may have seen the article that appeared that week about gay marriage. The reporter asked me if gays could have civil unions that conferred all of the same rights as marriage but was not called marriage would that satisfy me. I said no. I don't believe in separate but equal. In 1898 the US Supreme Court decided in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate but equal was permissible. It took 56 years for the Supreme Court to overrule that decision in Brown v. Board of Education which held that separate educational facilities for blacks violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. In the same way I believe that separate civil unions for gays and marriages for straight couples violates the Equal Protection Clause. One day maybe not in my life time I believe that the US Supreme Court will uphold my right to marry the woman that I love and cherish with a legal binding marriage license. We deserve equal treatment.

At any rate civil unions or domestic partnerships that we have here in California are not equal to having a marriage license. A marriage license is not just a stinking piece of paper. It's a piece of paper that brings with it the protections of 1500 state and federal laws as well as a public recognition of the commitment of two people to each other. If Susan and I had registered as domestic partners she woud not then have been able to apply for a green card with the INS, for example.

I remember the day in 1986 when the US Supreme Court handed down the case of Bowers v. Hardwick. Bowers v. Hardwick upheld a Georgia statute that allowed the Georgia State Police to burst down the door of two adults in the privacy of their own home who were having consensual sex and solely because they were of the same gender, arrest them and throw them in jail. I remember the despair I felt that day. The message was loud and clear - gays are not entitled to the same constitutional protections as other people in this country. Fortunately a more humane Supreme Court last year finally overruled that vicious vile case in Lawrence v. Texas by finding that gays are entitled to equal protection guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. In the end, that's what we celebrate today - our right to be treated equally under the law and to have the same dignity and respect that all humans deserve. Thank you again for coming here tonight to celebrate with Susan and me the joy of our marriage and for joining us in the struggle for our civil rights.