The judge may have pulled the plug on the live feed, but bloggers at the trial are doing a lot of live blogging at http://prop8trialtracker.com/An excerpt from this afternoon:
Live Updates from the Courthouse IV: Afternoon session continues
By Rick Jacobs
Sandy is now on. She’s also very poised. She learned in her mid-thirties that she is “gay.” She got married to a man before. She had no feeling that she was a lesbian when she was married to a man. I had a difficult relationship for most of our marriage, but I started it out with the best of intentions. She grew up in Iowa in a small town of 1,500. It was a good but sheltered upbringing.
We did not travel or go to places very different from where we grew up. I had no idea of a gay lifestyle or sexuality until I was a late teenager. I moved to CA in 1985 and got married to a man in 1987. We dated for a year before we got married on 14 November 1987. Marriage ended in 1999. (Olson is very interested in drawing out the trajectory of her sexuality, which is fascinating, rarely discussed in public.) She met Kristin first as a coworker. We were friends. The feelings I had for her were different than I had for others. I grew to realize that I was falling in love with her, in early 1999. My marriage was falling apart on many fronts. I was extremely unhappy. My ex-husband relied on alcohol and could not support the family properly. My sexual orientation or the discovery thereof did not have anything to do with the failure of the marriage. I had never experienced falling in love before. Olson draws out whether that’s true of her husband. I never thought people “fell in love.” When you grow up in the Midwest with a farming family, there is a pragmatism that is inherent, part of the fabric of life, that is pervasive. I remember my mom saying that marriage is more than romantic love, it’s an enduring long term commitment that is hard work. In my family, that seemed really true. I wanted to have the kind of relationship that my parents did and do. Kris and I have a very romantic relationship. Not only did we fall in love, we wanted to merge our families. I was 36. We wanted that life of commitment and stability.
O: How convinced are you that you are gay? You lived with a husband. Some people would say it’s this, then it’s that and now it’s this.
S: I’ve only been in love once and that’s with Perry. I’m 47. I know. I’m a plaintiff this case because I would like to get married and to marry the person that I choose and that’s Kris Perry and California law prevents that.
Sandy describes her version of their marriage, the toasts, the love from community: When I got that letter saying that our marriage was no longer valid humiliated, angry and that people who brought us gifts and celebrated with us felt pity for us which is the last thing that I ever want to evoke around marriage.
S: It felt great that the court thought we had a constitutional right to get married. It was cloaked in this distension that felt very familiar. The activist groups that opposed marriage made me realize that this was not permanent. I felt strongly that at my age I don’t want to humiliated any more. We got married twice and it was taken way. I want it to be permanent, no chance it get taken away from us. We did have friends that got married. We were proud and worried for them because we did not want them to have the same problems we had.
Read the rest here...
