Marriage

For those who don’t know, Colin and I got married… a few months ago (uh, I don’t think I wrote down the date).

Marriage has never been something we’ve felt as emotionally important to us, and we already felt totally committed to each other (especially with a baby on the way!). But we decided to get married for a number of practical reasons. Basically, since Colin started his business in January and hasn’t been bringing in any income, it will make sense for us to file taxes jointly with me as the bread-winner this year. Secondly, we want the maximum protection we can have for our family now that little Calix will be joining us. Getting married makes things incredibly easy. Nobody will ever question what will happen if something were to happen to one or the other of us. Also, our finances are automatically jointly owned, so we don’t have to try to keep track of out of whose bank account we’re spending which expenses out or what will happen to the house I bought if something happens to me. And, it’s nice in some ways to think of ourselves as married.

This is all very convenient! And here is what we had to do. We had to go to a King County office near us on a Saturday and wait in a line with a bunch of other couples to get a marriage license. Then we had to not get married during the 3-day waiting period. Then we had to have a friend who had authority to perform marriages (by becoming a minister on the internet) and two witnesses around. We had to say “I take you to be my husband or wife.” Then we all had to sign a piece of paper and send it to King County by the United States Postal Service.

That’s it! That’s all there was to it. Colin and I have been together for over 6 years, but we could have done the same thing if we had just met. Our lives have become easier and safer in a lot of ways with that piece of paper.

But if anything, the ease with which we were able to execute the whole thing has made me even more seethingly upset about my sister’s situation. Here’s her story.

My sister and her partner have been together for about the same amount of time as Colin and I have been. On October 7, 2006, they had a beautiful wedding ceremony surrounded by a very fun wedding weekend. The whole family and many friends flew in to attend the festivities. My sister wore a gorgeous embroidered flowing white dress. A professional photographer took pictures. There was a fancy dinner and a big cake. It was a wedding.

Two years later, my sister and her partner have four-month-old twins! They balanced finances, planned the timing, and went through many getting-pregnant anxieties, just as Colin and I did. But the security and conveniences Colin and I got from a 5-minute signing and dropping of a piece of paper in the mail, my sister cannot have.

Everything is a comparatively huge struggle.

To use each other’s health insurance, they have to be lucky enough to be working for an employer who happens to offer domestic partnership benefits, or they have to have enough clout with their employer to convince them to do so.

In order for her partner to be considered a parent to their children, my sister has to give up parental rights to them, and then they both have to adopt the children. This involves a months-long engagement of a lawyer to deal with all of the paperwork. They hope to have this completed sometime next year. Lots of time and money.

Then there are all of the other papers and fees for having power of attorney and wills, and I don’t know what all else. And no matter how much money and time they pour into it all, they still will never have the situation that Colin and I do. Certainly, for example, they have no rights to any federal benefits such as filing taxes together now that my sister is staying home with the babies.

And as for security, they are always at risk of laws changing out from under them or homophobic family members challenging in court what they have set up for themselves.

Colin and I paid $64 to get married – the cost of the license. Everything is taken care of. Oh yeah, and $0.42 for the stamp.

I think the contrast between my sister’s situation and my own is a deplorable injustice in our country. I can only think that in future generations, our grandchildren will look back on this aspect of our times with shock and scorn. Until then, I suppose all we can do is to fight unfair ballot measures and bills and the people that support them, and to keep telling the stories of people like my sister, which point out this terrible inequality in our system.

 

My plug for Barack Obama

For some reason, I’ve been really caught up in the political hubbub of the elections this last year. Maybe it’s the combination of knowing that we will finally be rid of G.W. and having the actual possibility of having a woman or a non-white person as president. At any rate, I’ve been watching a lot of the debates and some of the speeches, and I’ve been following the polls and the news.

For most of the primary season, I was pretty unsure. I initially was leaning toward Obama, based on early debates.

After talking to Jenni’s partner Anna, I was leaning toward Hillary Clinton. Anna’s main point was Clinton’s experience, and that is something that really appeals to me. I love the idea of somebody going into the white house on day one with a file cabinet full of wonderful legislation that they are going to start pushing through.

Then I talked to my politically-savvy friend Sandra, who was in favor of Edwards. She said that he was best in terms of working class issues. I started listening to the debates with those eyes and feeling like maybe I should vote for Edwards.

I still mostly leaned toward Clinton, though. The biggest reason for this besides her experience was health care. I think that our health care situation in the United States is a complete disaster, and it causes terrible tragedy for many, many Americans. Furthermore, it’s been going this way for a long time, and very little has been done about it. I think we should have universal healthcare coverage, and leaving anything so important to the whims of the insurance industry is a disaster. I don’t understand how Obama’s plan is going to work, where not everybody is required to have insurance. What makes the most sense to me is a system where everybody pays in, and the healthy people pay for the sick people. Later, the healthy people will be sick, and they’ll be paid for by the new healthy people. Maybe I’m being over simplistic, but I’ve been watching many debates, and I have yet to hear Obama explain how they’re going to fund a plan where healthy people don’t have to get insurance.

Clinton is smart. She’s a policy wonk. She absolutely knows her shit, inside out. She’s worked hard. She knows what she wants to do. She’s driven and organized. According to Anna, she’s a very successful Senator and is well-liked by the people of New York.

What happened? Well, I had to ask myself this question: “What are the most important qualities of a good president?”

As I listened to more speeches and debates between Obama and Clinton, and I read both of their autobiographies, it became clear that Obama leads in poise, ability to inspire, and professionalism. And, when I really asked myself the question of whih was more important:

1. kick-ass experience and policies and pretty good affect or
2. kick-ass affect and pretty good experience and policies

The president doesn’t get to legislate in a vacuum. The president has to inspire other people to go along with his or her ideas. For whatever set of reasons, Clinton is really disliked by a lot of people. The first problem is that this would make it hard for her to get elected. The second problem is that once she got elected, I think she would have a really hard time getting her policies adopted.

Obama says things in a way that make you want to go along with him. He talks in the way a good boss or a parent talks, making the audience feel inspired not just about him, but about themselves. Making them feel empowered and that they have the ability to accomplish great things.

It was pretty exciting in Washington state this year, since our caucuses were just a few days after Super Tuesday. I got to hear Obama speak live at the Key Arena (http://kuow.org/defaultProgram.asp?ID=14302 and luckily you don’t have to listen to the 2 hours of waiting we had to do before he got to the stage), just a walk from my work! And the caucuses were completely packed.

Our district is really diverse, with a lot of immigrants and people of all different races. The rally at Key Arena was the same way. And it’s been a really long time since I’ve seen someone who could gather together so many people from so many different walks of life together in the same room and have them all talking to each other, feeling excited, feeling powerful, and feeling like they’re all working together. It just felt really good!

I think that Obama is the person who has the best chance to bring the country together in a real, positive way, and the best chance to reunite the United States with the rest of the world in a dignified manner.

I’m listening to Clinton’s book “Living History” right now. It’s interesting to hear her talk bout how Bill’s campaign for president was perceived. The kind of language that was used to describe his run for the presidency, the way he came from behind, the way he was from a new generation, the way he was going against the establishment in the party… If you took out the context and the names, she could be talking about Obama today.

That’s not to say that I don’t think there’s good chance that Clinton could also do a great job for our country, and I’ll absolutely get behind her if she is the country’s democratic choice. But I am just more excited and inspired to consider what could be accomplished during an Obama presidency.