After helping to orchestrate a bus trip that brought a dozen same-sex couples from St. Louis to Iowa to get legally married, it was finally time for Scott Emanuel and Ed Reggi to tie the knot themselves. Standing under the Jewish wedding canopy, or chuppah, under the gaze of Rabbi Susan Talve, the marriage-equality activists looked into each other’s eyes, and everything came to a head.
“I think that that’s when the personal and the political kind of all came together for me,” says Emanuel. “But then [as we said our vows], the political kind of went aside, and it was totally personal. It was about us.”
Reggi and Emanuel’s wedding was one of a dozen that took place one after the other on a single day in a Unitarian church in Iowa City, Iowa, in April 2009. Since then, the happy pair have shepherded a busload of gay and lesbian couples north across the state line to make their marriages official every 10 weeks or so, says Reggi. This Valentine’s Day, the Marriage Equality Bus, sponsored by Reggi’s Show Me No Hate action group, will make its eighth trip and bring its 100th couple together in legal marriage.
Reggi practically had his bag packed the moment Iowa legalized same-sex marriage two years ago. “We had two extra seats in the back of our car,” he says, “so we asked another couple to go with us, and they asked a couple, and it just grew in a day or so to 12 of our closest friends, so we rented a bus. From all the media coverage, we had a dozen more couples who came forward, too, so we had our next bus scheduled right away.”
Many of the couples on the bus have been together for a long time, says Reggi, and “many of them have already had commitment ceremonies in their congregations and communities in St. Louis.” The Rev. Kimberly Banks Brown (who performs same-sex marriages, among other pastoral duties) and her wife, Kim Coleman, rode that first bus to Iowa with Reggi and Emanuel. “My wife and I had already been married for three years by the time we went to Iowa,” says Brown. “We’d signed a legal document similar to a marriage document, and we have a son and a dog and two cats and two mortgages,” she adds with a laugh. “The trip was more of a renewal of our vows, and we did it as a political thing, too.
“Once we got that marriage license, it was mystical, though,” Brown continues. “Everything was totally complete. My wife is really my wife. It was a personal revelation at that point, not just a public one.”
Once the couples get to Iowa, the weddings are a remarkable mixture of your average, everyday wedding ceremony and something more profound that comes from years of societal censure suddenly breaking open into acceptance.
“The church is full of all these couples and their family members, but also board members and 80-year-old ushers from the church volunteering,” says Reggi. “People donate flowers and design wedding cakes and donate all kinds of other things. In the end, it’s all very normal. But you know, it is pretty profound to see each couple pouring their hearts out. The tissue box is totally handed around to everybody. By the end of the ceremony, two hours later, there’s not a dry eye in the house.”
Says Brown, “There were some folks on the bus who talked about how this wasn’t the wedding they envisioned for themselves. The only bitterness I had about the whole day was having to drive back across the state line. Still, it was a really, really magical day.”
Learn more about the Marriage Equality Bus at showmenohate.com and heartlandtransportthemovie.com. Reggi cautions that couples who want to take the bus to Iowa will need to "get up at 5 a.m., be ready for the possibility of media coverage of their marriage, and possibly wait on a waiting list for a spot on the next bus."
