Feminist Weddings, the “Goddess”, and Jessica’s latest article at The Guardian

So I’ve really been enjoying all the talk about feminist weddings in the blogosphere — because I’m in the middle of planning my wedding. It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one trying to balence my beliefs with all the wedding industrial complex bullshit. And mine is a same sex wedding (in a place where it is currently not legally recognized), which just makes the planning full of extra difficulty.
So I was really excited to read Jessica’s latest article at The Guardian about planning her feminist wedding . Overall, the article was great. At least until I got to this part of the last paragraph :

So, while our wedding will be politicised, it won’t be a feminist caricature: I won’t be sporting Birkenstocks under my dress and we won’t ask the “Goddess” for a blessing.

That’s when I started to see red. Because both my fiancee and I are Pagan. And we will be asking the Goddess for a blessing on our marriage — and we won’t be doing it in “scare quotes”.
It makes me really angry to see my faith thrown out there, by someone who doesn’t share it, as a caricature. The definition of caricature is ” exaggeration by means of often ludicrous distortion of parts or characteristics”. And for some of us, invoking the Goddess at our wedding isn’t ludicrous or distorted, its a fundamental part of our spiritual belief.

My financee was raised Wiccan, this is the faith of her family being disrespected. I converted to Paganism from Catholocism in my late teens and have spent the last decade having to justify that to people who think that the only reason people become neo-pagan or Wiccan is to be goth and trendy (because it’s a TON of fun to have to justify my spiritual beliefs to strangers who know nothing about them besides stereotypes gleaned from movies and episodes of Charmed but who insist they must know more then me).
You think planning a feminist wedding is hard? Try planning a bisexual feminist Wiccan wedding. Yeah, there really are very few books or guidelines for that. We have found one book that has been good (Inviting Hera’s Blessing : Handfasting and Wedding Rituals by Raven Kaldera and Tannin Schwartzstein). We’re struggling not just with dads walking us down the aisle, but with entire swaths of family members who don’t understand our religion and think that we are crazy. We can use all the support we can get.
Our feminism plays very strongly into our religion. We honor the goddesses, we honor women’s roles in sacred space, we honor women’s labor, and we listen to women’s words. Most Wiccans and Pagans are feminists — because some of us came to the religion looking for something that wasn’t patriarchal and because some of us have learned to be so from the amazing women in our circles. Wiccans and Pagans do a lot of feminist work, from individual or group spellcasting and prayer, to all the amazing women I know who are or have been activists. And when anti-feminists accuse feminists of being lesbians who practice witchcraft, some of us are. It’s hard for us when we hear other feminists defend themselves from that charge by ignoring that we exist.
And to Jessica :
Wear Birkenstocks to your wedding or don’t, it doesn’t matter. Make the wedding you want, since no feminist police is coming to force you to add or subtract anything. But I would give a bit more respect and consideration to whose spiritual beliefs you otherize and characaturize in the process of defending your choices. It really fucking sucks to see a prominant activist put your spiritual beliefs in scare quotes. It’s not funny to see your faith thrown into some thoughtless joke. It was just not fucking cool dude, not cool at all.