My last name is now officially hyphenated. And the ceremony and reception also went well – at last.
The hours leading up to our commitment ceremony on September 12 at 2 p.m. at Kampen Church in Oslo couldn´t have been worse.
This is what Norway´s conservative paper´s online version had as its top story at 10.30:
The Bishop of Oslo Trying to Stop Gay Wedding
The evening prior we had given two quotes to the same paper stating that we were excited about tomorrow´s ceremony.
A few minutes later, the same message was revealed in all the major Norwegian online newspapers. Our phones started ringing off the hook, and reporters wanted our version of what was going on.
This is the short version of what had happened:
On June 11, 2008, the Norwegian Parliament passed the gender-netutral Marriage Law. However, the Lutheran Church and other denominations are excempt of this new ruling. Unlike most European countries, the Norwegian State Church still has the legal right to marry heterosexual couples. Homosexual couples, however, have to register their marriage by a judge. In reality, this gives the church the right to discriminate. In order to avoid this conflicting practice, Christians, who want a church ceremony, usually perform the judicial part of their marriage at city hall, followed by a church ceremony later in the day.
As we wanted our service to be as close to ONE event as possible (not city hall followed by church), we decided, with the parish priest´s blessings, to perform the judicial party in the church hallway, with the doors to the church open. After a brief, judicial routine, the service would continue as our priest would take over.
It was this attempt at making our service as uninterrupted as possible that made the Bishop furious. He would not allow us to perform the judicial aspect of our wedding in the church hallway at all, but rather demanded us to do it outside of the church. Paradoxically, the practice of enacting the judicial part of the ceremony in the church hallway, is common practice in several churches in Oslo and elsewhere around the country.
So what we had planned in good faith, and again, with the parish priests´blessings, was now being contradicted.
By the time 1.30 rolled around, we had talked to a dozen reporters that wanted to show up at the ceremony with their tv crews. As both my husband and I believe that we are worthy representatives of this noble cause, we had no objections – this would be a great way to show other gays and lesbians that struggle to come out of the closet in fear of how society will react, that we are here and that we are normal. That we have the same feelings and the same needs as our heteroxual counterparts.
As all this transpired, we started to fear that things may not go as planned, and when we entered the church hallway at approximately 2.00 p.m. (my best man later told me we were on the spot), we still did not know if the ceremony would be intercepted. But it wasn´t.
After signing the legal documents, Vivaldi´s Canon for Three Violins started playing as our four flower girls, followed by our best men/made of honor and the grooms approaced the altar. In front of crying moms, aunts, relatives and scores of tv crews, we repeated our vows in front of God and everyone present at Kampen Church that day.
READ MORE ABOUT IT IN LOVENORWAY´S BLOG
And this is what followed:
1. Interviews with all the tv crews and reporters (We hit all the headlines of all tv channels that day and the front pages of several major newspapers the next).
2. A beautiful reception with 64 dinner guests at Villa Lilleborg.
3. Departure for our honeymoon in Corsica, a beautiful island outside of France on the Mediterranean.
4. The media covered our story, in different versions for a whole week after we left. Even the Attorney General went public to say that the bishop is promoting hate crime because of his harsh statements about us on our wedding day.
PS.
(We decided not to send our picture to the newlywed column).
