Friday A/V Club: Scenes from a Gay Wedding in 1971
A look back at Baker v. Nelson, with footage from the plaintiffs' marriage ceremony
Obergefell v. Hodges is far from the first court case to tackle the topic of gay marriage. Way back in 1971, Jack Baker and Michael McConnell were wed in Minnesota. Their attempts to acquire a legally valid license sparked Baker v. Nelson, in which the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that men did not have a constitutional right to marry one another. (The decision also declared that marriage's status as "a union of man and woman, uniquely involving the procreation and rearing of children within a family, is as old as the book of Genesis.") The couple tried to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, but back then SCOTUS wasn't interested.
Below you can see some footage from Baker and McConnell's wedding ceremony. It aired two years after the nuptials, on the WCCO-TV show Moore on Sunday (hence the narration):
More than four decades later, Baker and McConnell are still together.
The full Moore on Sunday report was included in a student video project about a year after it aired. It's a pretty amazing artifact of the era, and I've embedded it below.
Part 1:
Part 2:
For more on the long history of gay marriage, go here. For past installments of the Friday A/V Club, go here.
