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PROPOSAL 2: Same-sex married couples find acceptance on other side of river

Ontario ruling legalizing unions provides haven
October 23, 2004

BY SHAWN WINDSOR
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

Last of four parts

OLINDA, ONTARIO -- There were no protests the first time the minister agreed to do it. No shouting. No placards suggesting damnation.

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There was just a little white church, 123 years old, built on a country intersection surrounded by peach and apple orchards near the tip of southern Ontario. It is a bucolic setting of stereotypical proportions where people tend the soil, raise children and pray on Sunday.

But the town of Olinda also is home to a Unitarian Universalist minister who does what not long ago was unthinkable, even for Michigan's more liberal neighbors in Ontario: She marries homosexual couples in ceremonies recognized by law.

The ruling of the Ontario Supreme Court last year to legalize same-sex marriage has changed lives in communities large and small, in ways subtle and dramatic.

The prospect of gay and lesbian marriage becoming common and uneventful across the Detroit River so unnerved the president of the American Family Association of Michigan that within a day of the Ontario court ruling he called for a change in the Michigan Constitution.

In fact, Gary Glenn said that Proposal 2 to ban same-sex marriage on Michigan's Nov. 2 ballot was inspired by the court ruling.

"We called for an amendment the next day," Glenn said this week.

Members of his group feared that gay and lesbian couples from the United States would cross the border to get married, bring the license back to the States and promptly sue to get it legally recognized.

But in Windsor, the court's decision settled into the daily routine so quickly that the tourism arm of the city spent $10,000 to market itself in gay and lesbian publications as a friendly destination for couples from Detroit, Chicago and across Ohio.

What's more astonishing, at least relative to American political life, is what little protest took place after the ruling faded into the polite ethos of Canadian public life, where even citizens who may feel intensely uneasy with same-sex marriage tend to keep their opinions to themselves.

In Canada, said Christine Hillman, the minister at Unitarian Universalist Church in Olinda, "if you don't approve of something, you keep your mouth shut. The relationship is more important than being right."

Hillman has married 15 gay and lesbian couples since the ruling, most of them from the United States. Before the ruling, she presided over gay and lesbian ceremonies, blessing committed relationships.

But that doesn't compare, she said, with what happens now.

"It's like I've been given a gift," said Hillman, 55. "Their faces ... the most joyous people in the world. They are amazed at the public affirmation."

Sudden change
Because the legalization of same-sex marriage came from the courts, the change seemed to happen overnight. There was little public debate. One day, marriage was defined as between one man and one woman. The next, it was defined as "the voluntary union for life of two persons to the exclusion of all others."

A month later, then-Prime Minister Jean Chretien announced draft legislation that would legalize same-sex marriage across the country.

Some religious denominations, particularly Catholics and evangelicals, feared they would be forced into marrying same-sex couples. They worried more as four other provinces -- Quebec, Manitoba, British Columbia and Nova Scotia, plus the Yukon Territory -- also legalized same-sex marriage through their courts.

The Canadian Supreme Court is considering whether the draft legislation exempts churches from having to marry couples.

Pastors in Ontario aren't reassured by statements from politicians that they won't eventually be forced to perform same-sex weddings.

Last Sunday at Windsor Christian Fellowship, several hundred worshipers filed into a warehouse-size house of God. They stood in the sanctuary for most of 90 minutes, arms aloft, swaying, following the rock 'n' roll Christian music and Bible teachings of the pastors.

It is a congregation that does not accept same-sex marriage, especially Dave Pistagnesi, who oversees the baptism ministry. He is also one of the few church leaders in Windsor to lead a public protest. Last September he led a rally against the decision at a Windsor park. About 250 people showed up.

"Windsor has been faced with a mudslide of immorality," Pistagnesi said. "When we start to change the laws, the fiber of marriage, we change the whole essence of what God intended marriage to be."

Pistagnesi is an unlikely evangelist. He is burly, shaves his head and wears a goatee. He looks more like a bouncer than a baptizer.

He's not sure whether the ruling has changed life in Windsor. But he thinks it will. And when it does, he said, it will be too late, and a whole generation will be desensitized.

"In Windsor," he said, "the moral measuring stick ... we don't have one. We lost it."

Above all else, Pistagnesi is fearful the government will force homosexuality onto the stage of his sanctuary.

Growing acceptance
More than 150 same-sex marriage licenses have been issued in Windsor since the court ruling last June -- mostly to Americans. In Toronto, there have been more than 1,100.

Most of the licenses in Windsor were handed out within two months after legalization.

John Coleman, the editorial page editor of the Windsor Star, said polls were split evenly in the beginning but now show that a slight majority favor same-sex marriage.

But in Michigan, 57 percent favor Proposal 2, which will constitutionally ban same-sex marriage in the state, according to an EPIC/MRA poll released Friday;, 39 percent are opposed.

Cultural attitudes may be separated by a border, but many couples straddle it. Marilyn Weller, 48, and Susan Sverdrup-Phillips, 39, are one of many cross-border couples. Weller is American, Sverdrup-Phillips is Canadian.

They met at a Christian lesbian conference in Waterloo, Ontario, in the summer of 2000. They began dating two months later. Weller would drive six hours from Kalamazoo to see Sverdrup-Phillips. Eventually, they picked Windsor as a halfway point. They moved there three years ago. Last June, they got married in the backyard of the house they bought.

"A neighbor came over and brought a gift," Weller said.

In that small act, they found a kind of affirmation. There they were, two lesbians, both of whom were raised in evangelical churches, both of whom had struggled with their sexuality and its place in public life, and both of whom had never considered the possibility that they might one day stand before a minister and here the phrase, "by the power vested in me."

Weller still works in the united States. She commutes to her job at Detroit's Department of Health and Wellness Promotion HIV/AIDS office.

Her coworkers know she is a lesbian. They know she is married. But when it happened, she wasn't sure how to talk about it. Her coworkers weren't, either.

" 'How's married life treating you?' You never hear that," Weller said.

In general, life is more comfortable across the river, where homosexuality is more openly accepted.

Brian Masse, who represents the west side of the Windsor area in Canada's parliament, said: "I don't think we've seen any of the negative things. Life moves on. You still don't know who is married and who is not."

And, he said, it's led to more stable relationships, which is all Weller and Sverdrup-Phillips say they ever wanted.

In Weller's dreams many years ago, she would be sitting on the beach of Lake Michigan. She'd drink coffee in the morning, tea in the evening. A blanket was draped over her legs. Next to her was someone she loved.

"That is my life with Susan," she said.

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