DYM SUM

On May 17, 2009, Michael and Charles Hewitt were married in a simple ceremony. They drove nearly two hours from their home in Independence, Missouri to a chapel at Graceland University in the border town of Lamoni, just three weeks after Iowa became the third state in the country to start offering same-sex marriages. When they returned to Independence, they wanted to publish their union in the local paper, as many married couples often do. At the beginning, though, they met strong resistance.

The Hewitts sent their announcement, and the related fee, to the Kansas City Star, as well as the Independence Examiner. The Star outright refused. The Examiner also refused to publish it in their print edition, but ended up placing it on their website. A week later, the Hewitt’s announcement came off the website, and their money was returned.

From a news industry website called Editor and Publisher

“We were sad that we couldn’t just go and put our happy announcement in the local paper,” Chuck Hewitt told The Pitch, a Kansas City-based Web site, at the time. “That just surprised us more than anything.”

Although the Hewitts probably thought their happy day would be lost in the ether somewhere, that it would never be immortalized in print, someone heard them. That someone was Derek Donovan, a reader representative at the Kansas City Star, the newspaper that first rejected them. On June 3, Donovan published a notice in his blog, letting folks know that senior management at the Star had made a decision: they were changing their policy on publishing same-sex marriage announcements.

I’ve heard from many readers today about a TV news report about The Star’s policy on announcements of gay marriages in the “Celebrations” section on Sunday. I don’t normally address issues relating to sections of the paper outside the newsroom, as that’s not really my purview, but I think I need to clear this one up.

At the time the couple contacted the Classified division last week, it was the first time I’m aware of that the question had been raised in a long time. The policy was put in place three publishers ago, before states began legalizing marriage and other unions between gay couples.

The Star’s senior management met last Thursday morning to review the old policy, and decided to change it. I replied to the TV reporter’s request for comment last week immediately after that policy meeting, but did not receive a response. The new “Celebrations” will debut in the near future.

In the weeks that followed, Donovan waited and watched, to see what the response of the people would be. Overwhelmingly, surprisingly, the people in the Kansas City Star’s distribution area responded well – a three-to-one majority in favor of the Hewitts. A few weeks back, he acknowledged one specific person’s objection, stating it was “extremely nice and perfectly reasonable in her dissent from the paper’s decision.”

Yesterday, more than six weeks after they first made their request, the Kansas City Star finally published the Hewitts’ announcement; theirs became the first in the Star’s history.

This past Friday evening, before the historic announcement was printed, Donovan acknowledged that the paper’s decision was a reasonable and fair one, even listing the names of those senior management who had decided in favor of the Hewitts, and all same-sex marriage announcements: publisher Mark Zieman, vice president for advertising Tim Doty, and editor and vice president Mike Fannin. Here are his own words:

The one objection I’ve heard — that Missouri and Kansas don’t recognize the marriages — doesn’t really work for me. After all, the section also runs announcements of engagements, anniversaries, birthdays and other commemorations that aren’t legally sanctioned or binding.

As ever more gay people open up about their lives, everyone begins to recognize those same people among family, friends and neighbors.

Newspapers reflect the world around them, and there’s no reason for them to refuse an ad that simply states an objective fact. My experience tells me most readers agree.

It should be noted that Missouri was the first to amend their constitution against same-sex couples after the historic Goodridge decision legalized same-sex marriages in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in November of 2003. The State of Missouri held a public referendum in August of 2004, and 71% of citizens voted to define marriage as between a man and a woman. Missouri has made progress since then, though: while they do not have anti-discrimination laws in place for employment (they are working on it, though), they do have hate crime laws in place that recognize both gay and transgender individuals.

With time, we’ll get there. I suppose people don’t have to like us, or what they believe we stand for; with time, though, they will accept us. That’s what I keep believing.