Decendant of Ulysses S. Grant Speaks Up For Marriage Equality

LGBT, NewsBites, Society & Culture — By Speak Equal on December 9, 2009 at 8:00 am

The following op-ed was originally written by Ulysses Dietz, the great-great grandson of the famous Ulysses S. Grant. It was originally published via the Star-Ledger Online

My partner of 34 years and I have lived in New Jersey for more than 29 of those years. A couple of years ago, we were officially joined in a state-sanctioned civil union ceremony. Geoffrey M. Connor, a municipal judge, performed the ceremony in our living room; his wife Holly, a colleague and friend of mine, looked on approvingly. Witnesses included my 91-year-old widowed mother, my brother and sister-in-law, and as many friends as we could gather on short notice. Our two children, then 11 and 12, acted as attendants.

This happened on April 28, a Saturday. It is a date I will always remember — only because it is the day after April 27, the anniversary of the birth of my great-great grandfather, Ulysses S. Grant. Although the ceremony moved me more than I expected, the notion of a civil union seemed to me, and seems to me still, inadequate.

After 34 years of joy and sorrow; after building a home together; after combining our lives and careers; after dealing with the death of three of our parents; after struggling for four years to become parents ourselves through adoption — after all this, civil union is still a day late and a dollar short of the real thing: marriage.

Gary and I have not suffered from the egregious sort of discrimination that makes up the heart-breaking stories we have heard over the years from gay-marriage advocates. We have carefully drafted wills, as well as a drawer full of legal documents giving each other spousal rights in terms of hospital visits, medical decisions and end-of-life determinations. We worry about taxes, college funds, insurance issues and, ultimately, about added inheritance penalties because we are not legally married. We are, of course, tightly bound by the fact that we are both the legal guardians of our kids (although they are at the stage when they might wish to forget that detail). We always travel with adoption documents, in case someone somewhere decides to question the legality of our parenthood.

We have been blessed by the fact that we have never had need to use these documents; have never been kept from one another or from our children in times of illness or need. Except once, before our civil union, during a summer vacation.

We were stopped at the Canadian border, returning from a visit to Victoria on Vancouver Island. It was the American border police who stopped us, who chose to dismiss the copies of our adoption papers and our children’s birth certificates (naming us both as parents) and then separated us from our children, questioning us as if we were potential kidnapers and our children as if they were potential victims. [READ MORE]

Tags: Debate, Equal Rights, Equality, Gay Marriage, GLBT, LGBT, LGBT, Marriage Equality, New Jersey, Ulysses Dietz, Ulysses S. Grant, Vote