The bride reached for the hand of her bride.
Inside the church, their wedding guests waited.
What a wait! The women had been engaged for almost 10 years.
“Everything you expected it to be?” asked Danielle Petroske, sparkling in a white gown.
“Better,” answered Misti Germundson, her white suit topped with a pink bow tie, “now that we’re together.”
Petroske and Germundson were married last Saturday at Unity Church-Unitarian in St. Paul, one of more than 3,800 same-sex couples to marry in Minnesota since gay marriage became legal a year ago today, according to officials and a Pioneer Press count.
“Love crosses time and tradition,” said the officiant, the Rev. Tom Ewald of Macalester Plymouth United Church, to those gathered. “Our Creator is present wherever love is present.”
On Aug. 1, 2013, Minnesota became the 13th state where same-sex couples could legally marry.
Since then, six others have followed suit, numerous legal challenges to gay-marriage bans have been filed and federal rights for gay couples have expanded in the wake of the June 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision requiring the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages granted under state law.
“I think there’s been a sea of change now in the past couple of years, where we’re seeing the level of progress that we need to … secure the freedom of marriage for same-sex couples across the country,” said Monica Meyer, executive director of OutFront Minnesota, which advocates for LBGTQ rights.
John Helmberger, CEO of the Minnesota Family Council, which opposes gay marriage, said in a statement Thursday that Minnesotans remain divided on the issue.
“If anything has changed in the last year, it’s that Minnesota is losing its moorings to the foundational principles on which it was founded. Those moorings need to be strengthened, not weakened,” he said.
Danielle, 40, a real estate agent, and Misti, 40, a teacher, met through softball in 2004. They were engaged by 2005.
“When I proposed, Danielle wanted to do a commitment ceremony, but I always wanted to wait until we could actually have a legal wedding here in Minnesota,” Misti said. “I did not want to go to Iowa, I did not want to go to Canada. I wanted a ceremony here, in Minnesota, before God, that was legal.”
Through the years, the women built a life together, but they weren’t sure they’d ever be able to legally marry in their home state.
Until last year.
Misti was at home on May 13, 2013, when the Minnesota Senate voted on the bill, the last hurdle before the governor’s desk.
“I was standing in front of the TV, watching the votes come in,” Misti said. “When the last vote came in and it passed, I literally dropped to my knees and cried for 20 minutes. I felt … whole. I felt like a human being. For so long, I felt oppressed by our government. Finally, we would be treated equally.”
Meyer says it’s been a joy in Minnesota the past year to watch people take advantage of the new law.
“There was more love in our state, more happiness,” she said.
Some politicians suffered consequences for their vote on the marriage law.
State Reps. David FitzSimmons of Albertville, and Jenifer Loon of Eden Prairie, two of the four House Republicans to vote in favor of the new law, weren’t endorsed at their party conventions.
Other changes were smaller-scale. Minnesota Management and Budget reports that 130 state employees applied for insurance benefits for a same-sex spouse since the law was passed.
Helmberger, of the Family Council, said the new law is restricting Minnesotans’ free exercise of their religion.
“The Minnesota Department of Human Rights has already initiated enforcement action against a Minnesota business owner who declined to host a same-sex wedding because of his deeply held religious beliefs,” Helmberger said. “Other Minnesotans have been threatened with lawsuits for the same thing, including even churches supposedly exempted in the law.”
Human Rights officials said they couldn’t disclose whether any complaints had been filed related to the new law, but they said no cases have been closed.
Just as marriage became legal for same-sex couples a year ago, so did divorce, and some divorce attorneys have been as busy as officiants.
“Minnesotans who were married in other places — Canada, Iowa, New York — but had been separated for years were finally able to get divorced here in Minnesota,” says Zach Smith of Vox Law, a St. Louis Park firm that specializes in family law. “So, on August 1st, we had a same-sex divorce boom. It took the rest of the year for us to get the backlog cleared.”
An estimated 3,885 same-sex couples have gotten married in Minnesota since it was allowed a year ago, according to a Pioneer Press analysis of county records.
There is no statewide tracking of same-sex marriages in Minnesota. Records are kept by each of the 87 counties, and often they don’t differentiate between licenses issued for same-sex and opposite-sex couples.
The Pioneer Press relied on clerk records, where they existed, and on the Minnesota Official Marriage System database in other cases. The database is limited in that it only returns 250 records, so it was impossible to get complete information for counties that had more marriages.
Also it doesn’t specify gender, so the Pioneer Press counted a couple as same-sex only where the names strongly indicated that was the case.
Also, in Stearns County, officials did not make totals available, nor were they accessible on MOMS.
The numbers include some licenses secured prior to Aug. 1, 2013 in counties that allowed early applications and some given out in July 2014.
By far the highest number of same-sex marriages — 2,334 — occurred in Hennepin County. One marriage out of every five performed in that county involved a same-sex couple, according to clerk records.
Ramsey County was next with 578, followed by Washington County with 220.
The state had 12,224 same-sex couple households in 2011, according to the American Community Survey.
One of the guests at the Germundson’s reception in Cottage Grove was Rep. Dan Schoen, DFL-St. Paul Park. He was one of the 75 House members who voted to allow gay marriage in Minnesota. This was the first same-sex wedding Schoen has attended since that vote. He met the couple May 14, 2013, when Gov. Mark Dayton signed the bill into law.
“I met them on the steps at the Capitol,” Schoen said. “That’s when they told me they were getting married and told me the date and said, ‘Get it on your calendar’ … I said, ‘I can’t wait to be there.’ This is a pretty good culmination.
“But you know what?” Schoen said. “It doesn’t matter, gay or straight. All people want is love. We all want it, we all strive for it. A wedding is a symbol of love.
“It’s so amazing to walk into a church, to walk into a room, and to be where there are so many accepting people. But the goal of this has to be a day when we see this and don’t look at it as historic.”
