Adrienne Baker walked down the aisle on her wedding day in August wearing high heels, a strapless ruffled dress and a slender white wristband. Her groom, Austin Vitt, augmented his dark suit with the same accessory. So did many of their 140 guests.
Moments later, when the ceremony began, the divinity student who was officiating offered the first reading. It was a selection that the soon-to-be Mr. and Ms. Vitt considered the secular equivalent of Scripture, excerpts from a ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Court in the case of Goodridge v. Department of Public Health.
“Without the right to choose to marry,” the officiant, Julie Maxwell, intoned, “one is excluded from the full range of human experience.” In other words, as the court concluded in the 2003 decision, same-sex marriage is a legal and civil right. As for the delicate wrist ribbons, they were Ms. Vitt’s adaptation of the white-knot logo for the marriage-equality movement.
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From Doug Leblanc: