From Liz Newcomb, our new writer over on AMERICAblog Gay:
When my wife Lynne and I were deciding whether to get married here in California, Prop 8 loomed in our consciousness. Lynne thought Prop 8 would fail and wanted to hold off on our wedding until spring when we could properly plan it. I was not so confident, and wanted to make sure we married before the election. I thought that if Prop 8 did pass, there was a very slim chance that our marriage might be grandfathered in.
So I persuaded Lynne to do a small ceremony with a handful of people to make it official, and then a larger one with friends and family in the spring. I’m not sure if she agreed with my prudence, was just humoring me, or liked the idea of having two weddings. But that is what we did. We married in September ’08 on a backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Then we had another, much larger wedding in March ’09 in Topanga Canyon near Malibu....
The current situation in California is unique. The Supreme Court reiterated post-Prop 8 in Strauss v. Horton that same-sex couples are entitled to enjoy all the rights the state can confer that opposite-sex couples enjoy, except for the right to call their unions marriages, and except for the exception to the exception, that same-sex couples who were married during the window would still be permitted to be married. To describe the situation is to highlight the absurdity of it.
