July 02, 2015 | Danielle Moodie-Mills | LGBTQIA
On Friday, June 26, 2015, I was glued to my Twitter feed and every cable news outlet, eagerly awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage.
For many, 6/26/15 will become a new anniversary to mark on their calendars—celebrating the freedom to marry whom you love, regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity, in all 50 states.
This date was already written in bold on my calendar, fitted with a happy face emoticon. Six years prior to SCOTUS’s transformational decision, on a rooftop in Washington, DC, my then girlfriend (now wife) popped the question.
Back in 2009, when Aisha asked me to marry her, there were only a handful of states where we could legally wed, and the District wasn’t one of them.
The marriage equality fight was just beginning to heat up in our adopted hometown as well as nationally—except most of the people on TV at that time discussing the importance of marriage didn’t look like us; they were white, affluent, gay men. To us, it seemed that they weren’t truly able to invoke empathy, because in many ways white men (gay or straight) are viewed as the oppressor, not the oppressed. And while debating marriage in the context of "rights" has its merits, we were learning that when we talked about loveand relationships, hearts and minds began to open.
Out of seven billion people on this planet, when you find the one person that loves you and only you, you want to shout it from every rooftop and celebrate with anyone and everyone you can. Deciding to entwine your life with someone else’s is an indescribable joy that everyone, regardless of whom they love, should have the right to experience.
It was in the blissful moments after Aisha asked me to spend the rest of my life with her that the politics become personal for us.
Sure, we were two politicos who had ventured to Washington, DC for college from our respective hometowns in New Jersey and New York because we wanted to be at the epicenter of power, “making a difference.” The phrase “making a difference,” however, didn’t really feel that significant until we actually had something to fight for.
The idea that our love was any different from that of our parents, friends, or colleagues—something separate, unequal, unsavory—sparked something in us.
We believed that we had the right to live, love, and labor OUT loud wherever our hearts desired, and that no one (namely our country) whose founding principles are steeped in democracy and every citizen’s right to pursuit their happiness, should be able to stop us.
It was with the audacity of this truth that we decided to dive wholeheartedly into the fight for marriage equality. We knew that it was going to be the stories of love and commitment, not statistics and poll numbers, that would ultimately change hearts and minds.
Maybe it was youthful ignorance, but we believed that our message of love—and black love specifically—was something special, and if we could just share our story and diversify the images of what same-sex couples looked like and who marriage was “for,” then we would be making a difference.
In 2009, we went from being two young women engaged and in love to being national spokespeople on marriage equality and then to becoming LGBT advocates, launching the FIRE (Fighting Injustice to Reach Equality) Initiative at the Center for American Progress—working to amplify the stories of African American LGBT people and the discriminatory policies that were most adversely affecting our community.
Last Friday, when my wife and I sat with bated breath, holding hands and watching the announcement that love finally won, tears began streaming down our faces. We knew in that moment that our voices, our work, our love mattered.
A portion of Justice Kennedy’s decision read:
The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning. When new insight reveals discord between the Constitution’s central protections and a received legal stricture, a claim to liberty must be addressed.
The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision made us—all of us, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals—not only more visible, but a bit more liberated in our skin. Our country, our government, recognized our loving relationships—and us—as equal.
As Justice Kennedy wrote, as we evolve, so must our idea of what justice and liberty look like. Our forefathers and foremothers couldn’t have imagined the White House and other national monuments turning rainbow last Friday in recognition of LGBT pride or that #LoveWins.
They couldn’t have imagined my wife and me, two African American lesbians claiming our love and humanity in such big and bold ways that we would have our images and words scattered throughout the media.
What they could imagine, though, was the creation of a more perfect union—and on Friday our country lived up to its ideals.
Discrimination seeks to make us invisible. It seeks to shrink us and disconnect us from our dignity and our humanity, but when we dare to live OUT loud, to be bold, and stand in our truth, we shine a light and act as a beacon of hope—showing others that they have the right to be visible, be fabulous, and love OUT loud unapologetically. #LoveWon
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