This past August, my uncle married his partner in a small ceremony at their home in New York. For me, the most powerful moment of the day was when the rabbi announced, to great acclaim by all, that she declared them wed “by the power vested in [her] by the state of New York.” Although Mitchell and Jonathan had celebrated their relationship several years earlier at a commitment ceremony with all of their friends and family, it had lacked the imprimatur of the state. In the days and weeks following their wedding, I gave much thought to the ways that love and law intertwined at the ceremony. Ultimately, it has impacted the way I think about our profession.
I have long been a supporter of equal rights for the LBGT community. But, even though I have many friends and family members who are members of that community, my support has been relatively conceptual. I usually thought about the issue with my head rather than my heart, focusing on legal arguments rather than the impact on people. It was not until my uncles’ wedding that, for me, the issue shifted from an abstraction to the wonderful, complicated real. While I had understood that marriage equality was a profoundly moral issue, the fact that I had been approaching it from the framework of the law had distanced me from thinking about the issue in terms of people like my uncle and his husband. This conceptual distance, once I recognized it, surprised and troubled me. Constitutional principles are incredibly important, but as lawyers, we ought not lose sight of the human element the individuals impacted by the application of the law.
