“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends
towards justice.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
As of midnight last night,
the state of Florida was legally required to recognize my marriage to Andy
Mobley, my life partner of 41 years this May, my legal husband of five years
this August. It has been a long fight in Florida
marked by much disingenuity and bitterness. But, with the final order of the
federal district court taking effect last night, the battle is all over but the
shouting, not that political opportunists like Florida’s attorney general will
not capitalize on every opportunity to do so.
No Roadmap to Follow
Andy and I have been life
partners since May 31, 1974. We have been through much together. There simply
were no positive models for gay couples in those days. We had no roadmap to
follow.
The closet was mandatory for
those who wished to remain employed and avoid vandalism of one’s car and
threatening phone calls at one’s home. Homophobia was the unquestioned norm sanctioned
by the state and it was frequently seen as the will of G-d by those who presume
G_d inevitably shares their prejudices.
We had to find our own way,
a way marked by many mistakes and wrong turns and much forgiveness. But by the
grace of a very generous G-d, we have survived. And 41 years later, I cannot
imagine living my life without my gentle-spirited partner, now legal husband.
Much has changed since those
early days. That has included our own views about marriage. A decade ago both
Andy and I were both opposed to buying into what we both saw as a failed institution
with too much baggage to be redeemed. For a while we both favored domestic
partnership because of the legal protections we believed it would afford us.
But when the case arose in Florida
involving a lesbian couple in a domestic partnership denied hospital visitation
privileges as one of the partners lay dying at Miami Jackson Hospital, my entire
view of this matter changed. It became clear to me that domestic partnerships
were not guaranteed to be honored at precisely the times when such legal
protections were most needed.
So first I and later Andy
decided that marriage was the only way we could gain the protections under the
law that every couple should be able to expect but only those with the law
behind them could anticipate. We then set about finding a way to accomplish
that.
Equal Justice Under Law
Our union had already been
blessed in the chapel of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, MA ten
years previously. A bishop from an independent Catholic tradition had officiated
before a number of friends, our family of choice. When we decided that we would
go to the District of Columbia to get married, we asked the same bishop to legally
marry us. He was delighted to do so.
The photo above was taken
moments after we had completed the legal pronouncements part of the wedding
rite. We are standing in front of the US Supreme Court under the famous frieze
bearing the legend “Equal Justice Under Law.” On that day, we were there to get
our own piece of justice and we did.
Ironically, in this photo we
are facing the US Capitol building across the street from SCOTUS, the very
agency charged with making laws for all Americans whose failure to protect our
rights to equal treatment under the law ultimately required the federal court
system to do that job for them. Instead,
the Congress passed a discriminatory law called the Defense of Marriage Act
which the SCOTUS ultimately struck down as unconstitutional.
Much to the prescient
chagrin of Justice Antonin Scalia, this began a cascading chain reaction in which
states like Florida, who passed similar laws and constitutional amendments,
found their own homophobic legislation struck down. To turn a common slander on
its head, if a discriminatory law walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s
a duck.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
believed that the arc of the moral universe is long but ultimately bends
towards justice. Today, justice has finally come to the state of Florida which
has been dragged screaming and kicking out of its human rights adolescence into
young adulthood. It now joins the 35 states and the District of Columbia which
have previously gone through this overdue growing stage to join nations around
the world who have long ago dismantled their own discriminatory laws. And eventually
it will be coming to a state near you, too.
Happy Equal Marriage Day,
Florida. You may now kiss your legal
spouse!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry
Scott Coverston, J.D., M.Div., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Asst. Lecturer: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Osceola Campus, Kissimmee
If the unexamined
life is not worth living, surely an unexamined
belief system, be
it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of
value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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