Then Comes Marriage by Roberta Kaplan Page A

to get married in New Paltz but had not succeeded in doing so before the shutdown. He wanted to know if I would take on the case pro bono, not because I had any kind of reputation as a gay rights activist, but for far more pragmatic reasons. For one thing, Matt knew that bringing in a lawyer from Paul, Weiss, a firm known for its litigation prowess, meant gaining the resources of a big law firm, which would be a tremendous help to a nonprofit like the ACLU. But there was another reason as well.
    Matt also knew that I had clerked for Chief Judge Kaye and that, as a result, I knew most of the other judges on the Court of Appeals at that time and was familiar with the way that the Court of Appeals operates. Being able to make a personal connection was crucial in a case like this, because marriage equality was still a foreign concept to most people. Matt felt that having a familiar person, who happened to be gay, standing up and making the argument to the judges might help to shift the equation in our favor.
    The personal is political, as the saying goes. And that became abundantly true in my own life over the next two years as I prepared, filed, and argued the case for marriage equality in New York.
    THE FIRST TIME I asked Rachel if she wanted to get married, she responded with “Don’t be ridiculous.”
    We had been domestic partners for a couple of years at that point, and although I had never been the type to fantasize about walking down the aisle in a frilly white dress, I was surprised that I had recently begun to think about actually getting married. Rachel and I still could not marry anywhere in the United States because Massachusetts, the only state that permitted marriage for same-sex couples, then offered that right only to Massachusetts state residents. But we could get married in Canada, and in the first months of 2004, hundreds of gay American couples, including some friends of ours, made the trek north to do just that.
    Yet even though we could finally get legally married, we still had conflicted feelings about it. For one thing, it was not entirely clear at first that the state of New York would recognize Canadian marriages between gay couples. But it was absolutely clear that the U.S. federal government would not, because of DOMA. At the time, Rachel thought, What’s the point? As she explained:
    We would not have had the same rights as straight married couples so it did not feel like an act of equality—it felt like begging for acceptance as if we were trying to say we’re normal. It felt like an act of conformity, not an act of affirmation. And I did not feel like doing that. I wanted to have equal rights as a married lesbian couple. Getting married at that point felt like a pretense because it had no real substance. We wouldn’t get any additional rights, and no New York official would recognize our marriage as socially, legally, or even emotionally equivalent to the marriages of straight people.
    I understood how Rachel felt. I too was frustrated by the lack of real recognition and rights for gay Americans. But at the same time, I found myself increasingly wanting to get married, and to get married to Rachel. On top of that was the fact that we had started talking about having a child. Both of us had known from the very beginning of our relationship that we wanted children, and with both of us edging toward forty, it was time to get moving if we were truly serious.
    For a lesbian couple, having a baby is not a simple endeavor. Pretty much every available avenue—from using a sperm donor (anonymous or otherwise) to adopting—involves multiple steps and lots of legal documents, so we knew it might be a while before any baby showed up. As we started making plans for our long-term future as a family, I asked Rachel again, “So, would you like to get married?” Once again, she said no. But she was not calling the idea ridiculous anymore, because something surprising had