In a 2 to 1 decision, the 9th Circuit Court has declared Proposition 8 a violation of the rights of gay Californians.

In his write up of the decision, Judge Reinhardt wrote:

“Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples.”

Reinhardt was quick to say that this decision is only about this issue in this state, but the court’s decision that denying same sex couples the right to marry violates their rights as human beings and as citizens could well add weight to the case for marriage equality when it comes before the Supreme Court.

Sometimes justice is slow, but I firmly believe it will come for all of us. Today, I got another proof that my faith is justified. It is my fond hope that California will rejoin the ranks of those who offer full rights to all its citizens soon.

No very specific reason was given for the split, but the couple did release a joint statement, saying they had “grown apart” and that their separation is amicable.

Whatever their reasons, I do have to appreciate the fact that they are refusing to air their dirty linen in public. That, my friends, is how to do it the classy way.

The other split that made the news this week is Aretha Franklin and fiance Willie Wilkerson, who announced the end of their engagement just weeks after announcing its beginning. While the engagement is off, though, there is no word of whether or not they have ended their romance.

Franklin’s statement said that she and Wilkerson had decided they were moving “a little bit too fast” and said there were “a number of things that had not been thought through thoroughly.” The upshot? “There will be no wedding at this time.”

Whatever their issues, it is my fond hope they can be resolved to the satisfaction of all involved. But if they can’t, I do believe it’s better that things end in a broken engagement than a painful divorce down the road.

None of this is happy news, but the heart is a resilient muscle. May all four parties find happiness in the long run, if not at the moment.

Since they got engaged in November, he and his partner, Aaron VanderYacht, have been finding they have a lot of questions about getting married as gay men. Naturally, they turned to the internet.

One frustrating Google search later, they had found a certain number of wedding-related services run by heterosexuals featuring rainbow flags that assured them they were welcome as customers, which was fine… as far as it went. What they couldn’t find was practical advice on how to throw a wedding with two grooms and zero brides.

So what do two guys looking for answers and not finding them do? They create the resource they’re looking for themselves. And so they started The Best Gay Wedding Blog Ever to document their wedding planning over the next year. As Kristen-Alexander says in his inaugural entry, dated January 10:

I thought it was time to hear stories and advice straight from the horse’s mouth, that horse being your’s truly!! So over the next, I dunno, year or so you and I will go on a journey. A journey to the big day: our wedding. I will share with you all the juicy experiences as my lovely groom and I try to figure out how the hell we are going to pull of a fabulous wedding on a budget. I am sure this experience will be full of hilarious stories, tears of joy, tragic tuxedos and terrible wedding cake! But best believe, by the time we are done you and your future Mr. or Mrs. will certainly know one thing: What not to do when planning your wedding!

All I can say is, I look forward to seeing what decisions messers Griffith and VanderYacht make.

Weir tweeted:

… he’s kind of everything that I’ve ever looked for and aspired to be in a relationship with.

That’s pretty much how I think people should feel about their life partners. Congratulations, Johnny and Victor! I wish you every happiness.

2012 has already brought happy news to more couples.

Basketball great LeBron James proposed on New Year’s Eve to his longtime love Savannah Brinson, the mother of his two sons. May they look that happy together for the rest of their lives.

Basketball legend Michael Jordan was ahead of the curve. He proposed to model Yvette Prieto, his girlfriend of three years, on Christmas Eve. Oh, in case you hadn’t heard, she said yes.

Last, but about a million miles from least, the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin announced her engagement to longtime companion William ‘Willie’ Wilkerson. This will be the third trip down the aisle for Franklin, who is considering a summer wedding.

The sixty-nine-year-old bride assures us:

No, I’m not pregnant.

Rock on with your bad self, Queen Aretha! May you continue to delight us – and Mr. Wilkerson – for years to come.

While I admit I’ve never been that big on comic books so my knowledge may be somewhat lacking, this is the first time I’ve heard of a same-sex marriage in one. And the fact that it’s Archie, that inoffensive bastion of childhood innocence and suburban Leave it to Beaver golly gee whizness only makes this a more powerful statement, in my view.

So congratulations, Kevin and Clay! You may be imaginary, but your love is a big step along the way to marriage equality.

