We have a couple awww… moments today, both involving veteran same-sex couples. In the first one, two senior veterans were married in a first for a veteran senior living facility.
LGBTQ Nation reports:
John Banvard, 95, a World War II veteran, married his partner of 20 years, Gerard Nadeau, 67, a Vietnam veteran, in a ceremony Thursday at the Veterans Home of Chula Vista in suburban San Diego. The couple told KSWB-TV they wanted to have their ceremony among friends, so they chose to have it at the Veteran’s Home, where they’ve lived for the last three years. The decision to get married was made after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June that overturned Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, and another decision that cleared the way for gay couples to marry in California. “We were waiting on the Supreme Court to make that decision,” said Banvard.
Awwwwww….. see the video at the link above.
In our other story, a woman who served in the Air Force won the right to have her spouse. who passed away last year from breast cancer, buried in a military cemetery.
Towleroad.com reports:
Nancy passed away in December 2012 after a 12-year fight against metastatic breast cancer, and although she and her wife Linda had wed in Canada in 2010, they were considered unmarried by the federal government. That meant that despite the lifetime of service Linda had given to the U.S. Air Force, Nancy was ineligible for the medical care that different-sex spouses of veterans are able to access. Even more importantly for Linda, it meant that her wife would not be allowed a burial in Willamette National Cemetery, the same cemetery where her father–an Army veteran–and mother had been laid to rest. But thanks to Linda’s tenacity and sense of justice, Nancy now holds a small but significant place in history of LGBT rights in the United States… Last week, Linda and several friends–including Avakian, his wife and Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, held a stone-setting ceremony for Nancy at Willamette. Nancy’s space in the cemetery is just two plots away from Linda’s parents’ spot.
It’s wonderful to see these soldiers finally treated with the respect the deserve.
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