Marriage bias? It isn’t the first time

Toshiko Wilkinson isn’t claiming any special wisdom. She’s not looking for a soapbox. She’s merely agreed to my request to talk about her marriage, since it began amid a swirl of societal and family doubts that sound vaguely familiar to those in the wind today as same-sex marriage goes on the books in California.

Yes, Tosh remembers voices like that, with her inner circle of friends wondering if she knew what she was doing and her father refusing to attend her wedding and her parents once discouraging her husband from attending the family’s traditional Thanksgiving dinner. When she and her husband moved into their Rossmoor neighborhood 45 years ago, the real estate agent went door-to-door asking neighbors if they minded having a mixed-race couple in their midst.

I think it’s fair to say that history judged that Tosh did know what she was doing: She remained married to the man for 53 years. Since the marriage produced a daughter and three grandchildren, I’m being rhetorical when I ask if she can picture her life without being married to Leland Wilkinson, who died in 2005.

“No, I can’t,” she says. “It was for me a wonderful journey, much better than I had a right to expect.”

Perhaps because those expectations were shaped by American life in the years after World War II, when not everyone thought it was fine if an American man married a Japanese woman. No matter that the woman was born in Los Angeles and grew up Americanized or that the man was a bank teller who grew up in Iowa.

She sees the same-sex marriage controversy in a similar way. But her defense of it isn’t so much intellectual as instinctual. She knows that had she listened to the people closest to her way back when, she and Lee never would have married.

“Not one of my friends married outside the race,” she says. “Nobody was very pleased about our marriage. It was not one of those happy times.”

But the two seemed to know they had a shared destiny, she says. They first laid eyes on each other in the late 1940s, when Lee came to pick up a friend of Tosh’s and saw her in pajamas and curlers. She laughingly says that isn’t why they didn’t start dating for a couple years or so, but by 1952 she decided they needed to fish or cut bait.

Friends said the marriage wouldn’t work, that the cultural differences would doom it. That their children would face societal disapproval.

“We just thought we’d made up our minds, we were going to make a go of it, and if everybody wasn’t happy, so be it.”

And how did she and Lee know?

“I’d call it that certain feeling you have about another person,” she says. “You don’t always get it, but throughout our marriage, I had that feeling about Lee. Call it romance or whatever.”

Other people saw it too, she says, with strangers sometimes coming up to her on vacation and saying that she and her husband seemed to have “something special.”

No, it wasn’t a problem-free marriage, but she recoils at the notion that people never wanted it to happen.

And just that fundamentally, she says, two men or two women ought to be allowed to marry.

“People are so vehement about same-sex marriage,” she says, “but if two people find that special something, can anyone really look at them and say, ‘No, you may not be happy under these circumstances.’ I don’t think I could do that to somebody. If they were truly in love, I’d say, ‘Yes, go ahead.’ ”

Solely because she loved the idea of being married, she balks at limiting gays and lesbians to civil unions or some other artificial designation.

“I had a very different feeling when we were on our honeymoon and driving north to Monterey,” she says. “I had this wonderful feeling, that we were really married. I wouldn’t want two people with that special feeling to be told they shouldn’t be married.”

Her and Lee’s story had a happy ending. The birth of their daughter several years after the wedding was the final validation.

Upon seeing his granddaughter, her father’s final bit of opposition melted away, Tosh says.

Still, she resented to some extent the years before, which the others also came to realize had been wasted on needless doubts and groundless fears.

That’s how she sees the same-sex marriage controversy playing out.

“I don’t know why there was so much opposition,” she says of her marriage. “But then, it was the times. I really believe that. Right now, it’s the time everybody is upset about same-sex marriage, and it’s going to take a little bit longer for this to ease up, don’t you think?”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.