Gay Wedding Announcements Belong in Newspapers

When you think of marriage, there's the image of the happy couple walking down the aisle, the champagne toast, the cake, and the loads and loads of family members celebrating along with the nuptials. At what point do you get to the part where a local newspaper won't publish the wedding announcement, because they don't like the fact that the two folks who were married were two grooms or two brides?

If you're a central Ohio couple, that time is now. According to Eric Resnick with the Gay People's Chronicle, two men who were legally married in Connecticut in 2009 tried to have a wedding announcement printed in their hometown newspaper, the Daily Jeffersonian. When the paper received the announcement and found out that it was two grooms who got hitched, the paper decided to refuse it. Fair? Not really. Certainly not to the two grooms, nor to the thousands of readers who have gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender family members.

Turns out the Daily Jeffersonian is owned by Dix Communications, a media company that owns six newspapers in Ohio, as well as several radio stations. Their owner, Andrew Dix, told the Gay People's Chronicle that his papers reserve the right to refuse content that they deem inappropriate.

But same-sex marriage announcements aren't inappropriate. Take action, and tell both Andrew Dix and the Daily Jeffersonian that they should publish same-sex wedding announcements in their paper. After all, these announcements are about celebrating love, not practicing discrimination.

What makes this story even more frustrating is that one of the papers owned by Dix Communications, The Alliance Review, currently accepts wedding announcements from same-sex couples. If one of the Dix Communications papers can do this, why can't all of them?

Andrew Dix told the Gay People's Chronicle that as a private company, his papers can set their own policy. Shouldn't they set a policy that provides for the inclusion of all their readers, both gay and straight alike? Dix even told the paper that the fact that Ohio bans same-sex marriage had no bearing on the Daily Jeffersonian's decision to nix the same-sex wedding announcement.

"I’m aware of what Ohio law is,” said Dix. “It has no effect on what we accept.”

So what would be the reason for refusing to run the announcement?

Simply put, there just isn't a reason -- at least one that's not rooted in homophobia. There are numerous newspapers in Ohio, including papers that cover rather rural swaths of land, that print same-sex wedding announcements.

Tell Dix Communications and the Daily Jeffersonian to reconsider their policy on banning gay wedding announcements. It's a disservice to their readers who either are LGBT or have family members who are LGBT, and it puts the media company squarely out of line with the standard practice in the newspaper industry today.

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