A police officer serves an expired warrant and lands a case in the Supreme Court, the Episcopal Church takes the first of two votes on a gay bishop, Wisconsin hands couples forty-three rights, and a Broadway audience is asked to stay in their seats for a wedding.
Gene Robinson at the Episcopal Church’s General Convention in Columbus, Ohio, June 16, 2006. Photo: Donald Vish, CC BY-SA 2.0. Source.
1982
The Expired Warrant
Michael Hardwick is arrested in his own bedroom
In July 1982 Michael Hardwick finished a shift at the Atlanta gay bar where he worked, walked outside and dropped a beer bottle into a bin. Officer Keith Torick cited him for drinking in public and wrote the wrong date on the citation, so Hardwick missed his court appearance. Torick took out a warrant. Hardwick went down to the courthouse and paid the fifty-dollar fine to settle it.
Three weeks later Torick came to the house to serve the - now invalid - warrant anyway. It was half past eight in the morning on August 3.
Someone let him in and pointed him down the hall.
Torick opened the bedroom door, found Hardwick in bed with another man, and arrested them both. Sodomy was a felony in Georgia. It carried a possible jail sentence of one to twenty years.
The district attorney let the charges drop. Hardwick sued.
Four years later the case reached the Supreme Court as Bowers v. Hardwick. On June 30, 1986, the court ruled 5-4 that the Constitution gave gay people no right to what the majority called homosexual sodomy.
Justice Lewis Powell supplied the fifth vote. Four years after that, retired, he said he had probably made a mistake.
Georgia’s own Supreme Court struck the law down in 1998. The US Supreme Court overturned Bowers in 2003, in Lawrence v. Texas, and Justice Kennedy wrote that it had not been correct when it was decided.
Michael Hardwick did not live to see either. He died on June 13, 1991.
The Episcopal Church’s deputies approve Gene Robinson
Making Gene Robinson the first openly gay bishop took two votes.
The Episcopal Church is the American branch of the Anglican Communion, the worldwide family of churches that grew out of the Church of England. Its dioceses elect their own bishops, but an election does not count until the rest of the church confirms it. Every three years the whole church meets as the General Convention, and in 2003 that meeting was in Minneapolis. Confirmation needed both of its houses: the House of Deputies, made up of clergy and lay people sent by every diocese, and the House of Bishops.
New Hampshire had elected Robinson in June. The deputies voted on August 3, 2003, and approved him. He was openly gay and living with his partner.
The bishops were due to vote the following day, and the vote was postponed.
Two complaints had arrived. A man in Vermont, David Lewis, emailed the bishops to say that Robinson had touched him inappropriately at a church gathering a couple of years earlier. The second said Robinson was involved with a website that carried links to pornography. The site belonged to Outright, a support network for gay and questioning teenagers, whose Concord chapter Robinson had helped start.
Frank Griswold, the presiding bishop, asked Bishop Gordon Scruton of Western Massachusetts to look into both. He reported back inside a day. Lewis said the contact had been a hand on his arm and his back, in public, that it had made him uncomfortable, and that other people might have thought nothing of it. He said he regretted using the word harassment, and he declined to bring formal charges. The website claim was groundless.
On August 5 the bishops confirmed him, 62 to 45.
He was consecrated - the service that makes someone a bishop - on November 2, in an arena, because no church in the diocese was big enough.
He wore a bulletproof vest under his robes.
The first death threat had come on the day of his election, before he got home. He needed round-the-clock security for years afterwards.
The Anglican Communion holds together churches in more than 160 countries, and it split over him. Its primates - the senior archbishops who each lead a national church - met in emergency session at Lambeth Palace in October 2003, where Peter Akinola of Nigeria declared his church to be in impaired communion with the Americans. Conservative parishes and eventually four whole dioceses left the Episcopal Church, several of them placing themselves under African archbishops instead. In 2009 they set up a rival body, the Anglican Church in North America.
In January 2009 Robinson gave the invocation, the opening prayer, at the first event of Barack Obama’s inauguration, standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial. He retired in 2013.
In 2006 Wisconsin voters wrote a ban on same-sex marriage into the state constitution. The amendment went further than marriage. It also barred any legal status substantially similar to it, so that nothing could be built underneath - no civil unions, no partnerships, nothing that amounted to marriage under another name.
A domestic partnership registry was the smaller thing states built when marriage was out of reach. A couple signs a form at a government office and picks up a fixed list of legal protections. Governor Jim Doyle proposed one for Wisconsin in February 2009, drawn deliberately narrow so that it could survive the 2006 clause.
Forty-three rights. Married couples in Wisconsin had more than two hundred at state level, and over a thousand more federally.
Registered partners could inherit without a will, visit each other in hospital and in jail, take family leave to care for a sick partner, and testify or refuse to testify as a spouse would. They could not adopt as a couple.
It passed inside the state budget by two votes in the Assembly and one in the Senate. Doyle signed it on June 29. On August 3, 2009, couples began registering with their county Register of Deeds, the local official who keeps the record of land, births, deaths and marriages.
Wisconsin Family Action, a Christian conservative group, had already sued, eleven days before the law took effect, arguing the registry was exactly the substantially similar status the amendment forbade.
When Scott Walker became governor he withdrew the state’s defence of its own law. Fair Wisconsin, the state’s LGBT advocacy group, and Lambda Legal, which litigates gay rights cases nationally, took over the defence instead.
They won at trial in 2011. They won unanimously at the court of appeals in 2012. They won unanimously at the Wisconsin Supreme Court on July 31, 2014.
By then a federal court had struck down the marriage ban itself, and couples in Wisconsin could marry. The registry closed to new couples on April 1, 2018.
The Prom is a musical about a girl in Indiana who is told she cannot bring her girlfriend to the school dance, and the Broadway actors who turn up to help her and to repair their own reputations. It was built out of real cases. The best known is Constance McMillen, whose Mississippi high school cancelled its 2010 prom outright rather than let her attend in a tuxedo with her girlfriend. The writers moved the story to Indiana because of Mike Pence.
It ran at the Longacre Theatre in New York and closed on August 11, 2019.
Eight days before that, on August 3, the audience was asked to stay in their seats after the curtain call.
Armelle Kay Harper, the show’s script coordinator, married Jody Kay Smith, an actor and singer, on the set. Both wore rose-gold sequinned gowns. Bob Martin, who co-wrote the show’s book, officiated, and told the audience he had been ordained online in a matter of minutes.
They had met in 2017. Smith proposed nineteen days after their first date.
It is thought to be the first wedding held on a Broadway stage.
