It’s been almost a week now, but I’m still internalizing the seismic change taking place in Minnesota. Love is the Law! It all began at midnight on August 1…

Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak presided over forty six weddings at City Hall in the wee hours of Thursday, August 1, beginning at 12:01 AM. By turns laughing and crying, he said over and over that these couples were now lawfully married. Watching those weddings of total strangers, I cried several times myself, and laughed a good bit too.

I didn’t burst into tears (as I feared I would) at the legalization of a longstanding partnership that I officiated on August 2, but I did later, driving on a suburban street, when I remembered the moment. What joy to look out at the faces of two women who have stood by each other for a quarter of a century and say, “I now pronounce you legally wed.” What joy in the faces of their relatives and friends gathered by the banks of the beautiful Mississippi in a small informal ceremony in Red Wing, Minnesota.  (Here’s a short video piece of that moment, excerpted from a longer video of the wedding by Helen’s brother, Chaunce Stanton:)

Of course, it’s never that simple. Every wedding brings with it the ghosts of those who are not there, whether they are deceased or simply absent. For Nia and Helen, there were large gaps in the family fabric, perhaps not surprising considering that Helen’s stepsister is the aggressively homophobic Rep. Michelle Bachmann. This made the wedding planning both joyful and sorrowful. In our preparatory meetings, as with the other lesbian couples I’m working with on weddings this month, we talked about invitations sadly not issued, or refusals sadly received.

As Helen’s brother Mike said in a toast, Nia and Helen have been models of restraint and respect through this entire battle for equality in Minnesota. It was out of respect for Helen that wedding guests at my table did not lift up a loud toast to Michelle, stating that without her we never would have reached this day.

And yet, that’s pretty accurate. Before heading off for the nation’s capitol, Minnesota State Rep. Michelle Bachmann repeatedly spearheaded the addition of a constitutional amendment defining marriage as solely between a man and a woman. The amendment never got on the ballot when the DFL was the majority, but as soon as Republicans controlled the legislature, after Michelle had moved on to bigger things, they moved forward quickly with it. And, while previously the DFL had held both houses, they were always hesitant and nervous when approached by GLBT advocates to move much of anything forward that was supportive of domestic partnership. Marriage equality would have been out of the question.

Then came the 18 month campaign, based in honest conversations with 27,000 regular Minnesotans involved. Minnesotans defeated the Constitutional amendment, and brought the DFL back into leadership of both houses. After that, DFL leaders were willing to move ahead with marriage equality. Eventually, a few brave Republicans crossed over, and both houses voted yes. And now, here we are, one of the 13 states where folks like Nia and Helen can quit worrying about caring for each other in their old age, and having access for hospital visits, and creating wills that try to assert that they are in fact related. Folks can get on with life! Hopefully we can move on with progressive movement in other arenas—jobs , housing, good education for all.

Which brings me to the one funeral I attended last week, also on August 1. It was for Ron McKinley, a prominent Native American philanthropist, educator, and activist. Hundreds of people of every conceivable culture, race, religion, age, ability, gender, and sexual orientation gazed out over Como Lake Thursday morning, some of us bleary eyed from watching weddings in the wee hours of the morn. I knew Ron only tangentially but know and love some of his family well. We heard testimonies and stories of joy, love, commitment, and wisdom in a life cut tragically short in a motorcycle accident. Several of the speakers commented on how much Ron would have loved the event, and how much the gathered crowd was in fact his legacy. It was an awe-inspiring legacy to me.

If weddings cause all present to re-examine our own relationships, funerals prod those of us outside the most intense sphere of grief to reflect on how well we are living out our life’s purpose. Ron’s memorial service certainly did that for me. As much as the weddings celebrate love and commitment, so I hope do our lives beyond that intimate partner.

So here is my toast: May marriage equality be one more step on our path towards a world where every person, no matter what, is equally valued, supported, and loved, until death do us part.

I’m a gardener in the upper Midwest, so in July I spend a lot of time pulling up weeds. Just yesterday, along with a lot of other stuff, I probably pulled up a couple of hundred tiny maple trees, growing from the ‘helicopter blades’ that spin to the ground from my neighbor’s maple each spring.

The first year that I saw these sprouting in my yard, I panicked. I think I envisioned our yard suddenly and abruptly turning into a dense maple forest. I paid my kid a nickel each to pull them up; in the course of the summer I shelled out $100!!! Duly sorted in tiny groups of 20 as she collected her bounty whenever she needed spending money.

Now I know that, unless I ignore them for five or six years, these little maples are the least of my worries. Sure, six or seven of them might implant themselves right next to the tomato plant, but a swift yank and they’re gone forever! Nope, the weeds that drive me crazy are much less dramatic, much more insidious, will never turn into trees but will simply plague me in their short green ubiquity. “We’re here, we’re green, get over it!” they seem to taunt me.

