When Jackie Goldberg and Sharon Stricker headed to San Francisco to get married four years ago, they saw their wedding as a political statement. It surprised them both when, halfway through the ceremony on the steps of the City Hall rotunda, the usually stalwart Goldberg burst into tears.
"It felt much different than I expected," Goldberg said Wednesday, a few days shy of the March 8 anniversary. "I thought I was going to be proud and pleased and happy. But I didn't expect to be emotionally moved."
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday, March 16, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 43 words Type of Material: Correction
Song title: A California section article March 6 about same-sex marriage described passengers on a Southwest Airlines flight as singing, "I'm Getting Married in the Morning." That is a line from the song, whose title is "Get Me to the Church on Time."
Goldberg, a former member of the California Assembly, Los Angeles City Council and Los Angeles Board of Education, and Stricker, a poet and activist, are among the thousands of same-sex couples for whom Tuesday's hearing before the California Supreme Court on whether gay people have the constitutional right to wed was as personal as it was political.
They had joined the rush to San Francisco after Mayor Gavin Newsom, arguing that to prohibit same-sex marriage violated the equal protection clause of the state Constitution, ordered gender-neutral licenses to be issued. More than 4,000 gay and lesbian couples married in February and March 2004 before the high court invalidated the licenses and the wedding train stopped as abruptly as it had begun.
Goldberg and Stricker weren't the only ones to find their spontaneous wedding both more joyful and more serious than they expected.
Five other couples, all friends and well-known activists in the gay and lesbian community, met Goldberg and Stricker at City Hall to be married that day. Five of the six couples had been together for 20 years or longer.
"Each expected that it would be a good affirmation of a long relationship," said state Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica), the friend who officiated at the six couples' unions and California's first openly gay legislator. "But I don't think any of them had expected to take marriage so seriously. We had essentially cut ourselves off from that expectation."
Goldberg and Stricker had been all but married. They set up house in Echo Park in 1979, three years after first meeting. They raised a son together. The October before the San Francisco wedding, they celebrated their 25th anniversary with a big bash in a rented hall.
What the San Francisco wedding brought, Stricker said, was recognition from the larger community.
"It was as if the last piece was in place," she said.
