Spouses Tonja Holder and Satyam Barakoti with their daughter, Annapurna, at a traditional Nepali rice-feeding ceremony last year. (Photo: Tonja Holder)
For couple Tonja Holder and Satyam Barakoti of Georgia, it was actually the Supreme Court’s last ruling on gay marriage, in 2013, that truly changed their lives: It allowed Barakoti, a native of Nepal, to finally pursue U.S. citizenship by marrying Holder — as long as they wed in a state other than Georgia, which had banned gay marriage since 2004.
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But today’s landmark SCOTUS ruling — which outlaws state gay marriage bans and effectively legalizes same-sex marriage throughout the nation — is hitting the two women in a wholly different way, because this time around, they’re parents. And now they can finally get married in Georgia, the state they’ve made their home and where they are raising their daughter.
“I feel really completely overwhelmed and more emotional than I thought I’d be,” Holder, 48, told Yahoo Parenting through joyous tears moments after the ruling. “My country has done right by me and my family and it makes me proud. Everything changes right now.”
Barakoti — whom Holder married in Washington just three weeks after the 2013 ruling — gave birth to their daughter, Annapurna, 19 months ago. And that has given new weight to the idea of having their marriage recognized everywhere, including their home state.
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“[As LGBT people], we’ve always created our families and known that they’re our families, because families are about love and caring and supporting each other,” Holder told Yahoo Parenting in the days leading up to the SCOTUS announcement. “Now it’s not even so much the change of legal recognition for us — because I always knew that Satja was my wife, and I always knew that I was Annapurna’s mother — but now other people know it, too. They understand it. And that’s really a nice feeling.”
The two women, who run a consulting group for nonprofit companies, met eight years ago when Barakoti was on the board of an organization that she said was interviewing the “fantastically knowledgeable” Holder for a job. They entered into a relationship after a year of friendship, both taking on the stress of Barakoti’s immigration status — always legal, but always changing and hanging in the balance.
“I’ve been on a student visa and then a work visa, and I tried to get my resident permit through work but that was unsuccessful,” explained Barakoti, 38, who originally came to the U.S. to attend the University of Maine and later moved to Washington for graduate school.
(Photo: Tonja Holder)
Her visa was set to expire in early 2014, so when SCOTUS handed down its decision dissolving the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), “we were finally able to breathe,” she said. “That ruling meant that Tonja, as a U.S. citizen, could sponsor her immigrant partner [me] as a spouse.” (Barakoti was pregnant at the time — something they had decided to move forward with despite her immigration quagmire — which made the decision even more of a relief.)
So three weeks later, Holder said, “We were in the middle of a Washington, D.C. park having a flashmob wedding.” They chose the location because Holder had family nearby; previously, in 2011, the two had held a commitment ceremony in Georgia. But it was their new federally recognized legal status that suddenly opened doors for Barakoti.
“I had submitted my [permanent citizenship] application and had been waiting for three or four full years and not gotten my fingerprint or background-check date. But with the marriage? We got married in July, did applications in August, in September I was fingerprinted and background-checked,” she said. “Then in January of 2014, we had our interview.” (Unfortunately, the office of immigration says it has lost Barakoti’s original application and therefore cannot make a ruling on her status, but that’s another story. …)
Their marriage also has allowed them to file joint federal tax returns for the past two years, though state filings have had to remain single. (“Our poor tax preparers,” Holder said.) And until the SCOTUS rulings, Holder noted, having certain rights and securities, for LGBT people, often came at a high price — having to pay attorneys to take care of legal matters such as hospital visitation, next-of-kin decisions, shared real estate holdings, and even rights to their own children.
“I had to adopt my daughter,” Holder said, referring to the second-parent adoption she went through to make sure Annapurna could never be taken from her if something were to happen to Barakoti. But such adoptions are not permitted in every state, and in Georgia, she said, only a couple of metro Atlanta county judges allow them — and she’s had friends who have moved to those counties to establish residency just so they could adopt their own children, and then moved back home. “With money, we can buy rights,” Holder said, “but the concept of rights is you shouldn’t have to buy them — everybody should have them.”
Now, with this latest and final SCOTUS ruling on the matter, the women feel a sense of closure and relief that extends far beyond even these important legal details.
“I think it’s going to be a cascade of effects, but the basic reality is we as a society are going to have to wrap our brains around the idea that same-sex couples have the same rights — and that people’s personal prejudices become nothing more than their personal opinion, and have nothing to do with what rights I enjoy,” Holder said. “I think it’s going to be pretty monumental.”
The moms do plan to get married again, this time right in their home state — possibly as part of a group flashmob wedding along the lakeshore of their tiny Atlanta-area town, Pine Lake, where Holder estimates the population of 800 is about one-quarter lesbian.
“I do want to get married in Georgia, because I have lived here for 23 years — it’s my home, it’s where the people I love and care about live, and I want to have a Georgia marriage,” Holder said. “That’s important to me, because LGBT people in Georgia and the rest of the South have taken it on the chin — along with a lot of other groups — and it’s important emotionally for me to have that document to say the state of Georgia recognizes my legal marriage to my wife. That means something to me.”
And despite having many moments of “exasperation” at their state’s politics, and wondering whether they should raise their daughter “in a place that’s a little nicer to people,” she added: “We love the community we’re in. It’s got wonderful people in it, and we want to raise our daughter around these wonderful people. We don’t want to leave just because the politics of people in power in Georgia benefit from fomenting hate against us.”
For Barakoti, today’s decision will turn a parental fantasy she has had into reality. “I run this scenario in my head,” she says. “It’s about how when my daughter is big enough to understand the implications of the gay rights movement, and we have a conversation about it … and I will be able to say, ‘When you were 2 years old, we were as equal a family as everybody else.’ That, in and of itself, is a huge, important thing to me.”
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