On Saturday, November 15th, up to one million people rallied in over 300 cities and towns across the United States and overseas to advocate for one common cause: marriage equality for all.

This event was born only eight days earlier when two women, Amy Balliett and Willow Witte, started exchanging emails about the passage of California's Proposition 8 and anti-gay initiatives in the states of Florida, Arizona and Arkansas. They created Join the Impact, and people flocked to their new website to network and publicize their own grassroots plans to rally. You can read more about Join the Impact in this great article from 365Gay.

I joined with the local LGBT rights organization Equality Action Now to help stage the Sacramento, CA demonstration. Many fine speakers, including local elected leaders, made the case for marriage equality. As they did, my mind wandered to consider the power of marriage, and three marriages in particular, to change the world.

Look back in time with me, then ahead to the future, to consider these three marriages.

The First Marriage

I thought first of this couple. In 1960, a young woman born and raised in Kansas and recently relocated to Hawaii, Stanley Ann Dunham, met a student from Kenya named Barack Obama at the University of Hawaii. They fell in love, Ann became pregnant, and they married on February 2, 1961. On August 4, 1961, at age 18, she gave birth to her first child, a son, and they named him Barack Hussein Obama II.

Little did the Obamas know that their son would someday become the first African-American President of the United States. And when they married, their interracial union was illegal in 17 states. Had the Obamas moved to any of those states, their marriage would not have been recognized, and they might have even faced criminal charges.

The Second Marriage

Thinking about the Obamas caused me to consider the impact of a second couple's marriage. In early 1950s Virginia, African-American Mildred Jeter met Caucasian Richard Loving when she was 11 and he was 17. Years later they began dating, and Mildred became pregnant, so they decided to marry. Because interracial marriage was illegal in Virginia, they traveled to the nearby District of Columbia, where they were wed in June of 1958. When they returned home to Virginia, they were arrested. From Wikipedia:

The Lovings pled guilty and were convicted by the Caroline County Circuit Court on January 6, 1959. They were sentenced to one year in prison, suspended for 25 years on the condition that they leave the state. They moved to the District of Columbia. In 1964, frustrated by their inability to travel together to visit their families in Virginia, Mildred Loving wrote to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Kennedy referred the matter to the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU filed a motion on their behalf to vacate the judgment and set aside the sentence on the grounds that the statutes ran violated the Fourteenth Amendment. This began a series of lawsuits which ultimately reached the Supreme Court...

The case, known as Loving v. Virginia was decided unanimously in the Lovings' favor on June 12, 1967. It overturned their convictions, dismissing the Commonwealth of Virginia's argument that as the law applied equally to both white and black persons and provided identical penalties to white and black violators, it could not be construed as racially discriminatory. The Supreme Court ruled that Virginia's anti-miscegenation statute violated both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and concluded that anti-miscegenation laws were racist and had been enacted to perpetuate white supremacy.

The Third Marriage

As I looked at the crowd of people gathered in Sacramento's Cesar Chavez Plaza, in front of City Hall, where on June 17th Sacramento Mayor Heather Fargo presided over some of the first legal same-sex marriages, I thought about a third marriage. I know next to nothing about them, but they may have been in the crowd in Sacramento, or else attending a marriage equality rally in one of those other 300+ cities and towns in America.

I don't know the names of the couple in this marriage, and I don't know the story of how they met, or what social, familial, and legal pressure they faced on their path to becoming a legally married couple.

They may already be legally married, or their union may not yet have been certified by the state in which they reside. They may not have even met yet.

I don't know whether they are two men or two women. I don't know how they have come, or will come, to be parents. Perhaps one of the partners has, or will bring, children from a prior relationship to the family. Perhaps one of the partners has, or will, collaborate with a supportive friend to conceive a child. Perhaps they will, or already have, adopted a child in need and made a family together.

But I do know this. I know that their love and their marriage is just as real as that of the Obamas and the Lovings. I know that they will love and nurture their children and guide them to be loving, caring and compassionate adults.

And I know that one day, their child will be the first child of a same-sex marriage elected to be President of the United States.

Cross-posted at The Daily Kos.