Tag Archives: marriage

Five years

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Erin and I are in Vermont this weekend, celebrating our fifth wedding anniversary. We got married out here then and we’re staying at the same B&B we did then. A few things have changed but not much.

Yesterday we spent our afternoon in a bar/restaurant called Bentley’s, which five years ago was the first place we landed when we arrived and the last place we spent time at before leaving for the airport. As we sat there, we dug back into this Glamour.com article about how we were going to live-blog and “Twitter” our wedding. (We weren’t, really, but nevermind.)

Reading it five years later, it seems adorably quaint – both the tone of wonder and surprise and the idea that such a thing would be worth writing about at all. At the time, I suppose it was. Twitter was only a year and a half old and had yet to become the celeb-filled and influential communications tool it is today. And the extra spin that we were eloping but people could follow along as it happened – again, not really what we were doing – gave it a societal change element.

The biggest jolt the article – and our accompanying website – provides is how long ago it seems while feeling as if the time has flown by. For example, I barely remember what iMeem was but apparently we used it to build our wedding playlist. Also, we had enough time on our hands to build a playlist and write a bunch of pages for a whole other website. The jobs we had then are four jobs ago in both our cases. We were still living in a small apartment in Roscoe Village and there was just Glin, no Abigail yet.

Somehow though, it doesn’t feel as if that much time has passed and everything seems new still. I’m still ridiculously in love with Erin. She remains my greatest champion and between her and Abigail they are the people with whom I prefer to spend the most time.

Erin’s sleeping next to me as I write this (typed out on my iPhone because I can’t get the WiFi to work on my iPad for some reason so forgive me my typos). We found a new restaurant here that instantly became a favorite last night. In a few minutes, we’ll go down to breakfast and then later revisit the farm where we got married five years ago. This weekend will be like that: old favorites and new discoveries we didn’t have time for then because of all the wedding hijinx. Exactly how you’d like it to be.

20131025-085413.jpgWhen I got up from the table at Bentley’s to use the bathroom, I started to wander around and remember the circuitous route it takes to get there: around the bar, through the hallway, up the stairs, around the corner. I remembered it exactly. Five years ago and it was like no time had passed at all.

On our wedding site, I said this:

Without Erin, there is no story, you see. There is no “us.” There is no “rest of my life.”

I hope that feeling never goes away.

Happy anniversary, Erin.

Things I don’t understand

Politics, , , ,

There are a number of arguments you can make against marriage equality or “gay marriage.” None of them are persuasive to me for reasons beyond the nature of this post. Regardless of intent, all are countered by the simple understanding that we cannot deny basic rights to one group of people if we extend them to others.

Yet the arguments make a kind of sense to me. Their basis is usually in fear and that’s a universal emotion, even if I don’t agree with the roots of that fear – usually an effort to hold on to some imagined way of life (the “traditional marriage” argument) that didn’t exist before and doesn’t exist now. I may disagree with the intent but I can at least get my head around it.

The argument Cardinal George made in a letter this week? I don’t get it. It’s not based in fear. It’s based in a kind of logic. A deeply flawed logic with truck-sized holes in it.

“Civil laws that establish ‘same sex marriage’ create a legal fiction,” George wrote in a letter sent to priests today. “The State has no power to create something that nature itself tells us is impossible.”

What does nature tell us is impossible? Reporter Manya A. Brachear explains:

According to the tradition of natural law, every human being must seek a fundamental “good” that corresponds to the natural order to flourish. Natural-law proponents say heterosexual intercourse between a married man and a woman serves two intertwined good purposes: to procreate and to express a deep, abiding love.

In fairness to Cardinal George, those aren’t his words even if the crux of the argument is. Here’s what I don’t understand:

Where does this leave couples who cannot have children due to a biological reason? If they cannot procreate, does their marriage run counter to natural law? Or if couples feel called to adoption – and as someone with just a passing familiarity of the domestic and international processes, make no mistake, it is a calling – is their marriage in opposition to the natural law Cardinal George feels is so important? What about couples who have a deep, abiding love but feel children are not possible in their marriage due to financial or other lifestyle concerns? Why isn’t Cardinal George trying to oppose these marriages? Is it because in Cardinal George’s mind he imagines they’re capable of both procreation and love and perhaps God will guide them to procreation by changing the nature of their minds or healing their biological concerns? Odd that the Cardinal views man’s mental or biological free will – a gift from God – with such contempt.

On a completely separate topic is this piece from New York magazine on what happened when the California State Teachers Retirement System, a public pension find, let a private equity firm called Cerberus Capital Management know it was less than happy with the firm’s ownership of a certain gun manufacturer:

Cerberus, it emerged, owns the company that makes the Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle used in the Sandy Hook spree (along with other gun companies). CalSTRS, which has $750 million invested in Cerberus funds, made it known that it wasn’t happy about this news.

Hours later, Cerberus — whose CEO’s father lives in Newtown — announced that it was putting its firearms holdings up for sale.

What I don’t understand is this: Could this method be used to reduce the widespread sale of guns in this country? A democratic political operative I’m friendly with on Twitter thinks it’s the ballot, not the buck, that stops the bullet.* And there may be reasons why the above wouldn’t operate at scale.

Worth trying to understand why or why not though, right?

* Apologies if that conversation is a bit tough to follow via the link. I’m not feeling up to Storifying it to capture the context and order of how it unfolded.