HARRIS PARNELL, left, and Meredith Small were among the first same-sex couples to be married in Bath after the law was enacted on Saturday. Although it wasn’t legal at the time, the couple still considers a ceremony on Labor Day 2010 as their real wedding.
As one of Bath’s first same-sex couples to marry, they reveled in the historic nature of it even as they downplayed its significance.
“We had a ceremony two years ago in Phippsburg, on Labor Day 2010, at Sebasco Harbor,” Parnell said. “I consider that our wedding day. But we went and got a license on Monday and a friend of ours is an attorney. He officiated as we said a few vows. But I still feel like we’ve been married for two years.”
When they met, Parnell and Small worked for the same organization but on different coasts — Parnell was in Portland, and Small in Portland, Ore. They met during a conference, struck up an easy friendship and continued to talk and occasionally see each other when work and travel permitted. “But it took a couple more years before we could admit that it was something more,” Parnell said.
Small traded Oregon for New England in 2006, the couple got engaged on Labor Day 2009 and unofficially married exactly a year later.
Having already shared their lives for six years, does their relationship now feel different?
“What,” Parnell quipped, “since Monday?”
But she continued after a moment’s thought.
“No, 2010 felt real and special,” she said. “But having the legal right now is so important to us for everything, whether it’s having children or filing taxes or being able to visit each other in the hospital.
“Being in a state where your marriage is recognized as equal, just like everyone else’s, is great. We’re thrilled, we’re excited, because as you go through life’s ups and downs, it’s nice to have that person by your side.”
Acting on a law that went into effect at midnight Dec. 29, local samesex couples took the opportunity to seek marriage licenses last Saturday. In Brunswick, that meant couples storming the offices of Town Clerk Fran Smith.
Reached by telephone Dec. 29, Smith said there was “much interest” by couples seeking the required paperwork.
Brunswick voters lent their approval to the statewide referendum on Nov. 6 by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. In response to the law’s local popularity, the clerk’s office, normally closed on weekends, opened for three hours to accommodate the demand.
“It’s been very busy,” Smith said, shortly after 9:30 a.m., working on a license application as she spoke. “There are lots of folks here.”
When the doors closed at noon on the first day, seven same-sex couples had received licenses in Brunswick.
Most were planning ceremonies elsewhere, but two of them — Cathy Meaney and Anne Merrifield, and Katherine Wilder and Margaret O’Connell — were wed on the spot by attorney and District 2 Town Councilor Ben Tucker.
Although the town’s website specifically warned applicants it would provide licenses but not the personnel to execute ceremonies, Tucker said he decided to be present to offer his services as an officiant.
“This community voted overwhelmingly for marriage equality,” Tucker said in an exchange of emails with The Times Record. “I was happy to play a small role in allowing couples to enjoy their basic civil rights, (for which) they have waited so long.”
In some municipalities, couples booked limousines, organized midnight ceremonies or stood in line to be part of historic exchanges of vows at midnight.
In Brunswick, the ceremonies kept a lower profile, with many couples opting to wait to plan events during traditional wedding seasons.
“There are three couples in my church who are planning weddings, but only one of them has chosen a date yet, and that’s for early summer,” said the Rev. Sylvia Stocker of the Unitarian Universalist Church on Pleasant Street. “They don’t want to rush the ceremony just to get it in on that day; they want plenty of time to plan it, just like other couples.
“There are people in my church who have been together for 30 years and have been waiting to marry,” Stocker said.
Stocker said she was a minister in Massachusetts when that state’s supreme judicial court — the first in the nation to proclaim such a decision — ruled in favor of same-sex marriage in November 2005.
“The joy of couples who had wanted to do so for so long and suddenly were able to, it was amazing,” Stocker said.
Barbara Ross, of Bath, said she plans to wed her partner of 2 / years in 2013, “no later than August, but preferably earlier.”
“I think it’ll be a fairly decent-sized ceremony,” said Ross. “We decided to wait and plan something bigger, rather than to do it now just because we could.”
Now 30, Ross said she knew at age 12 that she was gay, and that it’s been a long journey toward equality and social acceptance.
The Nov. 6 referendum closes loopholes left open by the less-stringent legal framework of civil unions and domestic partnerships.
“Society before looked at you and they either accepted you or not,” she said. “Now, they have no choice but to see it the way it really is, that we are just as equal as everybody else. It involves our kids, being able to leave things to (her spouse-to-be) or the kids, and there’s nobody that can step in and override that.”
Ross met the woman who will be her wife through a mutual friend on Facebook.
She and her fiancée, who preferred not to be identified for this story, have four children between them — two teens and two young children.
Both of the older kids understand what the law means and are excited for the upcoming wedding, Ross said.
“They’re happy that, in society’s eyes, we can finally be a family,” Ross said. “When we woke them up the day after the election, you’ve never seen four happier kids than on that morning.”
jtleonard@timesrecord.com
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