Now if only Archie would make up his mind between Betty and Veronica. You’d think seventy years would be plenty of time.

Still, the other day I happened across their wedding ceremony, and found myself deeply touched by the thoughtful, gentle view of marriage it expressed. In particular, I loved this passage:

May you always need one another, not so much to fill the emptiness as to help each other know your fullness. May you want one another, but not out of lack. May you embrace one another, but not encircle one another. May you succeed in all important ways with each other, and not fail in the little graces. Look for things to praise, often say ‘I love you’ and take no notice of small faults. May you have happiness, and may you find it in making one another happy. May you have love, and may you find it in loving one another.

I could wish nothing better for each and every one of you in your marriages.

Well, I found a perfect example of how beautiful a handmade, very personal wedding can be.

This lovely Canadian couple used furniture from their parents’ homes, leftover wood from the groom’s father’s lumber mill, volunteers, elbow grease, and a little forethought to create an elegant, unique, and utterly charming wedding on their own. Read the whole story and see more pictures at Ruffled.

Oh, and David Tutera? Eat your heart out.


In other wedding news, singer Sinead O’Conner tied the knot for the fourth time on the ninth with therapist Barry Herridge. The pair chose the same Vegas chapel where Elvis Presley and Britney Spears (separately) were married. They sat in the back seat of a pink cadillac for their vows.

If any of you have wondered if you can rock your tattoos and a traditional wedding gown, head on over to Kristi Odom’s website and check out this gorgeous inked bride and her fabulous Halloween wedding.

Lovely gown, impressive ink, and a wedding I’m sure the couple will look back on for years with pleasure.

But there’s a funny thing about average statistics: they reflect all weddings and none, not any one specific wedding.

You see, those numbers include things like Kim Kardashian’s recent multi-million-dollar extravaganza that resulted in mere weeks of actual marriage… and it includes that couple who couldn’t wait for the end of grad school and held a potluck in a friend’s back yard with ten of their closest peeps in attendance.

It includes the women I see on Say Yes to the Dress who don’t blink at the idea of spending fifteen grand on just the dress, and it includes the couples I see on Rich Bride, Poor Bride who present their planners with a budget of less than ten thousand dollars for the entire wedding. It includes the couples on Platinum Weddings who pay half a million dollars on a three-day blowout for six hundred of their best friends like it was pocket change, and it includes couples who borrow the money for a license from their folks and ask a friend to get ordained by the Universal Life Church so they won’t have to come up with a way to pay the officiant.

It includes the people who paid cash on the barrel for everything, and the people who went into debt it will take them years to pay off to have the day they want.

There are statistics and there are handy tools like Cost of wedding.com where you can learn what the average amount spent on a wedding is. Chances are you can find some sort of breakdown of what the ‘average’ couple spends specific items, too, like photography or cake. These things are interesting to know, and if you’re looking into a particular kind of item, service, or look, they can be helpful to you in figuring out what that might set you back.

But there’s one thing they cannot tell you: what you as a couple are able to comfortably spend on your individual wedding. You are not an average. And while your wedding will most likely involve a lot of the expected trappings in one form or another, your wedding is not average. It’s unique to you.

Here’s the bottom line on what weddings cost: your wedding will cost what you are willing to spend on it. That could be anything from the cost of the marriage license, followed by a quick lunch for the friends who married you and witnessed the event to a price tag that would make a Kardashian blush… if such a thing is possible.

My advice? Take a little time to price things you like out; consider carefully what you need, what you want, and what you don’t want; brainstorm a little about how to source things you can’t afford the ordinary way. Then ignore what everyone else is paying, and have the wedding that is the best intersection possible of your style and your available budget.

After all, do you really want to be average?

The bride wore Alexander McQueen, though I have yet to find a picture of the gown. The ceremony was intimate, with family and close friends in attendance, including Nettles’ Sugarland partner Kristian Bush.

This is the second marriage for Nettles, 37. Her first marriage ended in 2007 after nine years.

The couple will not honeymoon immediately, because the bride is a bit busy tomorrow night playing the Grammy Nominations Concert Live!! along with such luminaries as Lady Gaga and Lupe Fiasco. Alas!, Mr. Twistie is not expecting a nomination. Sigh.

Anyway.

I hope you’ll join with me in wishing the happy couple many years of delight in one another.

