How Would You Like Your Marriage Voided?

I know firsthand what a feeling it was to go from being “partnered’ to being married; it’s really a subtle difference, maybe a change in speech — This is my husband versus This is my partner — but it felt huge.

Now, imagine that you’ve married your partner, girlfriend, boyfriend, significant other, and you’re feeling that joy, that sense of newness, that sense of equality, only to have the rug yanked out from under when a Circuit Court decides that marriages bans against the gays are just fine.

That’s what happened when the 6th Circuit Court recently ruled that marriage bans are legal and, somehow, just. And since that ruling the state of Michigan is trying to declare that the 300 same-sex couples who received licenses last March, and were subsequently legally married in the state, are now no longer husband-and-husband or wife-and-wife.

How’s that for equality?

The weddings were performed by county clerks March 22, a day after U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman struck down Michigan's same-sex marriage ban; that same day the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati issued a stay on those marriages, but it came after those 300 couples had legally completed the steps to be married.

Now, Michigan Governor, and ISBL Asshat winner, Rick Snyder would like those marriages voided since the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Michigan's ban on same-sex marriage, along with bans in Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.

You can’t get married; you can get married; now your marriage is void. It never existed. You don’t exist as a married couple. Ain’t that America?

Lawyers for the governor, and for the state of Michigan, are saying that "from a legal standpoint, because the marriages rested solely on the district court's erroneous decision, which has now been reversed, it is as if the marriages never existed.”

I mean, bad enough that we are being treated like second-class citizens; bad enough that we are expected to do as everyone else in this country is supposed to do, work, pay taxes, be responsible citizens, vote, and yet we do not have the same rights as those other citizens; bad enough. But to allow us the opportunity to get married when the law is changed, and then to change it back and sue to have our marriages declared void?

That is not America; that cannot happen. These cases need to go before the Supreme Court and have marriage equality declared the law of land everywhere in this country.

Case closed.

Appeals ruling voids300 gay marriages, Michigan argues