Profile: One family's dealing with a gay marriage
  October 31, 2003
  NPR News
  ALL THINGS CONSIDERED

  In recent months, Americans have focused their attention on this issue 
  as never before. Canada has already stretched its definition of marriage 
  to include same-sex unions. Now the highest court in one state, 
  Massachusetts, is considering doing the same thing. Such a decision could 
  have a broad national implications in politics, the law, culture and religion.
  We begin our half-hour on gay marriage with a story about how
  one family's views have shifted over three generations. NPR's Barbara
  Bradley Hagerty traveled to Detroit, and she has this report.

  BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY reporting:

  It's difficult to find empty space on Saul Panisch's walls. There's
  the bar mitzvah wall, the grandchildren wall. The photographs capture
  just about every significant moment in his family's life. It all began
  with a crush on a girl 67 years ago.

  Mr. SAUL PANISCH: I met my wife at a roller-skating party when she was
  14 years old.

  HAGERTY: Panisch was 17. Three years later, he gathered his courage and
  asked for a date. From then on, Panisch saw Sylvia Logan(ph) every
  chance got, the young observant Jewish man walking six miles to her home
  every Saturday. They married in 1942 just before Panisch joined the
  Flying Tigers to fight in Asia. Panisch says the marriage covenant that
  extended more than six decades until his wife died in May was something
  holy.

  Mr. PANISCH: And I had a firm conviction that this was ordained, the
  marriage was ordained by God, and that we were meant for each other
  since the days of our birth. And in marrying, we made a contract with
  each other.

  HAGERTY: A contract with specific roles: he provided a roof over their
  heads; she provided the meals and moral teachings for their four
  children. And in those days, it was an unbreakable contract. The next 30
  years would bring changes that thousands of years had not, some
  reflected by his second daughter, Gigi(ph).

  GIGI: I never thought about anything religious or spiritual with respect
  to marriage.

  HAGERTY: By the time Gigi married for the first time in 1976, the
  divorce revolution was in full force. For Gigi, marriage was not an
  unbreakable contract and less about roles than practicalities.

  GIGI: It was just the next step. We lived together for a long time, then
  we got married. That way, you could buy a house and apply for a mortgage
  together or get on each other's health insurance, do whatever it was you
  needed to do.

  HAGERTY: Gigi's first marriage ended amicably. Her second marriage,
  which is still strong, would introduce the family to a new kind of
  marriage revolution. Gigi remembers the conversation with her
  stepdaughter, Eva Freed.

  GIGI: I can't remember when it was, but at one point, Eva said to me,
  'You know, I think it would be just as easy for me to fall in love with
  a woman as a man.' I don't know what that moment was about for her, but
  I do remember my initial reaction was, 'Well, Eva, if you have a choice,
  then marry a man because your life will be a lot easier.'

  HAGERTY: Eva would not take the easy route. In college, Eva met another
  woman, Jeanine Dunmire(ph), and fell in love. They announced their
  engagement a few months later. She says the M-word caused a bit of
  consternation, but her parents soon gave their blessing. Eva knew even
  in her liberal, well-educated family, she was nudging them past a line
  they never thought they would cross.

  GIGI: No one thinks that their child is going to grow up and get married
  to someone of the same sex. I mean, being in a relationship with someone
  of the same sex--I thought it was pretty radical that they were so
  willing to accept that.

  HAGERTY: Her grandfather's reaction was not so accepting.

  Mr. PANISCH: When I found out about it, my reaction was, 'Oh, no. How
  can that be?' Because my whole life, I thought that this sort of a
  relationship biblically was an abomination.

  HAGERTY: Eva stood firm. They wanted a traditional wedding and the
  blessing of tradition.

  Ms. EVA FREED: We wanted all those people to be invested in the
  endurance of our relationship, as well as God's, and saw it as something
  that's important to both of us. We knew we wanted to have children and
  we wanted to kind of get the legitimizing factor sort out of the way
  before we introduced children. And we do feel that now. We know, like,
  'Wow, if we broke up, 80 people, you know, would want their Cuisinart
  back.' So we do think it kind of invests the larger community in our
  being together as a couple.

  HAGERTY: Eva and Jeanine persuaded Eva's rabbi to oversee the ceremony,
  though not in his synagogue. It was a garden wedding. Saul Panisch was
  sitting reluctantly in the front row.

  Mr. PANISCH: I approached it that, 'I'm not going to interfere. I'm not
  going to offer any opinions. I'll just keep my mouth shut. I'm going to
  bite my tongue.' And we're outdoor and it was a beautiful day, and Eva
  and Jeanine appeared all dressed in white, beautiful white gowns. It was
  a traditional wedding. And I'm sitting there and I'm saying to myself,
  'Saul, don't be stupid. This is a wonderful, wonderful event. They love
  each other. You could see, they totally love each other.' I use the word
  epiphany; this was my epiphany. And all this previous--I'm not calling
  it a prejudice. It's not a prejudice. This is an indoctrination. This is
  the acceptance of my world. All that just flew out.

  HAGERTY: Two years ago, Eva gave birth to Stella(ph) through artificial
  insemination. Now Jeanine works and night and Eva goes to school by day,
  so Stella always has a mother taking care of her.

  Ms. FREED: We really are just extremely traditional. We want a
  stay-at-home mom, kids, you know, a full house. And I think, you know,
  even though we're two women, we really wanted the same thing that my
  grandparents had when they were together, you know, a Jewish home to
  have children and holidays together.

  HAGERTY: Eva says the courts should recognize her commitment and bestow
  on them the rights that other couples enjoy. Her mother, Gigi, thinks
  that one day soon, this debate will fade as have other controversies
  over marriage.

