In sickness and in health, 'til the courts do us part

We are a same-sex couple who have been living with, caring for and supporting each other for 13 years. We believe that two people who commit themselves to a lifetime of mutual support deserve to be part of the institution of marriage. And, in fact, their marriage should be encouraged and celebrated.

On our 10th anniversary, we bought wedding rings for each other. We weren't allowed to legally marry: In 2003, no state would grant us a marriage license. But we were optimistic that someday, somewhere, we would have the chance to use our gold rings. We wear them every day for the same reason that our legally married friends wear theirs: because our marriage is real and valuable and we treasure the constant reminder of our love and devotion to each other.

A year later, we were thrilled to put our rings on each other's hands in a real wedding. We were married by the city and county of San Francisco, under the beautiful rotunda of City Hall, in the most ecstatic moment of our lives together.

In that ceremony, we pledged ourselves to care for each other in sickness and in health, for better or for worse. We could barely say the words for the tears streaming down our faces and the tightness in our throats. But they were joyful and easy promises to make since we had already been caring for each other for years.

Unfortunately, our marriage was only six months old before we were forcibly divorced by the California court. It was a devastating blow, being told that our marriage was not worthy, that, in the words of the court, it was void from inception and a legal nullity. We knew that our marriage was not void from inception — it was an ongoing everyday reality. But as much as we wanted and deserved to be married, we were divorced nonetheless.

And now our state court in Washington has said that, although the heterosexual citizens of our state have a fundamental civil right to marry, we do not. This puzzles us. We thought fundamental civil rights were those that belonged to everyone.

Some ask us why we wouldn't be satisfied with civil unions. Our answer is simple: for the same reasons that any opposite-sex couple would find them distasteful. Ask any couple about to be wed, or any couple celebrating their 50th anniversary, if they would trade their marriage for a civil union. And if civil union were indeed the same as marriage, who would object? But civil unions are not marriage in so many ways, and the word "marriage" is the word our society uses to define and describe lifelong, loving relationships.

Why do we want to be married so much? For two reasons.

First is a pragmatic reason. There are hundreds of legal rights and responsibilities — more than 1,100 at the federal level and more than 400 at the state level — that flow from legal marriage. These rights and responsibilities apply automatically and for free (or rather, for the nominal cost of a marriage license) to our opposite-sex friends, family and neighbors. Being matters of state and federal law, they are not things we can claim with legal contracts between us, no matter how many thousands of dollars we would pay to lawyers. They are simply beyond our reach. They are, therefore, special rights of opposite-sex couples — and we know that our state and federal constitutions guarantee equal treatment, not special rights.

Second is a more heartfelt, perhaps more important reason. We need to be treated fairly. We need to be able to say that we are legally married to each other. Without access to the word and to the institution of marriage, we will always be second-class citizens. We love each other, we are devoted to each other, and we need and deserve to be part of the institution of legal marriage.

As the six months of our legally married life showed, and as the nearly 8,000 legally married same-sex couples in Massachusetts continue to show, our marriage harms no one and, in fact, the stability of our married relationship is a benefit to society.

For the same reasons that opposite-sex couples want and need to be married — because they need the legal protections that flow from civil marriage, because they promise to protect and provide for each other forever, and because they love each other — we want, deserve, and need to be married, too.

Ken Molsberry is a lecturer in the speakers bureaus of Legal Marriage Alliance of Washington and Lambda Legal. Chris Vincent is director of music for Mount Baker Park Presbyterian Church and artistic director of The Market Street Singers. They are co-authors of "The Freedom to Marry: Rites & Rights," at www.lmaw.org/freedom