Gay Weddings are Good for Business

• The Human Rights Campaign held a wedding event on Tuesday, the first day gay couples in the District could legally marry.  Here's the video of the ceremonies.
• Many Washington Post readers were not at all pleased by the photo the paper ran featuring two gay men kissing!
• Actress Cynthia Nixon, star of Sex and the City, wants to marry her partner!  In this video, she speaks out about how that's not possible in New York state, where they live.
• This will get its own blog post, but the Washington Post ran an article about the wedding related jobs expected to be created in DC due to the legalization of gay marriage.
• NH is all over the map when it comes to gay marriage.  The latest is that some towns will begin voting on whether gay marriage should be a ballot initiative.  Those votes begin on Tuesday.
• California State Senator Ashburn who has opposed same-sex marriage for years, was arrested for a DUI last week after leaving a gay club.  He's since come out of the closet and defended his stance on gay marriage.

And across the world:

• Gay weddings began in Mexico City this week.  Mexico City is the first place in Latin America to allow legal gay marriage.    

What's going on in your neck of the woods?

Well, a judge actually.  The most popular reading during gay wedding ceremonies is part of the ruling which legalized gay marriage in Massachusetts (the first state to have legal gay marriage).  It was written by Judge Margaret Marshall from the State Supreme Judicial Court.  While this is by no means the whole ruling, the passage below is the long version and  is often excerpted into smaller chunks:

Ms. Jennifer Coveney and Ms. Bernadette Smith

14 Willow Street

Boston, MA 

02110

Fast forward six years and Cambridge is still immortalized for issuing those licenses in the middle of the night, and to this day, a banner still hangs in City Hall with a quote from the State Supreme Court ruling.  

Last year, I had a gay couple come in from Pennsylvania to get married. I picked them up at their hotel in the morning and brought them to Cambridge City Hall to apply for their license and get married.  The best part of the day (I think we'd all agree) was when we were in Cambridge City Hall, license in hand, with the Honorable Denise Simmons (Justice of the Peace and at that time, Mayor of the City of Cambridge). She officiated a beautiful, simple ceremony in her office and at the conclusion of the ceremony, presented my clients a felt bag. Inside the bag was a key to the City of Cambridge.

Imagine the reaction of these two guys! They were elated! They were two African-American men in their 40s and at the time, Ms. Simmons was the only openly-lesbian African-American mayor of a city in the US, handing them a key to her city. I didn't know it was coming - but what a pleasant surprise for all of us! 

I posted about this in my other blog last year, and another couple saw the story and asked for the same experience.  I couldn't promise it, of course, but we ended up back in Cambridge City Hall, in the office of Mayor Simmons, and she not only gave these brides a key to the City, but me as well!  I love it.  

This is a little piece of history and I really enjoy sharing this with my clients by bringing them there to get their own marriage license.