90-Year-Old Former U.S. Senator Makes Stunning Wedding Announcement
Twenty years ago, former U.S. Sen. Harris Wofford (D-Pa.) sat at his wife Clare’s bedside as she died of leukemia.
As he wrote for the New York Times over the weekend, after her passing, he never imagined he would find love again. But at age 90, he did. But that isn’t the part of his story that is making many shake their heads in disbelief.
Nor is it that he’s married someone 50 years his junior. Rather, as he notes in his op-ed, it’s because Wofford “found love again”—this time with a man.
“Matthew is very different from Clare,” he wrote. “The political causes that continue to move me do not preoccupy him, nor have I turned my priorities to design, the focus of his driving talent. Still, the same force of love is at work bringing two people together …
“Twice in my life, I’ve felt the pull of such passionate preference. At age 90, I am lucky to be in an era where the Supreme Court has strengthened what President Obama calls ‘the dignity of marriage’ by recognizing that matrimony is not based on anyone’s sexual nature, choices or dreams. It is based on love.
“All this is on my mind as Matthew and I prepare for our marriage ceremony. On April 30, at ages 90 and 40, we will join hands, vowing to be bound together: to have and to hold, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part.”
Wofford said he never campaigned for “marriage equality” like many other liberals and LGBT activists had, thinking that “seeking to change something as deeply ingrained in law and public opinion as the definition of marriage” was impossible. Invoking the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he equated the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges opinion as a “major change for civil rights.”
“It is right to expand our conception of marriage to include all Americans who love each other,” he wrote.
