Why I Got Married Before California's Prop 8 Vote

Will My Marriage Last?
On Tuesday, Californians will head to the polls. How millions of strangers cast their votes will affect the most intimate parts of my life.

By David J. Jefferson | NEWSWEEK
Published Oct 30, 2008

I got married on Saturday. I'm just hoping it lasts through next week.

Few newlyweds enter a marriage with such low expectations (except for maybe Britney Spears, whose 2004 Vegas quickie was annulled after two days). But my new spouse, Jeff Bechtloff, and I are gay men living in California. And like thousands of couples who've tied the knot since the state Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage this spring, we rushed to get wed before voters could decide on Nov. 4 whether or not we should.

After hemming and hawing, we figured we'd better hurry up when the polls this month started showing that voters might actually take away our new nuptial rights. We had to send our invitations by e-mail and didn't expect many people could attend on less than three week's notice. So we were stunned and humbled when almost everyone we knew—our extended families, our friends, Jeff's co-workers and mine at NEWSWEEK—all said they would come. A United Nations lawyer we know flew in from Kosovo, and Jeff's sisters traveled from Florida to our home in Los Angeles. Jeff's mother walked him down the aisle, followed by my 86-year-old father and 93-year-old mother, who accompanied me as I bit my lip and fought back unexpected tears. Standing before the judge (who happened to be the sister of our best man), I looked out over the audience of 100 familiar faces and saw my tears of joy returned in kind. If that's not love, then I'm not sure what is.

It's difficult to explain how it feels now, as Jeff and I face the possibility that our marriage could lose its validity come next Tuesday. The absurdity of having the most personal aspect of your life determined by a ballot proposition is best summed up by the slogan on a T shirt I saw a gay man wearing this month: CAN I VOTE ON YOUR MARRIAGE? Proposition 8 would change the state Constitution to stipulate "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." It's not certain that marriages performed before the vote will continue to be valid if Prop 8 passes, though our judge is of the opinion they will, since ex post facto, or retroactive, laws are illegal under Article 1 of the United States Constitution. I am grateful that the Founding Fathers had the foresight not to make the U.S. Constitution as easily fungible as the state of California's.

Like most Americans, I like to believe in the promises those Founding Fathers made. I hold the Declaration of Independence especially dear because it was written by a long-lost cousin of mine (look again at my byline). If he were alive today, I'd have invited him to my wedding. Not that Thomas Jefferson would necessarily have approved of my sexual orientation—back in his day, he advocated castration as punishment for sodomy in the state of Virginia. Then again, my cousin was hardly a model of sexual propriety, canoodling as he did with his slave Sally Hemings. I would only hope that the man who promised me "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" would agree that affairs of the heart should not be determined by popular vote. (Question for the Mormon church, which has pushed its members to funnel millions of dollars into the Yes on Prop 8 campaign: do you regret having helped my dad and I trace our genealogy when I was in sixth grade?)

Look, I'm a realist. "All men are created equal" may be the cornerstone of what we call "liberty," but it has taken a couple of centuries for the American populace to digest the meaning of those words, and I suspect it will take centuries more. When my mother was born, women didn't have the right to vote. When my sister was born, "separate but equal" was the law in the South. When I was born, blacks and whites couldn't marry in several states.

And for most of my life, many of my fellow Americans have attempted to prevent gay people from having the same rights as others, whether by refusing to allow homosexuals to serve openly in the military, withholding legal recognition of our relationships—or in subtler, more personal ways. When Jeff and I were first planning our wedding, we decided to have the reception at our favorite restaurant, a dimly lit joint with red Naugahyde booths across the street from the Warner Bros. studios. But as we left the restaurant after a visit with one of the banquet managers, a drunk patron in his late 20s saw fit to spit an ugly remark at us: "Bye boys," he said with a fake lisp. In our seven years together, Jeff and I have encountered almost no antigay slurs—if anything, just the opposite—and it was a sock in the gut, a reminder of the taunts I endured as a kid and the fear I carry to this day that some jerk might decide to beat me up because I'm a "faggot." What if another patron said something offensive at the wedding reception, in front of our parents and friends? The next day—just two weeks before the wedding—we hastily switched venues to a more-private facility.

Since I was a teenager, I've been watching gay people in America fight for their rights. In 1978, when I was 14, a conservative legislator named John Briggs got an initiative on the California state ballot to prevent gays and lesbians from working in the public schools. The measure was leading in the polls by a large margin until just the week before the election when Gov. Ronald Reagan announced his opposition and it lost by a wide margin. "Homosexuality is not a contagious disease like measles," the governor wrote in a September 1978 statement. "Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual's sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child's teachers do not really influence this."