So I watched an episode.

The Santinis had been married for eighteen years (hey! that’s how long Mr. Twistie and I have been married!) but never got over the horror of their wedding day. You see, they hired someone to make the bridesmaids dresses who didn’t get them done in time. She had promised delivery on the day of the wedding to the church… and apparently nobody thought that plan to be potentially fraught with disaster.

The big day arrived, but the bridesmaids dresses didn’t, much to the consternation of all aware of the situation. For some reason passing all understanding, when the bride’s grandmother began foaming at the mouth about having the bridesmaids wear the groomsmen’s shirts, nobody pressed a cold compress to her forehead or called the paramedics. Instead, they listened to her.

And so it was that the bridesmaids marched up the aisle wearing the now bare-chested groomsmen’s shirts and matching high heels. One bridesmaid was tall enough that the shirt tails didn’t entirely cover her underpants.

Mrs. Santini left the church howling ‘I need a drink!’ and has been distraught over her wedding photos and video ever since.

Then Diann Valentine swooped in and fixed everything… eighteen years later.

I had some hope for this show, based on the fever dream that it might not wind up a painful hybrid of My Fair Wedding and Queen for a Day.

Also? While I detest My Fair Wedding with a passion beyond description, I do have to admit that when David Tutera gets done planning a wedding, it’s usually a pretty nice wedding. It may be provided with scads of eye-rolling and paternalistic weasel crap, but it’s a pretty event in the end. As much of a complete set of tools as Mr. Tutera comes off, he would never allow a groom to arrive at his wedding wearing a hat that was obviously too large for his head. Ms. Valentine picked that hat. Then she showed up wearing a gown that looked like something I saw Morticia Addams donating to Good Will recently.

And of course this show – like so many other wedding reality shows – wants you to swallow a huge dose of ‘see? it’s impossible to do this without a professional planner because you’re really just a gibbering idiot’ without even noticing you’re doing it. Valentine has said in press releases that if only these couples had had a real event planner on hand, these disasters would never have happened.

Okay, I can see how a planner might have helped in the case of the missing bridesmaid’s dresses. She could have counseled the couple to buy from a shop, or not give over the work to someone who didn’t intend to deliver before the actual wedding day. If the dresses didn’t turn up, she could have come up with a much better plan B than turning a church wedding into some sort of intramural strip club theme… but then again, so could one single random person with their head screwed on straight.

All it would have taken would be one person telling all the bridesmaids to run home, get their nicest dress in roughly the same length as the original dresses (or a similar color, or whatever was going to pull them together visually at the altar), and hurry back dressed in those. Would it have been utter perfection? No, of course not. You can’t guarantee that any five random women – even in 1992 – would all have tea length teal dresses in their closets. But would it have been a bazillion times better than what granny came up with? You bet your sweet bippy, it would!

So, yeah, not really absolutely necessary to have a wedding planner to come up with a solution. And I can’t think that having an event planner running the show would have helped in particular with the groom with a heart condition who flatlined during the vows. I’m thinking the paramedic best man at that wedding was a lot more useful. He got the groom’s ticker back on track with CPR.

So with all of this leaving a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, I have to say I love the story I ran across this morning about Mike and Nancy Rogers. The happy couple hails from Nova Scotia and this is a real photo of their wedding day:

See that burning building behind the beaming couple? Yeah, that was to have been their wedding venue, otherwise known as the late White Point resort.

The eighty-three year old mostly wooden building caught fire while Nancy and Mike were getting ready for their big moment in two of the outlying cabins on the property. The couple still wanted to get married that day, no matter where they had to do it. The quick-thinking staff moved the event to another outlying building that was in no immediate danger, and the ceremony went on as planned… or at least as close to as planned as possible.

This is the second marriage for both Mike and Nancy, and that might have made them just a bit more philosophical about the whole incident:

“Our last weddings were picture-perfect; nothing went wrong. But the marriages didn’t work out,” she says. “Rocky wedding, fantastic marriage is the way we see it.”

The general manager of the resort is also confident that they can rebuild and reopen. I wish them every luck with that plan!

As for Mike and Nancy, I think they’re creating their own luck. But I wish them well, too.

Somehow I don’t think they feel the need to call anyone in to fix what happened to them.