Tonight’s Grammy Awards telecast will feature a mass wedding segment featuring both straight and gay couples.
Thirty four couples–“gay, straight, old, young, of many races and many colors” will get married during an event officiated by rapper/actress Queen Latifah. Madonna and vocalist Mary Lambert will also take part in the musical aspect of the segment.
The ceremony will be part of the hip-hop duo Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’s performance of their Grammy-nominated song “Same Love,” which became a marriage-equality anthem last year just as that issue was drawing intense national attention….
Mr. Lewis, the group’s producer, said that the weddings “will be in our minds the ultimate statement of equality, that all the couples are entitled to the same exact thing.”
Longtime Grammys producer Ken Ehrlich, who is gay, insists the telecast won’t be making “a broad statement that [the marriage ceremony] represents the views of the academy or the CBS television network.”
The 56th annual Grammy Awards, hosted by LL Cool J, will be shown at 8 p.m. EST tonight on CBS.