Gender, Sexuality and Law:

Interlude (Lover’s Lament)

Harper Jean Tobin

Contributing Writer

I couldn’t write my regular column this week; something happened to me. I think it happened on Tuesday morning on my way to class. Passing through Wade Oval I was suddenly confronted with a small band of students merrily brandishing Bush/Cheney ’04 placards, and putting the final touches on a flurry of acerbic yet content-free slogans posted and chalked all over the heart of campus. And although I have always been unusually warm to strangers for a city girl, I found I could not look these folks in the eye. I couldn’t even look in their direction. And my face was flushed with a strange mix of embarrassment, sadness, and deep, burning resentment.

Rewind eight weeks. It’s a surprisingly lovely August day, and my beloved and I are at long last getting married. Surrounded by our friends and family, we stand beneath a giant tree on the banks of the Black River, golden sunlight streaming through the branches and falling in exquisite patterns on our beaming faces. The minister is talking but I am only vaguely aware of what she is saying, or of our guests standing and sitting all around, because I am looking into my beloved’s eyes. I am thinking of the love we’ve built together, and of all our hopes and dreams for the future, and the tremendous comfort in having this love of mine by my side in the years to come. I am near tears, brimming with joy, and my beloved is taking my hands. She is saying to me, “I take you, Harper Jean Tobin, as my wife…”

Twenty-five minutes later, my head is still swimming, and my bride and I are stepping out of the trees into the full light of day. Our guests are rushing off toward the reception, leaving the two of us standing alone in a public park, beatific but out of place with our flowing gowns and bursting bouquets. We are not saying much, gazing at each other again like many a newlywed couple, as if to say, “Are we really married now?”

Two passersby appear, and naturally they’re curious. “There a wedding going on?”

The two blushing brides answer proudly, “Yep – we just got married!”

“Like, to each other? The state of Ohio’s more liberal than I thought!”

At this we are dumbfounded – ripped back to a reality where our love and commitment to each other is, incredibly, a political issue. A reality where our friends are married, but we are “married.” “I’m afraid the state of Ohio’s got nothing to do with it,” my bride replies.

All of this rushed back to me in that moment Tuesday morning, and when I arrived at the law school, all the banter about the evening’s vice presidential debate was like so much buzzing in my head. All I could see were the signs: the slogans on the sidewalk, the buttons on backpacks, the stickers on jackets. All of them seemed to be arrows pointed at me. All of these people seemed to be spitting in my face – mine and my beloved’s. Whatever individual beliefs were behind these signs, they all seemed to be telling me: you’re not welcome here.

What else can I conclude from events around me? From calls to add to the constitution a clarification that no, we’re not equal? From declarations that the institution of marriage needs to be protected from people like us, from loves like ours? From the insinuation that we’re unfit to raise children? From the apparent determination to keep job discrimination against us legal? From asking Ohio’s secretary of state to stump for a state amendment banning even the most modest and trifling recognition of our relationship – because that amendment could turn out more votes for Bush?

The people behind these signs and buttons have never been personally unkind to us, of course. Unlike some people I have encountered, no one here at school has, for example, made insulting remarks when I mentioned my wife. I know this just as I know that my grandparents, who came to our wedding, meant no ill will by posting their signed “Thank you for supporting Bush/Cheney ‘04” photograph on their refrigerator. I know this, but I also know what their votes say, to us, and to millions of other Americans: you don’t count.

Back to Publications