The Mast-Head: It’s Time to Cheer

I had the honor, and I don’t use that word lightly, of being asked to read at the May wedding of close friends in California. Mike and John had begun dating something on the order of 11 years ago, back when marriage equality was not even on the horizon. They had a civil ceremony at San Francisco City Hall in the fall, with the intention of holding a celebration for family and friends in the spring.

By definition, United States Supreme Court decisions are historic, and Friday’s 6-to-3 ruling, which assured everyone of age the legal right to marriage, marks, in my view, a major turning point. Reactionary spasms of a fading culture war have ensued, to be sure. They seem like background noise now, echoes of ideas that have fallen out of the mainstream, surviving mostly among shrinking pockets of religious conservatives and those who fan their passions for cynical, political reasons.

You would think that with polls showing broad support for the right to marry the candidates crammed in the Republican primary clown car, like Ted Cruz, for one, might back off on hateful opposition to gay marriage, but, sadly, that is not the case. It’s hard to believe that opposing love is a good issue for any candidate, but what do I know?

Anyway, it was via email that Mike and John had sent word that they wanted me to read Shakespeare’s 18th Sonnet at the big event, you know, the one that starts, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” I was flattered and nervous and printed out a copy and practiced over and over again in my office. The poem is familiar, at least superficially, to almost everyone, the first line repeated so often that it has become a cliché. But, like all great works, it is about a whole lot more, in this case, the permanence of love and soul amid the decline of physical beauty — perfect for the union of two men comfortably past the mid-point of their lives.

The ceremony, led by a Buddhist officiant, was on a hillside overlooking a Marin County lagoon. With another reader, I sat on a hay bale in the front row. As Mike and John came down from the house, we stood, and a cheer went up the likes of which I had never heard at any other wedding.

As the evening wound down it dawned on me: This was as much a marriage as it was a victory celebration. It was as if our team had won the national football championship, only we were not tearing down the goalposts or flipping police cars over in the street. “We won,” we were saying. Mike and John won. And now gays and lesbians all over this country have won.

I still feel like tearing down some goalposts. This has been a moment to celebrate, a time to be extra extra proud of our nation, and something worth savoring as the days sweep quickly toward the Fourth of July.