Jul 09, 2004  |  By: ADRIAN BRUNE  | COMMENTS     

The same-sex wedding announcement was brief and was published with little fanfare in the April 11, edition of the Sunday New York Times, the hometown newspaper of geneticist, Dr. Dean Hamer. It began simply: “Dr. Dean Heilman Hamer and Joseph Hall Wilson were married yesterday. Johanna Hickey, a marriage commissioner in British Columbia, Canada, officiated.”

Still, just two years following the decision of New York Times editors to publish same-sex marriage announcements, supportive letters began arriving at the home of the Washington, D.C. couple.

Because of the outpouring, Wilson petitioned his hometown newspapers, the Derrick & News Herald of Oil City, Pa., to publish it. Without any wringing of hands, theirs became the first same-sex wedding announcement to run in the newspapers’ history. The Herald publishes a morning and evening edition.

“It couldn’t have been a smoother process, much to my surprise, and actually easier than submitting to the Times,” Wilson said. “I just e-mailed the editors the announcement — a little longer version — and they said, ‘Of course, we’ll publish this.’”

Small-town split
The response that followed proved quite different from what the couple received after the Times piece was published. Since the announcement ran in early May, more than three dozen letters from both sides of the issue have poured into the newspapers’ offices, revealing how small towns are now confronting the same-sex marriage debate that has slowly trickled down from larger cities.

“After seeing the direction that even our community might be going, I know how imperative it is for the Federal Marriage Amendment to be passed,” wrote Clarisa Zacherl, an Oil City resident. “All Christians need to stand up for what they know is right in God’s eyes, and stop this atrocity. The Bible was written as a set of rules for us to follow, not a set of general ideas for us to interpret however we want to fit our own lifestyles.”

But others in Oil City, which bills itself as “the valley that changed the world” for its role in the modern oil industry, backed the couple’s union.

“It still surprises me to this day that people can get so worked up over who another person chooses to love,” stated Scott Zelinsky, of Oil City. “We are still talking about love after all. Two people who have pledged their commitment to each other is hardly a reason to be moved to a shaking anger, as one reader wrote.”

The number of responses to the announcement didn’t surprise Glen Mohnkern, the managing editor of the papers, but the even split in the socially conservative city of 11,500, nestled in the mountains of Northwestern Pennsylvania, certainly did. For Mohnkern and the publisher of the family-owned company, however, the paper’s nondiscrimination and fairness policies outweighed any question of whether the wedding announcement should run.

“The marriage was legal, and the newspaper doesn’t condone a policy of discrimination,” he told Knight-Ridder News Service.

Newlyweds from Oil City must pay for their announcements in the local papers, just as they do in the Times or the neighboring Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which ran its first same-sex wedding announcement in 2001. But some people have still drawn a conclusion that the Derrick & News Herald condoned same-sex marriage by running the announcement.

The 26,000-circulation newspaper has not published an editorial about its position on gay marriage or the decision to run the announcement.

Letters debate marriage
On May 10, the day the Wilson/Hamer announcement was published, the Oil City papers received about 15 phone calls, and a dozen people canceled their subscriptions, company officials said. Since then, both the contentious and the conciliatory letters have run, almost daily except those that are unsigned.

Most invoke the same arguments: The Bible says homosexuality is wrong; or, good Christians do not judge one another. Some of those who have written even take personal aim at their neighbors who might espouse what one called the beliefs of “self-righteous hypocrites.”

“We think it’s been a good debate,” Mohnkern told Knight-Ridder. Mohnkern did not return Blade phone calls by ...