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Mark Reed, Dante Walkup and over 80 guests celebrated their same-sex e-wedding on October 10th without the slightest indication that it would be annulled only a few weeks later, dot429 reports.
The
Texas couple thought they had found a loophole in the system when they
were married by a Washington D.C. officiant from Texas using Skype–an
online Web conferencing program. The “loophole” Reed thought he found
last year was a D.C. law stating that the officiant, not necessarily the
wedding party, must be present in D.C. at the time of the ceremony, the
man told dot429. After verifying this condition with the D.C. courts,
the couple began planning their short-lived marriage.
The couple
soon received a letter from court authorities notifying them the
marriage was annulled because the couple failed to appear in D.C. during
the ceremony.
“We were stunned because the court had annulled our
marriage without contacting us or our officiant,” Reed said of the
news. “There was a total lack of due process of law.”
Photo by dot429 courtesy of Mark Reed
Premonitions
of trouble to come arrived earlier that week, when the Texas Division
of Motor Vehicles refused to change Reed’s last name to his married
name, causing him to endure a $350 court “change name” fee and a
criminal background check. According to dot429, Reed believes if he were
a woman marrying a man, he never would have had to go to the courts to
get his name on his identification cards changed from a maiden name.
A
trail of homophobic and anti-gay remarks made by the public have since
followed the couple. “It’s gotten to the point where I fear that with
our home address published, somebody might try and harm us,” Reed tells
dot429.
The couple feels strongly that the annulment and
challenges to the success of their marriage was set into action because
of homophobic view points, and they feel they have suffered a
prohibitive amount of injustice in the legal system. Upon the
exploration of options to fight the unannounced annulment, dot429 notes:
“ There are examples of heterosexual publicized Skype weddings that were allowed to be legal,” Reed says, “Traveling to D.C. will be
time-consuming and expensive, but we have to take a stand in our fight
for equality.”
