Fighting for family values

The morning of the state Supreme Court ruling late last month, Cristina Acevedo woke her partner with the bad news. The court had upheld Washington’s ban on gay marriage. Elizabeth Whitford joined her in the living room of their South Seattle bungalow and, as she listened, the news made her cry.

Whitford is 31 and pregnant, a dream she’s had since she was 4 years old, and the court ruling struck her as personally hurtful. Three years ago, she and Acevedo were living in Spokane and invited 80 family members and friends to attend their wedding ceremony. It was, they said, not legally binding, but real. The Spokesman-Review ran a feature story by former staff writer Jeanette White about that wedding.

Previously optimistic, the two women watched the news that morning with a sense of disbelief and deep disappointment.

“Never before has there been a court decision that had such direct personal impact for us,” Whitford said.

They’d hoped to marry legally well before November, when the baby is due. Now, to provide Acevedo with legal custody of this child, they’ll have to undergo a second-parent adoption in the weeks after the birth. That means if anything goes wrong in the hospital, Acevedo won’t have the legal right to make health-care decisions for the baby.

Last week the two women sat on their sage-colored couch to talk with me about the impact of the court’s decision on their lives. The conversation started with the adoption.

They’ll need to undergo a social worker’s interview, which feels offensive to them both, and undergo a legal process that will cost about $2,000. That’s money other couples might have spent on the baby’s room or child care. In addition, the women lack access to a whole range of benefits and tax advantages linked to legal marriage.

Whitford, the former executive director of Spokane’s Odyssey Youth Center, now works for Arts Corps, a Seattle nonprofit that brings arts education to low-income children. The two University of Washington graduates (art history for Acevedo, geography for Whitford) moved back to Seattle after Acevedo completed a master’s degree in interior design from Washington State University. She now works for a Seattle architecture firm.

The two women shake their heads over the state Supreme Court’s justification for denying them the right to marry.

“The Legislature was entitled to believe that limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples furthers procreation, essential to the survival of the human race, and furthers the well-being of children by encouraging families where children are reared in homes headed by children’s biological parents,” Justice Barbara Madsen wrote for the 5-4 majority. “Allowing same sex couples to marry does not, in the Legislature’s view, further these purposes.”

That argument, given all the effort these two women have devoted to the act of procreating, strikes them as ironic.

Heterosexual couples marry all the time with no plans, or even capacity, to procreate, they pointed out. Our culture smiles on older couples, for example, who marry for love and companionship well past their reproductive years. And many straight couples pursue fertility treatment, using the same reproductive technology as Acevedo and Whitford, to have a baby.

Would the court argue that those families, not headed by two biological parents, were also somehow less valid?

And what of the biological parents of all those “oops” babies throughout history?

“That’s what’s so irksome,” said Acevedo, who is 34. “It’s the whole Britney Spears argument. It’s so easy for heterosexual couples to get married on a whim, to have kids by accident. But gay couples, they can’t do that. It takes incredible planning and a lot of hard work to get to that point. So, for the most part, these kids are going to be wanted and loved.…”

These days, the women are reading piles of books on childbirth and pregnancy. Whitford is absorbed in a book on brain development called “What’s Going On In There?” They’ve gathered a stroller and hand-me-downs and enough baby blankets for six children. Soon they’ll start work on the baby’s room and attend childbirth classes.

The decision to let Whitford carry the baby was a fairly simple one. She’d always wanted to be pregnant one day, and Acevedo felt happy to have a child without enduring morning sickness or labor pain. They plan to have two children, with Whitford carrying both.

“We’ve talked about how we would explain our child’s birth story to them,” Acevedo wrote in an e-mail later, “and we like how another couple described it to their child: ‘Mama gave birth to him, and Mommy caught him.’ “

They plan to be equal parents, both strong on nurturing and maternal instincts, and to divide the rest of the experience naturally.

“I’ll be the person who takes the child swimming, and I’m more likely to allow the child to take physical risks and encourage athleticism,” Whitford said. “And Cristina’s really good at developing the creative mind and really good at inventing games and really getting into that child’s perspective.”

They have lots of men as friends and family members to provide male role models.

“Neither one of us believes men are irrelevant in our child’s life,” Whitford said.

She grinned. “I’ve already told my brother that if we have a boy, he has to show him how to pee standing up,” she said.

These two women say they live in a bit of a bubble, surrounded by family and friends who love and support them. When the newspaper ran its story about their wedding in Acevedo’s parents’ garden in Walla Walla, they never heard any negative reactions directly. They only read a few negative letters to the editor later.

Some of their favorite moments occur when family and friends forget the differences in their relationship. Whitford’s mother once caught herself wondering aloud if the baby would have Acevedo’s sleeping patterns, a biological impossibility.

And a co-worker wondered why they bothered with an elaborate wedding ceremony and didn’t just go down to the courthouse to file paperwork.

“That’s the one thing we couldn’t do,” Whitford said ruefully.

On Monday night, the two women showed off their new house, with buff-colored walls in the stylish living room. In the kitchen, they chopped tomatoes for a black bean and corn salad and quesadillas for dinner.

They talked about how Acevedo’s parents’ friends have come to accept them, too.

“They had a little bit of processing to do to get used to the idea that real people are like that, that real people might be in a same-sex relationship,” she said.

Whitford smiled. “And nice people who are the children of their very nice friends,” she said.

And that’s the thing. As these two young women talked of paint colors and pregnancy manuals, strollers and swimming lessons, the whole idea of gay marriage and family life began to seem more conventional all the time. Like any other happy thirtysomething couple, Whitford and Acevedo share an appealing sense of optimism, warmth and love.

As they stood by the front gate of their home, they described the joys and security of a stable married life, in which they wear their wedding bands every day and call each other partners. Next week they plan a romantic dinner at home on their midweek anniversary, and then a getaway to Portland for an evening at a nice restaurant.

As the sun set on a summery August evening, the conversation turned back to the state Supreme Court ruling and the politics that seemed to surround it.

Gay marriage, Whitford said, triggers strong emotions from some conservatives.

“It’s not really a rational response,” she said. “From our perspective, it just seems very strange to us because we don’t feel at all threatening. I don’t feel at all threatening to my neighbors’ heterosexual marriages. I don’t feel at all threatening to my brother and sister-in-law’s heterosexual marriage.”

As she stood there with a warm smile and a brown maternity T-shirt over her jeans, Whitford looked about as dangerous as any other blissfully pregnant woman. And that’s of course the conclusion most of us reach when we’ve had a chance to get to know and respect gay friends and colleagues. Too bad the state Supreme Court wound up reinforcing the sentiments of those who haven’t.

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