Yes yes yes.

Today, I get up and start looking through my never-ending blog roll.  A day like any other it seems.  When I first started reading wedding blogs (maybe 8 months ago?) Style Me Pretty was pretty much the best thing going, the one really chock-a-block full of gorgeous wedding inspiration.  In recent months, however, other blogs have begun to assert their place on the forefront.  Let me tell you, today SMP has won me back.  Last month (?) they began a new feature called "From Inspiration to Reality" where they take inspirational images collaged by readers and transform them into admittedly awesome photo shoots from their sponsoring vendors.  Usually, I'm underwhelmed, simply because these orchestrated images are editorial and essentially digital magazine features.

Today was different.  Today's fantasy wedding shoot featured two brides... marrying each other.  I have seem same-sex couples getting married on other sites and it warmed my heart, but this was a situation where a main stream media with a lot of conservative subscribes intentionally chose to use a same sex couple because they could, and because, I hope, they wanted to represent a highly underserved but very real segment of the population.  (And hot damn!  Are these ladies sexy!)

SMP, I'm proud of you.

This new turn in wedding media is not totally unique.  Martha Stewart recently featured her first same-sex couple in her magazine, Martha Stewart Weddings.  There was no fanfare, just the same treatment as any other couple.

And of course, the New York Times have been doing it for ages.  This week there was R. Douglas Arnold and Alexander Michael Quinn, and that's just online.  I'd be mighty surprised if that was all there was in the physical paper as well.

In the insanity that is wedding planning, it becomes really easy to lose sight of why you're doing it in the first place.  A lasting, public and official declaration of love to the one person who means more than everything else.  That's why.  And everyone (lucky enough) feels that.  They deserve to get married regardless of their gender and the gender of the person they love.  Love is love.  It means something different to everyone, but it's always worth fighting for.


I haven't quite figured out how or when, but at my wedding I'd like to acknowledge all those who are still legally forbidden to marry the person they love the most.  When I think of being in their shoes, it makes my heart twist.  I am proud that the value of my marriage will only increase as same-sex couples are allowed in increasing numbers to wed across this country that loves its universal freedom and acceptance.


Photo credits: from Style Me Pretty, Carla Ten Eyck; from Martha Stewart Weddings, Jaclyn Greenberg and Chris Brown of JAG Studios; from the New York Times, uncredited online but if I can check from a paper copy and let you know, I will!