As the Supreme Court justices grilled the lawyers on both sides of the marriage equality cases before them, I found myself getting irritated at suggestions that the country may not be ready for full marriage equality, and at questions about the potential impact of same-gender marriages on heterosexual marriages. Ones would think that marriages between loving same-gender couples were brand-new and completely unknown before state laws began to shift.
On the contrary, same-gender couples have been marrying each other for millennia. I think of scholar John Boswell, who wrote Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, which documents same-gender marriages dating back to the ancient church. Judy Grahn's groundbreaking study of LGBT culture in the Ancient Near East, Another Mother Tongue, made it clear that we have been around throughout human history.
Forty years ago I came out as lesbian and discovered Metropolitan Community Church (MCC). I met couples who had been together for 40 or 50 years who had lived through difficult times of government intrusion on personal privacy. Then-Sen. Joseph McCarthy's red-baiting investigations of liberals, Jews, gays and union organizers put a damper on freedom. Women and men drummed out of the military lived in fear of being discovered. But the documentary Before Stonewall revealed that in spite of all this, there was a world of people who boldly chose to love, despite threats of persecution and blackmail. Many lost families, jobs, children, safety, faith and lives.
I remember the risk taken by a federal judge and her partner, in about 1976, when they came to me and asked if I could marry them in a church ceremony without sharing their last names. Because I figured that God already knew their names, I performed their marriage before God and prayed that their love would survive all that they had to face.
Today we have judges and people from all walks of life who can tell their stories with much less fear of repercussions. But even in the midst of fear, gay and lesbian people continue to find each other. Then and now, many of us partner, have children and raise other people's children, many without benefit of legal protections or basic human rights. Slander and abuse are meted out for simply attempting to live our lives with integrity and in relationships. In the face of great odds, we have been faithful and successful in building our families.
My irritation shifts to anger when I hear people say that the social science is not in on this "social experiment." Justice Samuel Alito said that same-gender marriages are "newer than cellphones and the Internet." With statements like these, suddenly we who have been here in loving relationships all along just disappear like we never existed -- but our lives tell a different story.
In my first Thanksgiving worship service at MCC Boston, I met two elderly women, Connie and Eva. They met in 1932 in Marlene Dietrich's lesbian-friendly nightclub in Berlin. Eva was German; Connie was African-American. They were separated during World War II but reunited when Eva came to live with Connie in the United States. For decades they lived as "Mrs. Winne and her maid Connie," until they found MCC and realized that they could finally be authentically who they were: lifelong lovers, married in every way but in the eyes of the law. Everything changed when they knelt together at the altar to profess the love they had shared for 40 years. They were finally able to be open.
We pray that the justices remember that for more than 200 years, the core "social experiment" of Western culture has been freedom and equality, not same-gender love. Without this American experiment in freedom and equality, feudalism, slavery and ownership of women and children would still be the law of the land.
MCC leaders followed in the footsteps of those who said that the American dream was for everyone. The first thing they did after forming a church in 1968 was to begin performing Holy Unions -- marriages -- for couples. Over my decades of ministry, I have married hundreds of same-gender couples. MCC has performed tens of thousands of Holy Unions. In Colorado, one couple was married in 1975 by Rev. Freda Smith, an MCC pastor, because the marriage laws in Colorado were a little vague. Although the laws were later made more prohibitive, their marriage was never nullified. They may be the first legal same-gender marriage in the country.
So many couples, so many marriages, and so much love mark our experience with same-gender marriages. Did some divorce? Most certainly! Did many stay together or marry again? Yes! We are not a social experiment; we just live our lives! Like heterosexual couples, we value marriage, and even if we divorce, we tend to remarry. We are loving spouses making our homes together. Those of us who also claim Christian faith look to Jesus, who loved his unusual family of disciples and the women who supported him. We read the scripture from our own experience of family and relationship, and we see ourselves in them!
Even as a child I knew loving gay couples. My grandparents' best friends in New Hampshire were Frank and Ricci, a gay, interracial couple. No one ever told me they were gay, but people gossiped about them, and my grandparents had to defend being their friends. At the time I did not understand why. They were together for over 40 years, until Frank's death. I may not have known the word "gay" or understood that they were homosexual, but I certainly knew that they were family to each other.
MCC minister Rev. Ken Martin and his husband of 38 years, Tom Cole, told me the story of being in the car with their grandkids one day when they were still quite young. The little girl asked Ken, "Poppa, are you and Uncle Tom married?" Ken proceeded to try to explain why they could not be married and ended with this: "But we love each other just like we're married." To that she replied, "Oh, Poppa, we already know that!" Kids know love and family when they see it.
Let us hope and be confident in the ability of the Supreme Court justices to be honest and admit that they see our families as well. I know we will win, because our cause is right and just. I am hopeful that our time is now -- but whether it is now or in the future, our families are real, not a social experiment, and certainly not something new. Equality always feels new because it does not come easily, but equality, fairness and dignity are at the core of the American dream. No one is going to turn us around!