The tough weeds, the ones that I will spend my life pulling and re-pulling, never successfully, are the ones that spread underground, in their root system. Crabgrass. Bishop’s weed. Jerusalem Artichokes. (Bear in mind that a weed is just a plant in a place where you don’t want it! In some parts of the world, orchids are weeds!)

This year a friend took a turn at the horseradish plant I’ve hacked at every spring. “I think I got it all!” she declared enthusiastically. I just smiled and thanked her, confident because of past experience that she had not. Sure enough, though it’s gone from the area she dug—a huge four foot excavation—it’s now reappeared five feet away, in the middle of the strawberry patch. Root systems are invisible on the surface, and thus incredibly hard to eliminate.

Interestingly, pulling weeds yesterday led me to think about racism, and what’s going on in the US right now. Hundreds of hours of media attention have been given to the racist utterings of Paula Deen. Indeed, in our media, this story is the central narrative describing racism. From my view, Deen is a maple tree. Her racist practices, weedy as they may be, are isolated, have their own root system, can easily be plucked out. One second; yank; it’s over.

The racism that is harder to see, and harder to talk about, is spreading underground, evidence of its existence popping into view here and there without seeming connection, much harder to identify and eradicate. That’s the effects of the US Supreme Court eliminating the Voting Rights Act, which as far as I can tell is garnering no mainstream media coverage at all. Already in at least seven places, changes have been made to voting that will drastically affect people of color, and all of us, far more than the epitaphs of a random chef. And yet, I don’t even know the names of the people who are enacting these new ways of doing things. I’m not seeing interviews in mainstream media with them, or with the people affected by their decisions.

The problem with oppression is that so much of how it spreads and lives is invisible. It’s not about individual bigotry or what names individual people call each other. It’s about systems, connections of one thing to another that may not, on the surface of things, appear to come from the same roots.

That’s what I was thinking about while I was pulling up the weeds yesterday, anyway.

Horseradish, flourishing in the strawberry patch

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Before rebirth, there has to be birth. I have never given birth, but I have been privileged to witness two human babies, six puppies, three kittens, and a few birds and turtles enter the world. And I suspect all of us have watched documentaries of the same kinds of thing.

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Here’s what I’ve been musing about all week, as events of all kinds have folded and unfolded: How do we describe forces that are indifferent to human life and suffering, and does our description make a difference as we try to lessen their hold on us?

Here’s when I started to wonder: When President Obama, initially describing the events just unfolding in Boston, said, “We don’t know if this is the act of terrorists or not.” And I thought, why don’t we know? Isn’t random killing of innocent civilians in a way designed to terrorize an entire city—isn’t that what terrorism means? And then I realized he meant that we didn’t know if it was the act of a specific group which is defined as a terrorist group.

But does that matter? The ‘lone gunman’ who so often is the perpetrator of these violent sprees terrorizes no less because he is not attached to a formal group. The families of the victims grieve no less. The by-standers are no less traumatized. I think that the definition matters only if we want to know exactly who to blame, and for license to retaliate.

The owners of the factory in West, Texas, who repeatedly assured the EPA that there was absolutely no danger of fire in their fertilizer plant: Weren’t they also acting from massive indifference to human life and suffering? Weren’t they putting their profit and convenience ahead of the lives of others? Are the people whose loved ones died or were injured there grieving any less? Are the by-standers any less traumatized?

Or this: The U.S. Senate, despite pleas from grieving parents of murdered children, and survivors of mass shootings, refused to take action to limit access to guns by even the tiniest bit. How are those 46 Senators who cast the no votes (and refused to let the majority rule) tied to the future suffering of the inevitable next mass shooting which we know will occur? Are they responsible?

I’m not going to use the word ‘terrorist’ to describe factory owners, or U.S. Senators, or even the two brothers who wreaked such harm in Boston last week. But I am going to wonder: How do we find language to hold one another accountable, to demand that businesses, governments, schools, churches, and individuals care for one another?

Because one thing I have observed in my life: Individuals mimic what we see. Indifferent parents lead to indifferent kids. Crummy teachers foster crummy students. Ineffective governments foster ineffective citizens. Democratic society can only happen with democratic government.

So I’m less interested in knowing who to blame and how to retaliate, and more interested in creating accountability between us all so that care for one another is maximized and violence between us is minimized. I’m interested in finding the language that will do that.

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I began attending the Quaker Meeting close to my apartment on Sunday mornings. Week after week I sat with them. Nope, no awakening for me there. Probably a good thing, too, because I wouldn’t have had a clue what to do with it. But at one of those Meetings I heard about a daylong workshop on Indian Treaties.

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