South Carolina venue hosts free LGBTQ+ weddings in show of support and protest

shutterstock creative

Amid threats to marriage equality and LGBTQ+ rights in general, an art fair hosted the weddings and raised money to benefit transgender people.

trudestress

With threats to marriage equality looming, a venue in Columbia, S.C., hosted free weddings for LGBTQ+ couples Sunday and raised funds for a transgender organization.

Keep up with the latest in LGBTQ+ news and politics. Sign up for The Advocate's email newsletter.

Y’all-Mart, a quarterly art fair held by Art Bar, invited couples to “come get gay married” in a January 20 Instagram post, with a fee of $100 that included cupcakes, flowers, photography, and bolo ties, Columbia newspaper The State reports. All proceeds were earmarked for the name change and gender marker fund at the Harriet Hancock Center, the city’s LGBTQ+ community center. Legal paperwork to change one's name or gender marker, something needed by many transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people, costs $150, according to the center. The response was so great that the event surpassed its goal of $2,000, raising $3,500, and the eight couples who got married did so for free.

See on Instagram

“The LGBTQ+ couples all had their own reasons for wanting to get married at an art fair, but one common thread was the uncertainty that their marriage would be legal by the time they could plan a more traditional wedding,” The State notes. Threats to marriage equality are coming from many quarters during Donald Trump’s second administration.

“The more hostile it gets, the harder it gets to anticipate being able to do it later,” Sharon Thrailkill, who married Christine Fowler at the event, told The State.

Trending stories

“We were talking about how it feels a little urgent, but we want to use our agency as we have it and take a leap,” added Klo Hampton, who married Mahkia Greene.

“When we find our queer joy … we are resisting, just by existing and loving,” Y’all-Mart cofounder Caitlyn Viars, who officiated the weddings, said afterward. “It’s almost a form of a protest. It shouldn’t be, but it is.”

Among the threats to marriage equality and the protections:

The Republican-dominated Idaho House of Representatives passed a resolution in January urging the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 ruling for national marriage equality. The resolution is nonbinding, meaning it doesn’t have the force of law, but it shows where Republicans’ thinking is going.

Meanwhile, Kim Davis, the anti-marriage equality former county clerk from Kentucky, has a case in the federal courts as she tries to avoid paying damages to a gay couple to whom she wouldn’t issue a marriage license. Her case was heard recently in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and she her lawyers from the anti-LGBTQ+ group Liberty Counsel, ultimately want the Supreme Court to overturn the Obergefell decision as well.

Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito likewise want it overturned. Trump has claimed he sees marriage equality as settled law, but in his first term, he appointed three conservative justices to the court — Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh — giving the court a 6-3 right-wing majority with Thomas, Alito, and Chief Justice John Roberts. However, Gorsuch did author a pro-LGBTQ+ ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, and Roberts is sometimes surprising; he dissented from Obergefell but joined in Bostock, which found anti-LGBTQ+ job discrimination illegal.

The Respect for Marriage Act, signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2022, offers some protection for marriage equality, saying the federal government will recognize all same-sex and interracial marriages and that all states recognize those performed in other states. It does not, however, require any state to offer marriages to same-sex and interracial couples in the event Obergefell or Loving v. Virginia, the interracial marriage decision, is overturned.

From Your Site Articles