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Long Legal Battle Ends On Same-Sex Marriage (New Haven Register)
Thursday, November 13, 2008
By: Lauren Garrison
Peg Oliveira and Jennifer Vickery were married in a brief open-air ceremony Wednesday morning next to New Haven City Hall. In attendance were their 3-month-old daughter, Willow, a few friends and dozens of reporters crowding in to record the historic event. The wedding took place just hours after Judge Jonathan E. Silbert, the presiding judge in New Haven Superior Court, entered final judgment in a case that makes Connecticut one of only two states in the country to allow same-sex marriages. California offered same-sex marriages until a recent ballot measure amended the state constitution to make them illegal.
All eight plaintiff couples in the Connecticut case were in court Wednesday morning. After Silbert signed the order at 9:29 a.m., the couples embraced, several in tears.
“There were many tears of happiness and a huge sigh of relief that we finally reached today after eight long years,” said Anne Stanback, executive director of Love Makes a Family, a nonprofit advocacy organization that’s been working since 2000 to win the right to marry for same-sex couples.
Standing outside the courthouse, Bennett Klein of Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, the plaintiffs’ attorney, declared, “Today, Connecticut sends a message of hope and inspiration to lesbian and gay people throughout this country who simply want to be treated as equal citizens by their government.”
Following the proceedings, the plaintiff couples and their friends, families, supporters and attorneys walked from the courthouse to New Haven City Hall. As they walked, cars honked, and some people called out, “Congratulations!” One man yelled, “This state sucks.”
“We’re walking six inches above the ground,” said Jeffrey Busch of Wilton, one of the plaintiffs, adding that he felt proud of his state.
“It’s just extraordinary. We’ve been waiting so long,” said his partner, Stephen Davis.
At City Hall, a crowd overflowed the Office of Vital Statistics as plaintiffs prepared to fill out the newly created marriage license worksheets from the Department of Public Health. Where the form previously designated spaces for the bride’s and groom’s personal information, it now marks both columns as “Bride/Groom/Spouse.”
According to GLAD, three of the plaintiff couples applied for marriage licenses from their town halls Wednesday. All eight couples plan to marry within the next year.
Plaintiffs Robin and Barbara Levine-Ritterman were the first same-sex couple in New Haven to receive a marriage license. As they stepped out of City Hall about 10:20 a.m. holding up the form, the crowd outside cheered and blew bubbles.
Barbara Levine-Ritterman contrasted her experience Wednesday to the day several years ago when she and Robin came to City Hall to enter into a civil union. They got the civil union to protect themselves and their two children, but, having to stand in a separate line to pick up a separate form, they “didn’t do it with pride or with joy,” Barbara said.
Now, she said, “Love is love and our state recognizes it.”
Though they had a commitment ceremony in 1992, the Levine-Rittermans are planning another wedding down the road.
Davis and Busch are planning a “big Jewish wedding” for April. Having waited this long, they felt it was worth waiting a few more months to do it right, Davis said. Their 6-year-old son has “been waiting for this, too” and is looking forward to playing the cello at the wedding.
For Oliveira and Vickery, of New Haven, it was important to get married Wednesday.
“We wanted to be a part of that energy that is so amazing and surprising and historic,” said Oliveira. “For this marriage, in some ways, having it happen on this first day that it’s possible among those folks (who worked hard to make it happen) is almost more meaningful in some ways than the traditional get-everyone-you’ve-known-since-you-were-five-together.”
Oliveira and Vickery have been together for four years, but they declined to enter into a civil union when the state began offering them in 2005.
Since neither woman was an employee of the state, they felt they wouldn’t receive any special benefits from having a civil union. They were also unclear about what would happen to existing civil unions if the state ever legalized same-sex marriage.
But mostly, “The connotations that the word ‘marriage’ bring up for people don’t exist for civil unions,” said Oliveira.
The state’s civil union law will remain on the books, at least for now. Same-sex couples can continue to enter civil unions, which give them the same legal rights and privileges in Connecticut as married couples without the status of being married.
State Rep. Michael Lawlor, D-East Haven, co-chairman of the legislature’s Judiciary Committee, said lawmakers will have to decide the fate of the civil union law.
“We’ll definitely be taking this up,” he said. The new legislative session opens in January.
Oliveira and Vickery expect that having parents who are married will make their young daughter’s life easier.
“As she grows up, she gets to have a simple way of explaining her family instead of a complicated one that maybe she wouldn’t even understand,” Vickery said. “It’s (marriage is) the word that’s in fairy tales, and does it make a difference? Sure.”
Oliveira pointed out that as big a step forward the state took Wednesday, “It still needs to be made clear that those rights disappear the second we leave the state lines. It’s just a reminder that we have a long way to go still in ensuring equality for all individuals across the nation.”
Stanback said Love Makes a Family is anticipating that gay marriage opponents in the state legislature will introduce a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, but said they don’t have enough votes to pass it.
The defeat on Election Day of the ballot question asking whether there should be a convention to amend the state Constitution “made it clear that not only have we won in court, but we’ve won in the court of public opinion,” Stanback said.
Peter Wolfgang, executive director of the Family Institute of Connecticut, a political action group that opposes gay marriage, condemned the court’s decision as undemocratic. He acknowledged that banning gay marriage in the state would be difficult but vowed not to give up.
“Unlike California, we do not have a remedy,” he said. “It must be overturned with patience, determination and fortitude.”
Rev. Sandra Olsen, minister of the Center Church on the Green in New Haven, who plans on performing same-sex wedding ceremonies, views gay rights as advancing along the same path all other civil liberty issues have taken.
“It’s always been that it starts out where it’s only a minority position, and finally more embrace it,” she said. “I think in time, (gay marriage) will be accepted.”
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