21st-century problems

I'm rather behind on this, aren't I? I just got back from a wedding in Boston, for which my friends did me the great honor of asking me to officiate. Since they are good friends who met at my wedding (and, unlike me, did not have the foresight of having a high school friend wrap up divinity school around the time they were going to get hitched) I said yes, and I hope they didn't have too much cause to regret it. Like the Vice-President, my official capacities were rather limited. As far as I can tell, Mitt Romney doesn't care what you say at the wedding, so long as you filled out the proper forms, including a testimonial to your sterling character, and remember that it's a commonwealth and not a state. The only thing I absolutely had to do to prevent my friends from living in sin for the rest of their lives was sign the marriage license request form in BLACK INK ONLY.

I wish I had been able to get a picture of the license paperwork. (Taking pictures of documents by candlelight with unfamiliar cameras is a twentieth-century problem, if not nineteenth-.) As Americans not living under a rock might have heard in 2004, Massachusetts came to an exciting and rather unexpected conclusion about who got to marry in the Commonwealth. There's been a huge back and forth about the legality of gay marriage under Massachusetts' constitution, and while I expect that eventually after much acrimony people will settle on something resembling civil unions, that's not much help for the poor bureaucrat dealing with marriage license paperwork today. Whoever it is that designs that form tried, but you can tell that things may have been a little rushed, and so I found myself looking at question 23 ("Gender of participant A: [x] Male [ ] Female"), jammed into the bottom margin, and thinking, "Wow, they didn't even try to match the font."