Happy!

The Wedding of bink & Maura was entirely happy!

Except Maura stabbed herself pinning on my corsage...

My sister had responded to my last-minute panicked request for help getting dressed (which earrings? what about my hair?), and drove me to the wedding at J & D's house.
I asked her to get out of the car so J. could take our photo:

Below: Champagne toast after the vows: bink sparkled in her sequined suit!

Below: The reception at a fancy restaurant was a no-dolls event, so the girlettes deputized Pensive Bear to go in their place.
Maura calligraphed the name cards.

 

THE CAKE! THE CAKE!
That's a marzipan frosting.

And now they are Mrs. & Mrs.!
_____________________

This is more or less what I said in my speech.
I said way less, actually:
I skipped all the info about the DVDs because everyone there knew it. I'll leave it here though (and add some of what I did say: I hadn't intended on joking about drinking too much, because I didn't intend to drink too much.
As it came to pass, I did.
Do I have a hang over this morning?
I do.)

My Wedding Speech

What do I know about being in a wedding?
Nothing.
I was nineteen when I met bink, and I was an ardent lesbian-feminist.
Our people didn't do weddings.

So I googled it, and the advice was, "First, Don't drink too much."

I've failed already.

When we were young, we were "pure of heart": marriage was a vestige of patriarchal oppression, and we wouldn't do anything like that.
Also, it was illegal.
bink actually is pure of heart. A friend said, "She doesn't even know how to be bad."
And when she was little, she wanted to be Robin Hood and defend everyone's right to hunt in Sherwood Forest.

Her chance to challenge the hegemony of the rich and powerful and in the name of all came in 2010, when the archbishop sent out thousands of DVDs called "PRESERVING MARRIAGE IN MINNESOTA".
(I googled it to find the name, and it turns up for sale on eBay for $39.99.)

Financed to the tune of around a million dollars by the Knights of Columbus and unnamed donors, the DVD exhorted Catholics to oppose legislation that would make way for same-sex marriage in Minnesota.

With Maura's active support and encouragement--and many of yours, too--bink set out to collect all these DVDs and turn them into art.

Tomorrow is the Twin Cities Marathon.
On Marathon Sunday twelve years ago, bink stood in front of the Basilica and collected DVDs.
A lot of you were there.
Some of you brought donuts.

More than five hundred people gave their DVDs to bink that day, with more to come.
A lot of them came with a message attached--most commonly, quoting the words of Jesus:
"Love one another, as I have loved you."

And twelve years later, here we are, at bink and Maura's wedding.
Marriage is between two people, but it also involves all of us here in this room, and so I want to make a double toast:

To bink and her lawfully wedding wife,
and to all of us:
Let us love one another.

[end wedding speech]