Hugh (leader of the Baltimore Ethical Society) did a wonderful job officiating our wedding. We had a priest as a secondary officiant, and Hugh was very flexible in working with the priest and tweaking the ceremony to make sure it was everything we wanted.

We had our wedding on September 28, 2014, and were delighted to have our friend and leader at the Baltimore Ethical Society officiate our ceremony. He helped work with us to tweak the traditional Ethical Humanist wedding ceremony to reflect us as a couple, and to make the ceremony gender-neutral. Even though he was extremely busy at the time leading up to the wedding, we still found time for personal meetings and discussions about our ceremony, which were really helpful and stress-reducing. Our officiant also played a song on his guitar for our recessional, which our guests loved, and we were getting compliments all night about how touching and meaningful the ceremony was.

The Ethical Society requests a donation of about $300 (the amount can be flexible) for their officiants, but as we're members already, our donation was sort of in our own interests, anyway--it goes to help pay for the location rental and to get speakers for weekly meetings.

If you are looking for a truly inspiring service that is free of traditional religion then you will love the Ethical Culture service. The officiant started with a written service but had lots of ways to personalize it and they were very flexible about making customizations. I highly recommend... I did not have an experience anything like that other reviewer.

My husband and I wanted someone who shared our ideas on marriage to marry us, so we decided to go with the Baltimore Ethical Society. While I would not say this was a mistake, it certainly led to interesting stories for me to tell about my wedding day. For example, while I didn't mind so much that the officiant got the name of the ring bearer wrong (they had never met before and the ring bearer was not even one year old, so I doubt he minded), I did mind that the officiant consistently got the name of the groom wrong, despite having met with us before the wedding and having gotten it perfectly then. I also was vexed by his inflexibility when a problem arose. One of our speakers couldn't make it, so we decided to have the speaker's son, a groomsman, do the reading for his father. The only problem was, the groomsman said to me, is that it would be difficult for him to process down the aisle with the book in his hand. Not to worry, I thought. Our officiant, in his foresight, arranged for me to send him copies via email of all the readings in case there was an emergency. So, the two of us went to explain the problem to him and ask if our groomsman could read off his copy. No, he told me. This was not an emergency. Um...what? Who made him the decider of what constituted an emergency, and what in the world would he think would happen in the few moments between then in the ceremony that would necessitate him having a copy of the reading and not the reader? The Sign Language interpreter offered to give the reader her own copy, but this would not do, because she too needed to read off a copy so she could sign. Too flabbergasted to be of any assistance, I left to vent to my bridesmaids about how flaky the officiant was. The coup de grace was when during the ceremony he repeatedly shoved the microphone in my face and made me repeat my "I do"s because the crowd couldn't hear me, despite my explicit instruction to him earlier that he is only allowed a microphone if I will not be forced to use it. (I explained to him that I was shy and felt uncomfortable with the whole everyone watching me thing to begin with.)