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A ‘Traditional-Progressive Wedding’

Celebrating nuptials with the New York Times' Couple Of The Year
NYT screenshot

I’ve been paying so much attention to sexual insanity among the Roman Catholic clergy that I’ve neglected to point out this week how the entire world is going berserk. Check out this Weddings column from (where else?) The New York Times:

Joseph Schneier posted his profile on OkCupid in 2016, but admits that he wasn’t really looking for love back then. “I wasn’t sure of my gender. I was very androgynous,” said Mr. Schneier, a 40-year-old technology entrepreneur who also wasn’t sure he wanted to start dating again. “I put up the most depressing profile.”

Mr. Schneier, born Joanna, is from Israel. He moved to the United States in the early ’80s with his family, then to Ukraine in 1994, and back to Israel in 1996. He later returned to the States, spending time in California and Connecticut before solidifying roots in Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, in 2004. From the time he was 19 until about two years ago, there were two marriages, two divorces, three children, and one identity crisis.

“I considered myself bisexual for years,” he said, “but began taking steps toward transitioning in 2015.”

Two marriages, two divorces, and three children — think of the trail of broken hearts and broken people Joanna Schneier has left behind on the journey to find herself.

Her spouse also has an interesting story:

Allie Brashears, 42, wasn’t looking for a relationship either when she joined OkCupid around the same time.

“I’d been in several relationships with men and women,” said Ms. Brashears, a biology professor at LaGuardia Community College. “I was frustrated I wasn’t fully transitioned. So I joined OkCupid to meet queers in the city.”

Ms. Brashears, born Jake Alexander, grew up in Chicago. By the time she was 12, she and her five siblings had moved with her mother and stepfather 11 times.

“My brother would be playing with cars and I’d be playing with My Little Pony and dresses,” she said. “It created a lot of tension in the fundamentalist Christian community.”

Didn’t take long for Brashears to move in with Schneier and Schneier’s three kids. And then came marriage:

“This is the most traditional, progressive wedding you’ll ever go to,” said Ms. Stanford-Danuser, who has known the groom for the last 10 years, when he presented as Joanna. “This is a very unusual wedding. But love is love. I want my children to know that. I’m part of a community that believes that.”

Love is love. Of course. The arc of history bends towards bentness.

It must be conceded, though: when the people who ought to be the among the voices of moral authority and moral sanity are revealed to have been running gay brothels under cover of seminaries and episcopal hierarchies, it’s hard to know what grounds they have to condemn this appalling mockery of marriage.

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