Craig: A member of the Support Team who accompanied couples on multiple days during the WE DO Campaign. Craig is on staff at the Center for Participatory Change.
[ssba-buttons]It’s one thing to know that the law is unfair. It is another thing entirely, I have found, to stand and witness my friends requesting a marriage license—at the very same Register of Deeds office where my own marriage is recorded—and watch the County Clerk write ‘REJECTED’ across the top of the page.
I stood alongside my friends Cindy and Gaby, as they made a request for a marriage license that they knew would be denied. It broke my heart to see such a simple request for equal treatment be rejected. And my mind is still in turmoil. I want to shout out, I am queer too, and you let me get married! Because I’m bisexual, because my partner is of the opposite sex, we received a license from the state and a blessing from the church. My family gets all the social and economic benefits that come along with a state-sanctioned, legalized marriage. We even got a little gift bag of free samples and coupons for household products. And what do my friends get, because they’re both women? REJECTED.
Listen, I’m a good partner and spouse, but I’m not any better than Cindy and Gaby. I’m a kind and loving parent, and they both are too. I would do anything for my family. They would do anything for theirs. We are friends and neighbors and our kids play together and there is absolutely no sane and rational reason why my family should receive over a thousand legal rights and privileges that their family is denied.
Especially since I’m queer too. Bisexuals are so often invisible—if we’re in an opposite sex relationship, we’re assumed to be straight ; if we’re in a same sex relationship, we’re assumed to be gay. But we’re here, and there are a lot of us. You can look at any Register of Deeds office in the country, any courthouse, any church, and you can be sure that there are some bisexuals whose marriages were celebrated and recorded there. That’s right: a lot of us queers have been getting legally married for a long, long time. At least, those of us who happened to fall in love in a way that was acceptable for straight society. For those of us who could go either way, the arbitrary and unjust nature of marriage laws is absolutely clear: they are about maintaining heterosexual privilege, nothing more.
And let me tell you, as someone who’s walked on both sides of the line—in the long run, the experience of living with unearned privilege is just as poisonous to the spirit as the experience of living with discrimination. Equality is the only thing that can save us all.
– Craig White
