"The Truth Before Freedom Came..."

I Tried To Illegally Get Gay Married

Hunter Pauli

November 4, 2014

As a state-described “straight person," I am incapable of feeling firsthand the emotional sting of being treated unequally by government for the people I prefer to have sex with. I cannot feel that enormity, because the state will not let me. It says I am better than gays with the same rootless logic that says cats are better than dogs.

Who you prefer to have sex with has been crafted into quantifiable identities by the state that atypical minorities may be marginalized more efficiently. But just because definitions like "gay" and "straight" are social constructs does not mean they are not real. Like race and nationality, we made them real in our laws and our legal systems and our constitutions.

Montana's constitution bans gay marriage implicitly, never mentioning homosexuality, enforcing through practicality injustices too offensive to execute literally. As amended in 2004, “Only a marriage between one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as marriage in this state.”

Terms like "same-sex marriage" mask that these bans are expressly designed to hurt same-sex gays, not same-sex straights wishing to marry like my roommate Jacob and I. The state does not ban same-sex marriage for fear of the economically destabilizing effect of equally-paid male power couples. The state bans gay marriage because the majority of those in power agree they are better than gays. Inequality is prejudice on paper, and the ink stains our community.

My girlfriend escorted Jacob and I to the Clerk's office on the second floor of the Missoula County Courthouse. In case they refused to give two men a marriage application outright, she'd step in as a legally acceptable ringer to secure the forms anyway.

Our marriage attempt stalled almost immediately. The secretary kept his professional composure as what looked like a straight, albeit young couple requested a marriage certificate, but couldn't hide his surprise when I handed him Jacob and I's IDs. He saw both and listed us as male, his observation the first line of defense enforcing marriage inequality in Montana. He explained that as the law read now, only applications between opposite-sex partners could be processed, but that we could still have a form.

Clerk of Court Shirley Faust explained all marriage applications are processed locally and sent to Vital Records and Statistics in Helena, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. The application itself, FORM V.S. 18 (2000 Revision 2), comes from this centralized hub, replete with exclusionary official vocabulary like groom, bride, husband and wife. Faust explained the fields under sex are automatically filled on the PDF as male for groom and female for bride and cannot be changed.

Marriage in Montana is a binary system legislatively and computationally. We program our machines to discriminate and they do it without complaint. They may feel nothing, but county employees do. They looked obviously hurt having to reject our application, and wished us luck in the 2015 legislative session.

Public employees are forced to discriminate against their fellow citizens face to face, a dishonor legislators who make inequality binding have the luxury to put on the shoulders and consciences of others. Little Eichmanns at every level of Montana state bureaucracy enforce, against their better angels, prejudice made law by officials and spat out by unfeeling machines.

Public employees fight back against this banality in small ways. On the clerk's marriage license info sheet, just above the discriminatory requirements of bride and groom, sits a row of Valentine's Day clipart in the document header. Marriage in Montana, the legal binding of love, is a heartless system decorated with hearts. Its architecture is not vast. One sentence of the state constitution prevents marriage equality, and one file enforces it. A better world is a key press away.

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Freedom came to Montana last week...

"Fear Eats the Soul"