Best Woman
Tom & Brad, Chicago
Submitted by their friend, Gina
In 1999, I had the privilege of being the "best woman" at my friend Tom's commitment ceremony with his partner, Brad. Tom and I have been friends since we were 10 years old -- nearly a decade before he came out. It was an incredibly joyful experience for me to see him, after years of searching, pledge his life and future to a man as smart, funny and full of integrity as Brad.
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Brad and Tom on holiday in Peru
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Their ceremony, which took place in a historic theater building in Chicago, also united Tom's huge urban Latino family with Brad's Anglo suburban one. Though many of Tom's relatives, who are highly religious, have had some struggles with his sexual orientation, all but one turned out to support him that day. And everyone had a great time. Brad's enthusiastic family had hired a wedding coordinator and pulled out all the stops!
Mixing in the couple's straight and gay friends, it was truly the most diverse-- and fun -- party I've ever attended. It was easy on a glorious night like that to "forget" that the couple's union was not actually a legal one -- that they are, even now, denied the right to actually marry.
Now, eight years later, as Tom and Brad make efforts to have a child, opting to work with a surrogate after hitting one barrier after another in pursuing adoption, it strikes me how -- one perfect night aside -- our government and legal system continue to make sure that same-sex couples just don't have remotely the same rights and benefits as heterosexual couples.
Like many gay couples, Tom and Brad have been together just as long, and are just as happy as (or happier than!) the heterosexual couples in their lives. Yet around every corner, they face roadblocks and hardships about things heterosexual couples are able to take for granted. My husband and I adopted twin girls from China in 2001, so I speak from personal experience when I say that it is absurd and painful to think that anyone, anywhere would think a baby was "better off" in an institution than with a loving couple like Tom and Brad, who will be wonderful parents. This system makes about as much sense as arguing about the "sanctity" of marriage between men and women when the divorce rate has been nearly 50 percent for three decades!
The gap between reality and lofty moral ideals seems to just grow larger and larger, and everyone suffers, from couples denied the freedom to marry to babies who are being denied access to parents who desperately want to love and raise them. Who does this system benefit? When will it become clear that discrimination of this sort against the LGBT community is no different than discriminating against someone for the color of his or her skin? Date Created: 10/24/2007
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