Marriage

A Paradigm Shift for Marriage

Posted on October 23, 2009 by Ami and has 1 comment.

You know, I wasn’t always a big gay. For more than half of my life so far, I did not self-identify as queer.

In fact, the number of years I’ve had to think about marriage are about three to one the number of years I’ve had to think about queerness. I’ve encountered marriage as a child, as a teen, as a straight-by-default, as a closeted queer, as an out queer, as a married queer, as a Lutheran, as a Mormon, and as a person with enough Comparative Religion credits to need several paragraphs to express their spiritual perspective.

So I was very surprised to learn something about marriage while volunteering for the “No on 1″ campaign in Maine.

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No on 1, Part 2–Heads We Win, Tails You Lose

Posted on October 21, 2009 by Ruby and has 2 comments.

There are 13 days left until Election Day. If you had been in the No on 1 campaign office today, you would have known that. You might have noticed the big sign on the back wall that is changed every day to remind you of the imminence of your job. You might have called a volunteer to ask them to spend some time canvassing or at the office in the coming days.

You might have been worried. Yesterday (14 days out) there was a poll published [pdf of press release] that said that 48% of Mainers were for Question 1 (boo), 48% against, and 4% undecided. I’m sure somebody has a calculation on what it takes to get a percentage point of the population to vote your way. How much money. How many volunteer hours. What kind of weather on Election Day.

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Trailer Life, Volume III

Posted on October 17, 2009 by Ruby and has 1 comment.

If you’re thinking about taking your RV to New York City, don’t. There’s only one RV park anywhere nearby, and it’s a parking lot on the Jersey side of New York Harbor. When I say parking lot, this is not a poetic interpretation of a relatively plain RV park. This place had half the charm of your average rest stop. It was next to a marina and an empty, overgrown lot, and the RVs were so close to each other that you and your neighbor could reach out and shake each other’s hands. Public transportation was very close, and it was damned close to the city. The City. But still.

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Still Married

Posted on October 16, 2009 by Ami and has 2 comments.

We’re staying in Albany, NY tonight and we are officially married.

We’ve been through New Jersey, a vegetable oil spill (in the trailer kitchen after bumpy road), milky spills, some puppy spills–but now we’re all tucked in. And Ruby and I are married.

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Marriage (and Other LGBT) Rights in Michigan and Ohio

Posted on October 9, 2009 by Ruby and has 3 comments.

Yesterday I had a bright idea: instead of stopping every hour (sometimes every half hour) to eat, gas the car, walk the dogs, or change the baby, we should do all of that and then drive for three hours. Straight, if you’ll forgive the expression. So that’s what we did. The dogs and I held our pee. Frances didn’t cry because of her diaper. Ami played me podcasts and read me e-mail and interesting tweets. The car cruised along at its set 65 mph, and it was almost easy to forget we were driving.

Until the car started to slow down. Sure, you probably knew that was coming, and why the car was slowing down. But I didn’t. I looked at the speedometer. I looked at the cruise control indicator. I think I even checked the gas pedal.

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