.equalifornia.

So, let me introduce myself. I am a college student who attends college in lovely western Massachusetts. In the spring of my sophomore year, I met this girl who I’d known only as an acquaintance before, but whom I got to talking with for hours in the library about politics and really “clicked” with. That very night we began a whirlwind romance that, a year later, resulted in an engagement and a stronger-than-ever bond, with promises of a shared life and laughter and countless adventures.

The thing that trips us up is that we’re both female - gasp, lesbians! - and so our relationship / lives are seen as somehow less legitimate than romantic unions comprised of a man and a woman. In thinking about our future and planning for grad school, we not only have to think about programs, faculty, location, et cetera, but how well we will be “accepted” into the community instead of being harassed and targeted for persecution. This permeates every facet of our lives together, but as of late, as we’ve announced our engagement to our families and friends, we’re faced more than ever with how we will even logistically get married, since pre-May 15th, Massachusetts was the only state in which we could marry.

So what’s the big deal, right? We go to school in Massachusetts! Well, after same-sex marriage was legalized in Massachusetts on May 17th, 2004, then-Governor Mitt Romney decided, in homophobic fury, to resurrect a 1913 law - a law that sprang out of racist bigotry - preventing non-residents from marrying in Massachusetts. As a California resident, this is a problem for me. Therefore, I would have to intend to reside in Massachusetts after our marriage in order to get married in the first place, and as much as I adore the Pioneer Valley and in particular Northampton, I have other places to go And of course, as soon as we left Massachusetts, our marriage would have been null anywhere else in the United States. Add to the fact that even if we’d stayed in Massachusetts forever, the federal government still doesn’t recognize same-sex marriage, so we’d be forced to file federal income taxes separately, thus flying in the face of the legitimacy and deep personal significance of our relationship as well as denying us joint tax benefits, and we wouldn’t be able to get other privileges such as Social Security. Imagine, going through all that and only being allowed to live in one state, and then not even being recognized in yet other ways.

Thus, we railed against the injustice and lamented and had many long deep talks about it - the kind of talks that brought us together that warm spring night over a year ago.

So, imagine our immense joy when on May 15th, 2008, the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of the constitutionality of same-sex marriage! We’d been following the case obsessively, tracking Equality California [EQCA] and the National Center for Lesbian Rights [NCLR] for all updates and remote signs of any glimmer of a decision; I’d even signed up for updates directly from the CA Supreme Court. I remember the night before, anxiously not being able to sleep, and then checking my e-mail inbox the next day in the first minutes after the ruling was to be made, scarcely believing my eyes and then rushing off to tell my beautiful fiancee that yes, my home state was actually going to join her home state in giving us equal rights. We hugged, we cried, we even screamed And we told everyone about it to share in the great news.

As we hear about the right-wing efforts to put an initiative on the November CA ballot amending the California Constitution to overturn the CA Supreme Court’s ruling, as well as the same right-wing organizations’ attempts to put a stay on the ruling until after the vote in November, my heart sinks and is heavy with bitterness and worry, wondering how these people can feel so righteous in denying us our happiness and basic economic and physical security. That is what I will be dealing with in this blog: my life, my love, others’ hatred, and the politics of an entire state attempting to decide if I shall have equal rights in November. We swing in the balance, and as we, along with countless others, ride this crazy tide together, I will keep this blog as a record.

I do hope you enjoy, relate, or at least learn a bit.

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