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Unitarian congregation that supported wedding helps
celebrate anniversary.
Chris and Rich were a couple of idealistic kids in the
1970s. They believed they could change the world. So they
decided to get married.
"In those days, there were no marriage commissioners,"
Chris Vogel remembered, "so Richard and I had to find
a minister who would marry us. We went to a civil liberties
meeting at Mira Spivak's house, and that's where we met Norm
Naylor."
The Rev Naylor was the minister at the First
Unitarian-Universalist Church of Winnipeg. He was accustomed
to marrying couples when other ministers wouldn't
couples of different faiths, or with a background of
divorce. But he felt he had to bring this particular wedding
to his Board of Trustees before he proceeded.
Jane Bramadat was actively involved with the social
justice work of the Church at the time. She remembers
it that, "we Winnipeg U Us felt elated and somewhat scared
at daring to take such a risky decision as supporting our
minister to perform a gay marriage."
Subsequently, Jane Bramadat became a Unitarian minister.
As the Rev Bramadat, she has married many same sex couples
herself.
"There wasn't anything in the provincial statutes to
preclude homosexual marriage," said Vogel, now a retired
provincial civil servant. (His partner, Richard North, is a
nurse.) "It's all in the common law. But we couldn't be
registered. So Norm read the banns for us for three weeks.
The banns are a remnant of the element that required
everybody in the community to agree to the marriage.
And nobody in the congregation objected. So we were
married."
Vogel said that when he and Richard North undertook to
get married, "Our objectives were law reform and public
education." Homosexuality was such a taboo subject that the
phone company would not publish a listing for an
organization that promoted homosexual rights. Their marriage
was to be a symbolic statement that they hoped everybody
could understand.
But after the wedding, the couple discovered that
marriage really did make them feel different. And there were
the practicalities, such as the employee benefit plans that
kicked in once they were spouses. Perhaps because they were
the first same-sex couple to be married in Canada, (although
others had been married in the US), Chris Vogel has a wealth
of information at his fingertips about the Canadian scene.
"Every province has 60 to 100 statutes to amend," he
said, "everything from hospital visits to declarations of
conflict of interest. Then there is the issue of combining
incomes when claiming benefits that require a means test.
The federal government estimated it would save $4 million by
recognizing homosexual marriages, and I think in fact that
they saved more than that."
In retrospect, the wedding that seemed so daring in 1974,
was rapidly overtaken by the change that all parties
involved wanted to achieve. "We were remarkably successful
over three decades in achieving what we wanted," said Vogel.
"When you look at how long it has taken other groups to
struggle to equality, our progress has been remarkably fast.
"I think there must have been an enormous amount of
intelligent goodwill out there that made it so much easier
for homosexuals than for other minorities. I can't
help think that Unitarians played an enormous role in that
public change."
The Canadian Unitarian Council/Conseil unitarien du
Canada (CUC), is an association of forty-five congregations
located across Canada with 5,200 individual members. Arising
out of the work of outspoken reformers and dissenters
within the Christian tradition five centuries ago, the
Unitarian movement today includes Universalists and
flows in a broad religious stream augmented by Humanist,
earth-centered, Buddhist and other progressive beliefs.
For more information about Chris and Rich, contact: First
Unitarian Church of Winnipeg,
uuwpg@mts.net, (204) 474-1261
For information about
the CUC, contact: Jennifer Dickson, Executive Director, jennifer@cuc.ca
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