Part 1: Julie Rose and Lynda Brocchini



Shortly before going to bed at midnight last night, Julie Rose updated her Facebook status message: "Julie Rose is wondering if she will still be married in the morning."

Rose wasn't waiting for a divorce to finalize, or for her spouse to leave her. Instead, the legality of her marriage to Lynda Brocchini (her partner of a decade) was hanging in the balance, at the mercy of California voters deciding on the fate of Proposition 8. If passed, Prop 8 would amend the State Constitution to ban same-sex unions such as theirs.

Today, even with some three to four million absentee ballots yet to be counted, Prop 8 still looks to be on the road to passing in California, with 52.5% in favor and 47.5% against the measure at press time. San Francisco, Los Angeles and Santa Clara County (the latter where the bulk of Silicon Valley is based) have already joined forces in filing a petition with the California Supreme Court for a writ of mandate to invalidate Prop 8, so the fight isn't even close to being over. But for families like Rose and Brocchini, who share a three-year-old son named Dylan and have had no less than five different commitment ceremonies together (including one performed by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom himself), this is a truly difficult and disheartening moment.

"It's hard, because there's all this talk of, 'Yes we can,' and change," says Rose, "But for a group of us, it doesn't feel all there."

Proposition 8 was endorsed and largely funded by individuals and organizations with ties to religious groups such as the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

"What kills me is that the people funding [Prop 8] are people who say that say they are religious people and all of these churches, the Catholic church and the Mormon church that threw all this money behind this, claim to be Christian people," Rose observes. "I can see why the 'No on 8' people would throw a lot of money behind it, because you're fighting for your rights. But these 'Yes on 8' people who threw millions and millions of dollars that they spent to take rights away from us, why aren't they spending it trying to help poor children or feed people or build houses for people or help third world countries? Isn't that what Christianity is supposed to be about? Helping people, not trying to hurt people?

"If I belonged to a church and I gave money to that church thinking it was to feed people who were hungry or homeless and then I found out that they were using it on a political campaign to take rights away from somebody, I don't know how happy I would be about that."

For the past seven years, Rose has worked for Levi Strauss & Co., the San-Francisco-based company that made history in 1992 by being the first Fortune 500 company to extend its domestic partner medical benefits program to same-sex couples. But even that doesn't have equal advantage to married couples, as she explains.

"I don't get to claim married medical benefits, so all the benefits that they pay for my partner medically, I get taxed on as income. And we had to go to an attorney to have all of this complicated paperwork drawn up –– a married couple, even if they got a trust put together, they pay one fee for the trust. Well, we had to pay for each of us, so twice as much. There's a lot of real, concrete benefits that you don't get.

"In California, domestic partnership laws after AB205 are very good. But also there's the whole 'separate but equal' argument, saying, 'Well, why do you need the word marriage if you have everything else?' But why can't we have the word marriage? Why should it be good enough that we should get a subclass of the same thing? The word shouldn't just be used for one group of people. If they were running around and saying that black people couldn't say they were married, or interracial marriages could only say that they were civil unions, people would think they were ridiculous."

While the battle for Prop 8 continues, so does this family's strength and devotion to the idea that this story will have a happy ending.

"Our son gets really excited when he sees our wedding pictures," she adds. "He thinks it was so great because he was at [two] of them, and he says, 'Mommies are married!' It's not like he's old enough that I could even begin to explain [Prop 8] to him, but I'm hoping he's not going to remember a time when we weren't legally married."