Charles Paul Hoffman

Wedding Toast – May 28, 2005

When Shannon and I were discussing how we would do our toasts this evening, she told me that I could speak on whatever I liked. So I decided to take her on her word. For those of you from the University of Chicago, the following toast should seem perfectly in place with the day, as it is only tangentially related to our wedding. For everyone else, you will just have to bear with us...

So instead of thanking everyone for coming (which Shannon will do in just a moment), I would like to speak of the one reservation we had to getting married in the first place. While on the whole Shannon and I believe the institution of marriage to be a positive good in our society, marriage in its current form in most of the country is the site of a discrimination so perverse that we were reticent to become associated with it. For while most are permitted to marry till death do them part, a large segment of our population is not. As Shannon and I were wed today, our gay and lesbian relatives and friends were denied this opportunity.

Why does this matter? Over a thousand federal benefits alone are contingent upon the marriage relationship, not counting the many rights also provided by individual states. Most of these rights can never be attained by a homosexual couple. Unless same sex couples are allowed to marry, we will be denying them the equal protection of the law.

So why should we care? We should care because a large subset of our population – people who we call our family and our friends – are deprived of something recognized as a fundamental human and civil right. In the aptly named Loving v. Virginia, Chief Justice Earl Warren stated that “[t]he freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men. Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man.’” In denying same sex couples access to marriage, we deprive them of a fundamental right protected in our system of government.

By now many of you have already listed in your minds the reasons that you oppose same-sex marriage. But those reasons are wrong. Many claim that marriage is fundamentally a religious ceremony. Yet this view has been rejected since the American Revolution – it is the state that decides who can marry, not the church. For example, while the Catholic Church forbids remarriage of divorced individuals, the state permits the marriage. One does not need to state an allegiance to a particular religion to marry – otherwise, atheists like me would be forbidden to marry. Marriage has been a civil, rather than religious, relationship for hundreds of years.

Others argue that marriage exists only for the purpose of procreation. Yet we have never required individuals to be able to procreate to marry. We allow the infertile to marry without question. Instead, we help those who are cannot conceive by providing fertility treatments and making adoptions available. Thus while same sex couples cannot conceive children on their own, they are in this regard no different from millions of heterosexual couples.

In the end, only one reason stands for depriving homosexuals the right to marry: we, as a society, simply do not like them; we want to treat them differently than we treat ourselves, for we see them as different. Yet this is in violation of a principle to which we have bound ourselves in this democracy – we will treat everyone equally, even when we do not want to. For the

Constitution of the United States does not say that it protects only the heterosexual or the Caucasian or the Christian – it demands that “No State . . . deny to any person . . . the equal protection of the laws.”

And so, while most of them were unable to be here, I raise this glass to our gay and lesbian friends and relatives. May you one day be able to have your relationships legally recognized throughout this country, and not only in that liberal bastion called Massachusetts.