My wedding has been postponed one week due to winter weather. I followed storm reports out of Buncombe County on Twitter through the day yesterday, and it was difficult to know what to do. When the governor of North Carolina declared a state of emergency, we called it. Having finally made the decision to wait was a relief. 

I’ve been in this relationship for almost 15 years. It hasn’t been until recently that I ever thought we’d get married. Now that we can, I’m more and more irritated, even angry, that we cannot perform the ceremony in Tennessee. Because we can’t, a fifteen minute drive to the county court clerk’s office has become a ten hour round trip, overnight stay in another state. I’ll need to take two days off from work to make it happen.

The Supreme Court will likely resolve all of this come June. That’s all well and good. But we need to get married now. It makes no difference why and it’s no one’s business. The fact remains that I am denied a right that people who live in 38 other states are given.

This will all be settled in about a week for us, but I don’t feel right not drawing attention to the injustice of it. Years ago, Tennesseans voted to constitutionally prohibit same sex marriages. More recently, a judge on the sixth circuit court upheld that law when it was tried. I feel like the people who voted for this constitutional ban, the judge who upheld it, or perhaps the State of Tennessee need to reimburse me to cover expenses accrued for this forced destination wedding. I’ll throw in compensation for pain and suffering, too, now that we’ve had to change the date because we could not travel.

As I said, this will be resolved and eventually be a fascinating story I can share with my grandchildren. But I wonder: what other group is suffering because of injustice? How am I blindly contributing to their pain? What am I doing to not only support them, but to work for change?