  GIGI: It's funny. I think about, maybe in the '60s, people sitting here
  and having this conversation about interracial marriage. And so it makes
  me wonder, in 30 years, people listening to this, how silly this might
  sound or what their conversation may be about.

  HAGERTY: And yet, for all the distance he has come, 84-year-old Saul
  Panisch still feels torn.

  Mr. PANISCH: What comes out of my mouth sometimes shakes me. I have a
  hidden guilt complex, that I am usurping the beliefs of my parents and
  my grandparents. I'm saying things now that I never could have said to
  them and they could never have said to their parents. I'm, in a way, I
  guess, dishonoring their memory.

  HAGERTY: Nearby, on a table crowded with photos, is a picture of Eva and
  Jeanine in white wedding dresses. Barbara Bradley Hagerty, NPR News.
                                          

  Host ROBERT SIEGEL: Jennifer and Geoffrey Vaughan say they feel less conflicted
  about gay marriage than Mr. Panisch does. They're against it. Geoffrey
  Vaughan is a professor of political philosophy at the University of
  Maryland, Baltimore County. His wife, Jennifer, who studied theology at
  Oxford, has written a paper on the subject. The Vaughans say they have
  no problem with the union between a man and a man or a woman and a
  woman; they say just don't call it marriage.

  Mrs. JENNIFER VAUGHAN: We're not talking about legal recognition or even
  social recognition. The problem is changing the definition of marriage
  itself.

  Professor GEOFFREY VAUGHAN (University of Maryland, Baltimore County):
  Well, you consider three parts to marriage. The one is--it's
  traditionally understood, of course--a man and a woman, so opposites.
  Some sort of public contract, you know, today, sometimes implicit, but
  more often a public contract. And finally, some form of fruitfulness,
  like the lesbian couple we heard about; they now have a daughter. I
  mean, there's a fruitfulness to their union that they have. It's
  artificial insemination, but there's a fruitfulness. They have love;
  they have product. But in their case, while they have the public
  contract, the fruitfulness, they don't have that bringing together of
  opposites. When you start changing that and allowing for a variety of
  different types of marriage, you're changing even the first type; Type
  A, now that you allow type A, B and C, type A is now just part of the
  jumble.

  SIEGEL: But by necessity, I accept many different kinds of heterosexual
  marriage. I accept the fact that other people may have radically
  different interpretations of their vows than my wife and I have, but
  that's their business. That's how they live their lives.

  Mrs. VAUGHAN: Right. Part of the problem in just saying 'It's not OK for
  me, but it's OK for anybody else who wants to do it,' is our
  responsibility as bearers of a certain truth to future generations. If
  we actually, truly believe something to be the way things are, the way
  things should be, then we should very well fight for it. To just sort of
  sit back and say, 'Well, it's OK for me, but I'm not sure it's OK for
  you,' sends all sorts of messages to our children, to our children's
  children, to future generations. And that's not a risk I'm willing to
  take.

  SIEGEL: That degree of relativism...

  Mrs. VAUGHAN: Exactly. Exactly.

  SIEGEL: ...would be too great a risk to undertake?

  Mrs. VAUGHAN: Yes, I think so.

  SIEGEL: Let me put the highest test of relativism to you, which is when
  it involves your own relatives.

  Mrs. VAUGHAN: Yes.

  SIEGEL: Let's say you raise your family and despite the values you
  instill in your own children, or they in their children, despite the
  church they've gone to, the education they've had, your son or grandson
  announces to you one day, 'I am gay, I am in love with Tom and we'd like
  to get married.' Do you say, 'Don't set foot in my house ever again' or
  'I'll do what Mr. Panisch did. I'll go to the wedding and take part in
  your life, because you've decided this is what you want to do'?

  Mrs. VAUGHAN: I don't think that there's really ever room in a family to
  decide you don't love someone anymore. However, I also think that part
  of loving your family members, loving your children or your
  grandchildren, is doing exactly what Mr. Panisch has done, I think quite
  courageously, in saying on a national radio show, 'I love my
  granddaughter, but I'm not all right with what she did.'

  SIEGEL: Yeah, 'I'm torn up about this in some way.'

  Mrs. VAUGHAN: Yeah. And I think, you know, there's definitely some sort
  of rejection there, and I don't think that that's inappropriate.

  Prof. VAUGHAN: Confronted with this possibility, you can always say,
  'Well, fine, but let's not call it marriage. Consider the implications
  of that. Consider what that does for the centuries upon centuries of
  human understanding of what a marriage is and what marriage should be.
  In your seeking that ideal of marriage that you hope to have, my dear
  grandson, yes, you're seeking that ideal, but at the same time, you're
  changing it significantly.'

  Mrs. VAUGHAN: It's important to acknowledge that it's not possible--I
  mean, really, truly, marriage, if you think of it as a cord of three
  strands where you have complementarity, a covenant that exists before
  God and the people and the fruitfulness that shows forth in the bearing
  of children or otherwise, that can only exist in its truest form, in its
  natural form, between a man and a woman. You can sort of fiddle with it
  and make, you know, a gay couple can have children because of artificial
  insemination or adoption, but just changing the definition still doesn't
  make it possible.

  SIEGEL: Well, Geoffrey and Jennifer Vaughan, thank you very much for
  talking with us today.

  Prof. VAUGHAN: Thank you.

  Mrs. VAUGHAN: Thank you, Robert.

  SIEGEL: Geoffrey and Jennifer Vaughan of Catonsville, Maryland.


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