Speech by wedding commissioner at the protest against Proposition 8 in Napa, CA. My name is Gregg DesElms. So she was looking for volunteers. Expecting perhaps 50 people to respond, she told me later that she had to stop taking applications when the number hit About a week before lawful same-sex weddings began on June 16th, all of us were sworn-in in the county council chambers in San Jose in the witness of cameras from all the local newspapers and television stations. Today, perhaps a dozen or so of us are left I can say the words in my sleep, now I was there just yesterday, in fact, all day.
Seventeen couples I signed-up because, though I am a heterosexual, I am also a lifelong progressive Democrat who has had no trouble whatsoever understanding throughout his life the simple fact that same sex marriage is a civil rights issue, plain and simple.
So I wanted to be there, right in the thick of it On election day, with the polls telling us that Prop 8 had an uncomfortably decent chance of passage, there were so many couples trying to get in under the wire before the polls closed that there were more of them than there were timeslots in the chapel.
So I conducted a mass wedding at the end of the day, less than three hours before the polls closed, up in the county council chambers, in order to ensure that they would all make it. To the bitter end, we worked to help any same sex partners who wished to avail themselves of the same simple and blessed right to marry as their opposite-sex counterparts could so do.
At the end of the day, we prayed that Prop 8 would not pass, and that we had done all we could do if it did. And, of course, Prop 8 did pass. So now I am here. It is only a small thing, I know, but like becoming a wedding commissioner in the first place, I am hoping it will help. I am here because Einstein was right when he said that the world is a dangerous place not because of the people in it who do evil, but because of the people in it who stand by and let it happen.
