Leah Fraimow-Wong's '11 parents have been together for nearly 25 years. But it wasn't until a Tuesday evening several weeks ago that they decided to get married - that Friday.
Fraimow-Wong's mothers, who are lesbians living in Berkeley, Calif., passed on their opportunity to get married a few years ago when San Francisco legalized gay marriage, but decided to go for it this time - just weeks before Proposition 8 passed by narrow margins on Nov. 4.
"It's kind of hard to know that half of the people in your state don't really approve of the way you live," Fraimow-Wong said, expressing her disappointment last week.
And despite the distance between the coasts, other students on Brown's campus are reacting to Prop. 8, too.
Several weeks before the election, Shae Selix '12, from Sacramento, Calif., decided to organize a phone bank so that Brown students, unable to participate in door-to-door campaigning and other activism in California, could still help the "No on 8" campaign.
Selix said about 40 students participated in the phone banking, which was publicized primarily through Facebook and by word of mouth.
For former Herald Assistant Design Editor Alex Unger '11, who is openly gay and participated in the phone bank, the ideological implication of prohibiting marriages for gay couples is crucial.
"You are considered a different class of citizen," he said. "One definition applies to one group of people and another applies to another."
Restricting marriage only to heterosexual couples, Unger said, implies that relationships between same-sex couples are fundamentally different from those between men and women.
"I think I care what it's called because I know that love is the same no matter who is feeling it," he said. It is in effect, he added, a "law that tells people ... your deepest feeling - love - is not valued. It is not the same."
"Our country has had a long history of discrimination," Unger continued, adding that cases of racial difference prove that "separate but equal is not truly equal."
David Brown '12, who is from Palo Alto, Calif. and also gay, echoed that sentiment.
When Prop 8 passed, "I felt like I was slapped in the face," he said. "It felt like I was a second-class citizen."
Unger said though the issue has personal significance for him, it is relevant to everyone.
"It affects us all because we all know someone who is directly affected," he said, adding that a degradation of civil rights is a broader social issue affecting everyone, not just the group whose rights have been limited.
But Anish Mitra '10, vice chairman of the Brown Republicans and an opinions columnist for The Herald, said he doesn't see gay marriage as a civil rights issue.
"Any gay person can still marry a person of the opposite sex," he said, adding that extending marriage to same-sex couples would "change an institution that's been around for thousands of years simply on a political whim."
Brittany Lavine '10, who is a registered Republican and identifies as a conservative in fiscal policy matters, doesn't follow her party on the issue of gay marriage.
Lavine said growing up in Arizona where she didn't know anyone who was openly gay, she didn't have a specific opinion on gay marriage. But now, after meeting and becoming friends with gay students at Brown, she does.
Now, "I don't really see why anyone would have a problem" with extending equal rights to gay couples, she said. "I don't see why I should be able to say that you shouldn't be that way."
According to Selix, data from the exit polls show that Lavine's perspective is increasingly the norm among young people in California.
The narrow margins with which Prop 8 passed - 52.2 percent of Californians voted "yes" while 47.8 percent voted "no," according to the Web site for California's Secretary of State - suggest that the ban might only be temporary, Selix said. While Californians 65 and older voted "yes" roughly 2:1, those aged 18 to 29 voted "no" by the same margins, he added.
"What that basically tells me is ... it's not going to take very long," he said, before the majority of Californians are willing to support same-sex marriage.
Fraimow-Wong and her family sure hope so.
The passage of the proposition leaves her mothers' marriage in ambiguity. According to Fraimow-Wong, there have already been several court cases brought by various California counties in protest of the validity of Prop 8. But whether these cases go to the California Supreme Court or the United States Supreme Court, she said, is still unclear and means that no one really knows what will happen next.
But, perhaps for now Fraimow-Wong is content knowing that the proposition doesn't take away her mothers' love for each other.
"They've been together so long that (the marriage) didn't really change much," she said.
