What did I ever do to you?

I just passed a girl on the street. Loose fit jeans, chartreuse sweater, long wavy hair, yellow cross-body leather bag, cigarette in hand.  Is she married? 

Then this guy- unkempt white beard, black tshirt, workman pants, boots.  Married?

What if each of these individuals were married?  How would my [brief] interactions with each of them on the corner of Forbes Avenue and Atwood Street have been different?  How would Reggie be different?  If green sweater girl was married, would Reggie not have left a very sweet "happy dating anniversary" card on my nightstand yesterday morning? Would I not have thrown that last load of laundry in the dryer? Would he not have done the dishes? Grilled burgers for dinner? Picked mint from the garden? Played with giant legos with Tilly?

Well, gosh, none of that makes much sense, does it?  I mean, if green sweater girl or scraggly beard guy were married, nothing nothing NOTHING about our lives would be different. Certainly nothing about our married lives.

Why would I even question how we, as two loving married people, would be different if scraggly beard guy had just poured a travel mug of coffee for his spouse before leaving the house? Or if green sweater girl had texted her significant other to remember she'd be out of work late today?

The answer is that we wouldn't be different.  We wouldn't be different at all.  I'd still get frustrated at Reg's inability to locate the clothes hamper, and love how he makes the perfect poached egg on Sunday mornings.

You know who would be different? Green sweater girl and scraggly beard guy. They would be different were they married. Because marriage is special and wonderful. To tell the world, we are a family, a unit in society. We choose to represent ourselves this way.  It is our choice. Aside from the social qualities, marriage brings with it a host of other protections and promises under the law.

Apparently, the state of other people's unions does affect some people.  Apparently some people believe with enough vigor that they will stand in line, in record numbers, in the middle of a work day, to cast a vote to FORBID another human being from getting married.  Apparently, in the mind of some, green sweater girl texting her wife that she will be late does impact how another person's heterosexual spouse plants tomatoes, cleans the bathtub, holds their hand in labor. Apparently a woman marrying a woman, or a man marrying a man, affects how another person's marriage works.

I'm trying to understand it, but I just can't. 

90 years ago, states passed Racial Integrity Acts.  The point of the law was to prevent Mathilda from being born. To prevent inter-racial marrying and reproducing.  These laws were, quite simply, based on the premise that anyone "non-white" was less. Less of a person, less intelligent, less deserving.  Less. Therefore, marriage to someone of a different race was less. Less than single-race marriage. Children of inter-racial marriages were even lesser. In many states, from the 1600s until 1967 with the Supreme Court overturning all interracial marriage bans with Loving v. Virginia, it was illegal to marry someone of a different race. Almost 400 years of legally banning who someone else chooses to love.

Last summer, Reggie and I were on a walk with baby Mathilda.  We passed a couple in their 70s. Like us, the gentleman was black, the woman white.  They stopped us to coo over Tilly.  Then they told us of their story. How they met at Carnegie Mellon in the 60s.  How they fell in love and married.  How they were harassed on campus. How police were told to turn the other way. They told us of their three beautiful, successful children.  They told us how they love seeing mixed-race families, how it makes them happy to see that what they went through was not in vain.

It took nearly 400 years for this country to agree that legally banning a person from marrying another person, simply because they were not of the same race was wrong. 400 years to realize that my choosing to marry a black man does absolutely nothing to affect the relationship my white friend has with her white husband.  The Racial Integrity Act seems so medieval now, it's hard to imagine it was ever law. But we are, in effect, watching history repeat itself. Yesterday, the state of North Carolina joined thirty other states in the union in constitutionally forbidding people to marry whomever they love. 

Will it take another 400 years for us to learn- again- that limiting the rights of human beings is wrong? That government deciding who two adults can love is wrong? What did I ever do to you for you to restrict whom I can love? Gay straight black white. Why do you care so much? We live in a country where people in over half the states believe that a stranger- scraggly white beard guy, or green sweater girl-'s marriage somehow impacts their own enough to make that marriage illegal.  Shame on them. Shame on us.