Brody's Scribbles... Gay marriage: Ulysses S. Grant's great-great-grandson says his civil union is not enough

Ulysses Dietz, great-great grandson of U. S. President Ulysses S. Grant, at the Newark Museum. 
Photo by Jim Wright THE STAR LEDGER

By Ulysses Dietz (Maplewood, New Jersey) Dec 9 | My partner of 34 years and I have lived in New Jersey for more than 29 of those years. A couple of years ago, we were officially joined in a state-sanctioned civil union ceremony. Geoffrey M. Connor, a municipal judge, performed the ceremony in our living room; his wife Holly, a colleague and friend of mine, looked on approvingly. Witnesses included my 91-year-old widowed mother, my brother and sister-in-law, and as many friends as we could gather on short notice. Our two children, then 11 and 12, acted as attendants.

This happened on April 28, a Saturday. It is a date I will always remember — only because it is the day after April 27, the anniversary of the birth of my great-great grandfather, Ulysses S. Grant. Although the ceremony moved me more than I expected, the notion of a civil union seemed to me, and seems to me still, inadequate.

After 34 years of joy and sorrow; after building a home together; after combining our lives and careers; after dealing with the death of three of our parents; after struggling for four years to become parents ourselves through adoption — after all this, civil union is still a day late and a dollar short of the real thing: marriage.

Gary and I have not suffered from the egregious sort of discrimination that makes up the heart-breaking stories we have heard over the years from gay-marriage advocates. We have carefully drafted wills, as well as a drawer full of legal documents giving each other spousal rights in terms of hospital visits, medical decisions and end-of-life determinations. We worry about taxes, college funds, insurance issues and, ultimately, about added inheritance penalties because we are not legally married. We are, of course, tightly bound by the fact that we are both the legal guardians of our kids (although they are at the stage when they might wish to forget that detail). We always travel with adoption documents, in case someone somewhere decides to question the legality of our parenthood.

We have been blessed by the fact that we have never had need to use these documents; have never been kept from one another or from our children in times of illness or need. Except once, before our civil union, during a summer vacation.

We were stopped at the Canadian border, returning from a visit to Victoria on Vancouver Island. It was the American border police who stopped us, who chose to dismiss the copies of our adoption papers and our children’s birth certificates (naming us both as parents) and then separated us from our children, questioning us as if we were potential kidnapers and our children as if they were potential victims.

This lone incident freaked out the kids and angered us; but it is small potatoes compared to what some have suffered at the hands of unfeeling medical personnel or keepers of the law. We were treated politely by the officers involved, but nothing could lessen the feeling of isolation, of suddenly being bereft of all of the benefits of citizenship that we have always assumed. No other kind of family would have been subjected to this sort of intrusive upset.

There is no valid legal justification in this state not to grant marriage status to same-gender couples. There is not one shred of evidence from anywhere in the world that same-sex marriages cause any sort of rift in the fabric of civilization. My own religion validates my wish to be married. The rector of my church preached a sermon in strong support of marriage equality this past Sunday. My bishop joined the throng in Trenton last week to speak out in favor of passing the gay marriage law now stumbling around in our state Legislature.

Heterosexuals can get married with barely any forethought, and then divorced and married again and again as often as they wish (or can afford). Marriage is not a perfect institution, but it is the social building block of this nation, and anyone who seeks to accept its limitations and abide by its rules should be welcomed.

I don’t want to be civil unioned. I want to be married. As an American; as a loyal, hardworking, tax-paying New Jerseyan; as a devout, churchgoing, tithing Christian with a secular Jewish spouse; as a father. I want my relationship with my children’s other parent to be acknowledged by everyone for what it is — a marriage. Anything less is just wrong. Anything less is unjust. Anything less is, truth be told, un-American.

Star-Ledger/NJ.com Guest Columnist Ulysses Dietz is what you call a 'lifer.' His job as curator of the decorative arts collection at the Newark Museum is the only one he's had in his nearly 30-year career. From a crowded office in the museum, Dietz commands an empire of thousands of unique objects, from jewelry, to pottery, to ceramics, to silver. His encyclopedic knowledge has helped put the Newark Museum on the map as a vanguard of modern decorative arts. He & his partner live in Maplewood, New Jersey.