From Asian Week, CA

Gita, Mildred and the Freedom to Marry

By Phil Tajitsu Nash

November 11, 2005

Gita Deane arrived just in time for the start of a town hall meeting held at the University of Maryland last Wednesday. A striking Bombay-born woman in her early 40s who went to college in Washington, D.C., Gita strode confidently to the table at the front of a packed conference room.

After shaking hands with fellow speakers Ben de Guzman, Genie Cortez of ACLU, Dan Furmansky of Equality Maryland, student Gus Collins, and church and human rights activist Jon Melegrito, she sat down and got her notes ready. While it had been a rush to get to the meeting on time, she had wanted to make sure that her six- and nine-year-old daughters finished their dinner and homework.

When her turn came to speak, Gita told the audience how she had come to the United States to go to college and had met the love of her life.

Despite knowing that her student visa would expire eventually, they continued their relationship as Gita pursued graduate school and a year of training. When immigration authorities finally sent her a formal order to leave the country, Gita and her partner decided to get married.

Unfortunately, the prevailing law at that time did not allow them to marry, so Gita took her chances by going to New Delhi and applying for re-entry into the United States. She was successful, and today she, her partner of 24 years, and her six- and nine-year-old daughters live in the Baltimore area.

As I listened to Gita's story, I was reminded of the plight of Mildred Loving, a woman whose marriage to the one she loved was challenged by the state of Virginia in 1958. Not only was the Lovings' Washington, D.C., marriage certificate not recognized in Virginia, but the trial judge who upheld Virginia's right to ban interracial marriage said, "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

In 1967, a unanimous Supreme Court rejected that trial court reasoning when it said, "The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.

Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State."

My thoughts were abruptly interrupted when I heard the emotion in Gita's voice as she described how, after 24 years of living together, she and her partner, Lisa Polyak, had decided to be the lead plaintiffs in a landmark Maryland lawsuit challenging Maryland's exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage. While their racial differences no longer would have prevented marriage, their gender differences still do.

Same-sex couples such as Gita and Lisa are denied the many protections and rights different-sex couples take for granted. There are over 1,000 federal and 435 Maryland state benefits that flow from signing a marriage certificate, including the right to receive insurance protection, make medical decisions for a sick spouse, and inherit pensions and property.

While some opponents of same-sex marriage say that this practice would violate their church's teachings, over 40 percent of current marriages in Maryland are held in no church at all.

The most tragic effect of this unfair bias against same-sex marriage, however, may come in the social stigma it creates for the couple and their children. For example, Gita told the audience last week that after reporters came to her house to talk about the lawsuit, her nine-year-old daughter asked her 15 times why she and Lisa had not married, and ended their family discussion with this question: "Why didn't you take care of this before I was born?"

Indeed, it would have been better if Gita and Lisa had been allowed to marry years ago. But if we all join them in this just campaign, we can make sure that future nine-year-olds never again have to pose this question.