Journal BarbaraHudson's Journal: I changed history last week 7
And unlike in "All You Zombies", I didn't need a U.S.F.F. Coordinates Transformer Field Kit, series 1992, Mod II to do it.
As you can see from this excerpt from Wikipedia, the first country to pass a same sex marriage law was the Netherlands, in December of 2000.
2000
21 December: Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands signs into law the first same-sex marriage bill in the world. It had previously cleared the country's Senate on 19 December in a 49â"26 vote and the House of Representatives on 12 September in a 109â"33 vote. The law came into effect on 1 April 2001.
Of course, Canada screwed that up just fine:
2001
14 January: Two same-sex marriages are performed at the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto in Ontario, Canada (2-1/2 months before the Netherlands law came into force). Although registration of the marriages was initially denied, a successful court challenge upheld their legality on 10 June 2003, thus retroactively making them the first legal same-sex marriages in modern times.
Not so fast there
Now if that sounds totally f'ed up, then you know it has to involve me, and my 35 years of work trying to modify the name and sex on my birth certificate, running into one delay after another, and a very recent law change with totally unexpected consequences that has my kids and me laughing
My application was pre-approved years ago, but I ran into lots of problems, and until just before Christmas last year, it was expensive - something I just couldn't afford because of all my health problems, and before that having to quit my job because my boss bounced a month's worth of pay cheques and then tried to make it look like I had agreed to work as an independent contractor, and too many other problems many of you are familiar with, so finalizing it kept getting put off.
Then a few years ago, they said the procedure was being changed, and it would be both quicker and cheaper - just wait a year to pass the new law.
Of course, the new law took a lot more than a year to pass, and then everything was ready to go ---- and if you believe that bullshit, you'll believe anything the government tells you.
Add a couple more years leaving people in limbo because now they had to come up with the legal and other procedures for actually applying the law. A lot of people probably said to hell with the wait and went with the old procedure.
Finally, I saw that they were now able to take new applications, got the forms, gathered up all the stuff needed, and was just waiting on one of my sisters to sign an affidavit saying she knew me and I understood the seriousness of all this.
After weeks of "not today, maybe next week", she said to email the docs to her and she'd look at them. And after more weeks of "not this week, I'm busy", a second request to email them to her so she could look at them. Like I told my endocrinologist, it was pretty obvious she was avoiding it. Afterwards, one of my neighbors said she would have done it immediately, but I didn't want to impose on her. Oh well.
Finally she did, and I took the paperwork downtown, and was told it would take 4 months. Turns out that because it had been pre-approved all those years ago, they could skip part of the evaluation, so it took less than three.
Now if it had happened a year ago, 5 years ago, a decade ago, all that would have been changed was my name and sex on my birth certificate. The cover letter they sent said this:
Please not that the required changes were made to your act of birth and your act of marriage registered to the registrar of civil status. The change to your given names was also entered on the act of birth of your children.
So my marriage from 1976 - by the Catholic church of all places (no, I was an atheist even back then) is now legally recognized as being between two women, and my kids have two women as their parents - and all the documentation available shows this.
I cannot even ask for a copy without the changes. Neither can anyone else. My kids are like me - they find it hilarious.
BTW - here no church or municipality is in charge of, nor may they keep or issue, records of birth or marriage. So even the Pope can't claim that the Catholic church doesn't do same sex marriages.
And everyone who didn't run into these delays got screwed out of "first same sex marriage post."
It doesn't make up for the decades of problems, but it's something to laugh about, and we all need a good laugh once in a while.
Oh :( (Score:2)
I thought you'd gone back in time and killed Hitler. But congratulations on screwing up the space-time continuum anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
You'd think that the example of Hitler would have led people to have a more developed sense of hubris. Until we learn the lesson, we're going to keep going through the school of hard knocks. The next one may make Hitler look like a pussy-cat, we just don't know. What we DO know is that there will be a next one. The 21st century is still young, and in many ways the world resembles WW1, with the wars and refugees.
But hey, on the good side, thanks - I finally accidentally did something significant :-)
Re: (Score:2)
I've been thinking the same thing. We have the rise of populist demagogues, the resurgence of nationalistic tub thumping, at least two expansionist empire-building nations, one encroaching on a creaky defence pact in Europe...the area of major unrest has gone south (haven't we all?) from the Balkans to the Middle East, but otherwise conditions are very similar to pre-WW1. What concerns me the most is the glorification of dead soldiers without equal condemnation of the world leaders whose failings killed the
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And I was so sure she was going to tell us she'd gone back and saved the Archduke...
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I don't think we'd like to live in a world that didn't have the benefits that accrued from the 2 world wars. Our birth rates would be higher, our life expectancy lower, and our expectations from life would be much watered down.
Congrats (Score:2)
Congrats Barbara. What an epic struggle spanning decades it's been, and you are right, it is kinda hilarious too.
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