Suddenly, he's not half the man he used to be…

I’ll freely admit it — while I railed against Massachusetts’s same-sex marriages, my denouncement was against how it was done (four judges, NOT by legislative or public action), not against the concept itself. I’ve said I support same-sex unions, as long as they were done in accordance with the public’s wishes.

But it turns out that New Hampshire got the “jump” (so to speak) on Massachusetts. We had a same-sex marriage here in the Granite State about ten years ago. It only just came to light recently, and it was news to most everyone.

Especially the happy couple.

It turns out when the groom was born back in 1951, there was a typo on his birth certificate. Someone put an “X” in the “female” box instead of the one marked “male,” then fixed it by crossing out the “FE.”

But the correction was only made on his copy. According to the city and the state, Stephen Paul Houle is a woman. Which was news to Steve, his wife Tonya, Steve’s parents, and everyone who’s ever known him.

He’s been fighting to get it fixed, but he’s running into all sorts of unexpected roadblocks. His baptismal certificate declares him a “child,” not “boy” or “male.” The hospital where he was born has no records. The doctor who delivered him is deceased, and Steve/Stephanie doesn’t appear in his remaining records. The city’s health department lost all its pre-1990 records in a fire. He apparently even offered to drop trou in front of appropriate city officals to… er… “establish his credentials,” but they declined.

He’s getting together a bunch of documents, statements, and the like to see if he can get the state to certify his masculinity, but in the meantime he’s at least getting a good laugh out of it. And I really can’t think of any better way to deal with it.