The night of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va) was busy helping Dea Jones and Sharon McLeod publicly ― and legally ― declare their love for one another in northern Virginia.
The pair, who live in Kentucky, reportedly wanted to ensure that they had the fullest legal protections possible for a same-sex couple as the Trump administration came to power. So Kaine, a friend of Jones’ brother, served as the officiant at the Jan. 20 ceremony.
“We hadn’t been in a hurry to make it legal,” McLeod told Roll Call. “We really were hoping to do it as soon as we could before the Trump administration.”
Kaine and the happy couple were kind enough to share an excerpt from their ceremony with The Huffington Post:
Sharon and Dea have been together since 2000. They were first wed at Mount Auburn Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati on October 12, 2002. The wedding was a big church wedding but was celebrated at a time when the marriage was not recognized by the laws of Ohio or Kentucky, where they live. After Vermont passed a law to allow civil unions, Sharon and Dea went there and celebrated their union on September 26, 2003. And now, in January 2017, they are marrying in accord with the laws of Virginia and the United States. Full and equal marriage. Virginia is for lovers. … They were worried after election day and decided that a church wedding and a civil union would not be enough. Just as many are afraid about what might happen in the days and years ahead, they were anxious about what might happen to the laws regarding marriage equality. And they decided to triple tie the knot in the hopes that what God had thriced joined, no man could put asunder.
Kaine’s history of being a strong ally to the LGBTQ community stands in stark contrast to many of the individuals poised to lead Trump’s administration, including Vice President Mike Pence. Kaine previously invited a lesbian couple to attend the Vice Presidential debate in October.
We could all use more allies in positions of power like Tim ― and we thank him for spending inauguration night making the world a little bit brighter.
