I joke with Marilyn that our relationship’s legal status has been inversely proportional to the size of the cakes with which we have celebrated our union.
On the afternoon of June 1, we celebrated with a small, brown-sugar-oatmeal cake, one of our favorites from The Cake Artist’s Studio. We shared it with a couple of close friends over cups of coffee after we all went out for barbecue. Later, the four of us watched the local news coverage of the historic day at the County Clerk’s office.
Three years earlier, when we had our civil union on June 17, 2011, we had five small cakes because we had so much to celebrate: the fifth anniversary of our commitment ceremony, progress towards equality, and our civil union. The ceremony at the courthouse lasted only two minutes and thirty-eight seconds, but it was as moving as our forty-minute commitment ceremony at the Unitarian Universalist Church had been five years earlier. Our state now recognized our union (though the federal government still did not). More than fifty local friends stopped by our house in the afternoon for cake and champagne.
Back in 2006, when we had our commitment ceremony, we had a three-tiered cake, which we designed with the Cake Artist, and we even had an extra round cake to make sure there was enough for the hundred guests at our reception. When my father asked whether our ceremony would be recorded in a government office and my mother asked whether an announcement would appear in the paper, I was touched--I was sorry I had to tell them both no. The ceremony and our union had no standing in the eyes of the law.
When the
marriage equality bill was first passed in Illinois last fall, Marilyn brought us a cake from—where else?—The Cake Artist’s Studio. Even while we celebrated, I wondered whether filing
tax returns would become easier. After
our civil union, we had to file more tax returns than we did before. The state
needed us to file as a married couple, but to do that we had to create a federal tax return as a married couple—a
return we could not file with the IRS. So when we did our taxes, we had to generate
four returns: two federal returns that we filed as single people, and then the “fake”
married federal return to generate the married state tax return. It made us
crazy. I joked that this was a conspiracy: “Sure! We’ll give those gays equal
rights. Well, almost equal rights. And then we’ll make them fill out extra tax
returns. Even better, we’ll make them
fill out tax returns that they cannot use.”
I am thrilled to tell
you that from now on, we can file one
federal tax return as a married couple, and our state tax return will be
generated easily after that, as it should be.
Ah, equality! I think this calls
for a slice of cake.
(The formatting on blogspot is not cooperating today; please excuse the inconsistencies).