Our wedding is just over two weeks away (eeee!) and now that we’re getting down to the decor and details, I’ve been wondering about how we will honor marriage equality at our wedding. We plan to include a reading of Chief Justice Margaret Marshall’s ruling on marriage equality in Massachusetts:
“Marriage is a vital social institution. The exclusive commitment of two individuals to each other nurtures love and mutual support. Marriage is at once a deeply personal commitment to another human being and a highly public celebration of the ideals of mutuality, companionship, intimacy, fidelity, and family. Because it fulfils yearnings for security, safe haven, and connection that express our common humanity, the decision whether and whom to marry is among life’s momentous acts of self-definition. It is undoubtedly for these reasons, as well as for its intimately personal significance, that civil marriage has long been termed a ‘civil right’. Without the right to marry, one is excluded from the full range of human experience.”
We also made a wedding registry with the Human Rights Campaign, to encourage guests to contribute to the ongoing support of LGBT rights in lieu of gifts; we’ll also be making our own gift to HRC instead of favors. And, we’ve been mindful to work with vendors who are LGBT-friendly and who have made extra efforts to use gender-neutral language in their documentation (though this is often a work in progress).
But I’ve been wondering if this is not enough – or too much??? How do others handle this, gay or straight? What else is out there? I’ve heard of the “White Knot” where couples hand out small white knots for guests to wear to support marriage equality and full equal rights. Other couples opt for a more rainbow-tastic color scheme to their weddings, while still others do nothing obvious at all other than the radical act of getting married.
So I’ve been wondering – what are you doing to honor marriage equality throughout your wedding process? Do you have any awesome ideas to share with us? How have your gestures towards equality been received by guests, family or friends? Do you think there is a place to get political during a wedding? Why or why not? Let us hear it in the comments!!!
We’re using that excerpt on our programs and asking our officiant to reflect on it for part of her meditation/sermon.
We will definitely put something in our ceremony about marriage equality–I love the above excerpt! We’re also going through idofoundation.com for our registry, so a portion of everything spent will go to Lambda Legal (in addition to a separate donation we’ll make on our own). I don’t want to beat everyone over the head with the message (especially since almost all of our guests are either queer or allies), but I do want to let people know that it’s important to us.
My wife and I eloped (we’re from FL and wanted a legal marriage license), but are having a reception at home. We’ll be giving white knots to all of our guests, in an attempt to share how important marriage equality is. For us, I think it answers a lot of the questions of why we eloped rather than host the bigger wedding ceremony we were planning with our friends and family here in FL.
I love this post! We are doing a plethora of things at our wedding. *our daughter is guarding our rings in a ring book and we’re using Why Marriage Matters by Evan Wolfson. *our colors are rainbow and because we are Pagan also, we will have a bit on our ceremony regarding the importance of each color. *our favors are donations to HRC (and to the Susan G. Komen foundation because her mom died from breast cancer). *we’ve also signed up for the HRC wedding registry. *we are also including either THAT reading from your post or if CA lifts the ban, we will have a reading from Judge Walkers’ ruling. We were thinking about White Knots but thought it too much because of everything else we are doing. I think it’s amazing when I read of straight couples who incorporate marriage equality into their own weddings. :)
Our family traditions were very important to us so nothing was super radical, but we did have a few touches. And most of it was more about deemphasizing the significance of gender conformity more than anything else, which for me goes hand in hand with choosing a same sex partner. 1. Our cake topper was two girls in jeans and white t shirts and barefoot with an arm around each other. My wife wore a suit and I wore a dress but we wanted to represent ourselves as equals (and our every day clothes meet more in the middle anyway) 2. Garter and bouquet toss were done at the same time to all single people of any gender. 3. We had a dance with our fathers and then with our mothers. It didn’t make sense to us only to dance with an opposite sex parent. 4. It was alluded to in our ceremony (“don’t let the words of the unenlightened give you pause” etc) and we had a reading from Plato’s “Symposium” that spoke about the ancient roots of love, mentioning same sex relationships.
there was really nothing radical about our ceremony… and i kind of regret that. i think we were trying to just make everyone feel comfortable. too comfortable. in some ways it was good because it made the more conservative guests see that gay weddings can have the same normalness as hetero ones. but we did nothing to bring attention to the importance of the issues at hand, and looking back something subtle would have been nice. oh well… it was still a great day. but i am excited to see all the subtle wonderful gay touches you put on your wedding! ;)
we…got married.
i felt very strongly about our wedding being apolitical. perhaps because i am inundated with politics everywhere else, perhaps because my political views on marriage are too unusual to easily symbolize, mostly because politics was (for me) so far removed from what we were there for (love, community, etc.)
but i have heard over and over again from my parents that the gay folks they know (of their generation) are all *thrilled* to hear about our wedding. it comes up over and over that we call it a *wedding* (not ceremony, union, what-have-you), and i think that perhaps not making it political made its own political statement. it, perhaps, said “this is a wedding like any other wedding and there’s no need to discuss that.”
that said, we asked our readers to choose their own reading unknown to us, which opened the floor, and was perfect.
Great ideas, all. Thanks for sharing your choices and experiences, it’s nice to learn more about the variety in other peoples’ weddings since there aren’t so many models about how to do a gay wedding. Congrats and/or best wishes to you all!
I just got married 3 weeks ago and we made white knots for our guests to wear. We also gave a donation to whiteknot.org instead of favors. We also had the supreme court reading at our ceremony as well as incorporating same-sex marriage recognition through the broom-jumping ceremony.
When my wife and I got married in May we were careful to ensure that neither of us took on gender roles. We had a traditional Jewish wedding and we both wore long white dresses. We each circled around each other, we each exchanged traditional Jewish house rings, as well as wedding bands, we each stomped on a glass, etc. And, for our registry one of the organizations that guests could choose to donate to was the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. And, at the end of the wedding we played ukelele for our guests and sang “Aba Daba Honeymoon” – in which the monkey and the chimp “were happy and GAY!”
Because we had an atraditional wedding that looked so traditional, everyone felt comfortable. And, our joy became contagious. Everyone was happy. Check out my blog to learn more.
We are a straight couple who are recently engaged, and from the very first start of our talks about a wedding we knew we had to find a way to support everyone. Since we live in a state which does not currently support equal marriage rights we will be getting legally married on our honeymoon (most likely New York City, in a courthouse). We don’t need wedding gifts and will instead be registering for donations to equal rights organizations and making a donation ourselves instead of favors/menus/programs. We will also be using gender neutral vows and next to our guest book we are thinking of putting together a petition or pledge for our friends and family to sign to support equal marriage rights in our home state.