Matt Griffin & Raymie Wolfe
In June 2025, Matt and Raymie published this piece in The New Orleans Advocate on NOLA.com, focused on the tenth anniiversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s freedom to marry ruling.
It was a hot, sunny morning on our farm in East Tennessee the morning the Obergefell vs. Hodges decision came down. We had the television on, as we had for several days, knowing the decision was coming soon. Twice in the past several years, as part of the Campaign for Southern Equality’s “We Do Campaign,” we had applied for marriage licenses at our local clerk of court’s office, knowing we would be denied because we’re gay. When the news finally broke that morning that the Supreme Court had ruled that same-sex couples had the legal right to marry, we cheered and hugged. “So,” Raymie said. “Are we getting married today?”
Getting married that same day wasn’t about being first to cross the finish line. It was about not letting another day go by that denied what we had known for a decade already: the permanence of our love for each other.
A few minutes later, we got a phone call. It was our local clerk of court, the same one who had twice denied us. She was calling to ask if we wanted to get married—because if we did, she wanted us to be the first same-sex couple she issued a license to.
An hour or so later, license in hand, we had to find a judge to marry us. Raymie’s family started calling judges they knew. One after another said no. But finally, they found one who agreed. She was shoeing horses on a friend’s farm, and said she’d be happy to marry us there. And did we have anyone to play music? We told her we didn’t. That afternoon, on a farm just a quarter mile down the same road as ours, her son and his friend played our wedding music as she married us. Things came together for us that day in a way that felt serendipitous and impromptu but was actually the work of the people who fought before us and the people around us. That judge dropped all her plans that day to make our marriage happen.
What Obergefell did was allow support for marriage equality that had been hidden to finally come to the surface. It gave people the opportunity and the courage to stand up for what they really believed all along. What we found that day was a community all around us that we hadn’t known was there, people ready to stand with us—and to take personal and professional risks to do so.
It was a desire for more of that kind of community that led us, not long after, to New Orleans. Here we found what we’d been craving—a place where people can be fully themselves, and where neighbors take care of each other every day.
We need that kind of community now more than ever. We must continue to support marriage equality as a federally protected right because no one should have to wonder if their rights will exist tomorrow simply because of their zip code. Equal rights are not forever unless we fight for them. The work that got us here isn’t finished—it is never finished—and we still need our community to stand with us.
But Obergefell showed us, ten years ago, that many of the divisions we imagine, and talk about as given—red vs. blue, rural vs. urban—are illusions stoked by partisan politicians. They are not sufficient to the compassion and kindness that neighbors show one another, that human beings show even to people they have never met. Obergefell showed us that support can come from the places you least expect it, and that meaningful political action can happen not only in organizing and protest but in the quiet, everyday ways one person shows up to help another. Obergefell showed us something both ordinary and radical: that community is everywhere, and not so far away as they would have us believe.