As we celebrate the ten year anniversary of marriage equality in Massachusetts, we’ve invited members of the community to share their reflections. Today’s post comes from Sarah Richards, who married her wife once in a religious ceremony in Georgia, and again legally in Massachusetts.
As I sit down to write my reflections on ten years of marriage equality in Massachusetts, it strikes me that I’ve recently done something mundane yet remarkable. My spouse and I signed our first joint federal tax return. It’s honestly difficult for me to say what feels better: not having to pay the “gay tax” that has cost our family approximately $4,000-$6,000 each year, or not having to check the insulting little box marked “single.” Even though we signed our returns in our kitchen, with no audience or fanfare, no congratulatory hugs, it feels like a watershed moment. It feels a lot like the moment I experienced ten years ago walking into the town clerk’s office in Northborough, Massachusetts on May 17th, 2004.
My wife and I had already been married in a lovely ceremony nineteen months before when we lived in Georgia. We did the whole wedding thing: fancy clothes, flowers, a tiered cake with ribbon, a DJ. My hometown rabbi flew down from Massachusetts to do the ceremony for us. Many friends and relatives attended from around the country. But palpably missing was my wife’s family. Her parents and brother couldn’t attend because they “had other plans” that weekend. A dear friend who had served as a career mentor and surrogate mother of sorts walked my beloved down one side aisle while my parents walked me down the other side. We joined in the middle, and after the vows and blessings, we exited through the center aisle together.
So there we were, a thousand miles north, back in my home state, about to get married for a second time. This time we held the ceremony in our home and invited all our local friends to join us in becoming “legal.” The same rabbi married us again. But this time instead of signing a
ketubah
, the traditional Jewish marriage contract, we signed the marriage license papers we had obtained from the clerk. But they’re not the papers that hang framed on our bedroom wall. And when we talk about our anniversary, we always mean the one in October, not the one in May.
Our family lives back in Georgia again now. We’ve been blessed with three beautiful children since those events, all born here in my wife’s home town of Athens. There was a lawsuit filed recently in Atlanta on behalf of several plaintiffs who share stories similar to ours. The suit seeks to add Georgia to the list of states recognizing couples and families like us. And so we march on.
I’m glad for the progress our country has made this past decade. I’m glad our children will grow up in a place where that type of discrimination is written into law less and less. I’m glad that fewer and fewer people will look out at the guests attending their wedding and feel a stab of pain not seeing their own family among them. And I feel a lot of gratitude. I am proud to hail from the state that led the way. I look forward to the day when I can tell my grandchildren about a time when things were different, harder. I want to see the expressions on their faces. I want to see in their eyes that hearing about a time without equality is like hearing about a time without electricity.
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