Sophie Reine Rogers and Brandyn Frederick Churchill were married Oct. 19 in Fincastle, Va. The Rev. Karen Osborne, an interfaith minister ordained through the One Spirit Interfaith Seminary, officiated at the Kyle House, an events space.
The bride, 23, is a law student at Washington and Lee University School of Law in Lexington, Va. She graduated cum laude from Belmont University in Nashville.
She is the daughter of Angela Scheller of Scranton, Pa., and Michael Rogers of San Antonio. She is the stepdaughter of Jenice Rogers and Robert Scheller Jr.
The groom, 27, is a Ph.D. student in economics at Vanderbilt. He graduated from Washington and Lee and received a master’s degree in economics from San Diego State University.
He is the son of Tammy Jackson of Chester, W.Va., and Craig Churchill of Weirton, W.Va. He is the stepson of Terry Virden and of the late Larry Jackson.
Ms. Rogers and Mr. Churchill met in 2016 on the campus of San Diego State, where she was a sophomore and he was a graduate student. As the spring semester wound down, Ms. Rogers developed a crush on Mr. Churchill after running into him regularly at a Starbucks where both liked to study. In June, she invited him out for pizza.
“I was completely oblivious,” Mr. Churchill said. “At the time I didn’t realize she was asking me for a date.” He went, though, and over slices at Woodstock’s Pizza, they bonded over their backgrounds and their appreciation for show tunes and classic rock. A spark developed. But then they hit a snag. “My younger sister was coming to visit me the next day and I was so disappointed because I wanted to ask Sophie for a second date but it was like, what am I going to do with Britney?”
Worried their budding romance would fizzle, he asked anyway, and enlisted his sister, Britney Faith Jackson, 16 at the time, to tag along. Ms. Rogers was game. “I thought it was a little touching that he trusted me enough to want me to be around his sister.” A few days after the pizza date, they showed Ms. Jackson the beach and took her out to dinner. After that, “we spent a lot of time together,” Ms. Rogers said. So much so that when Mr. Churchill left California for Nashville at the end of the summer she thought she might want to go, too. She was already interested in transferring from San Diego State, and Belmont University appealed. She enrolled at Belmont for the 2017 spring semester.
On a July 2018 vacation to Napa Valley, Mr. Churchill proposed over wine at a tiny vineyard, Tudal Winery. “He had reserved the whole thing for just the two of us,” Ms. Rogers said. Through tears, she said yes.
Ms. Rogers and Mr. Churchill decided on a simple country wedding and expected the run up to be run-of-the-mill. Then, on Aug. 27, one of Ms. Rogers’s law professors, Jonathan Shapiro, emailed his students looking for couples who were marrying and might be willing to join a lawsuit. Ms. Rogers and Mr. Churchill signed on, joining two other Virginia couples; less than a month later, they would help eliminate the state’s requirement that couples seeking a marriage license disclose their race.
The couple applied for their marriage license at the Rockbridge Circuit Court in September. When they refused to provide their race — among the 200 choices on the form were Aryan, Mulatto, Nubian and Octaroon — they were denied.
“Plaintiffs deem the requirement of racial labeling to be scientifically baseless, misleading, highly controversial, a matter of opinion, practically useless, offensive to human dignity, an invasion of personal privacy compelling an unwanted public categorization of oneself, and reflective of a racist past,” the lawsuit said.
Mr. Churchill put it more succinctly: “Those terms were deeply offensive.”
On Sept. 13, Virginia’s attorney general, Mark Herring, notified circuit court clerks that he was eliminating the requirement. Ms. Rogers and Mr. Churchill reapplied for, and received, their marriage license. This added an element of vindication to their wedding celebration.
“We’re both very interested in public policy, in using the law to make things better for people,” Mr. Churchill said. “When we heard about the lawsuit we said, ‘Yes, absolutely, we have to do this.’”
