A little while ago, I picked up an issue of the Atlantic Monthly and came across an article in “The Agenda” section entitled “My Big Fat Straight Wedding.”  I should mention that, before reading this article, over the past couple months, I had been hearing debates over whether gay marriage should be legalized or not, and began to wonder just what the big deal was:  as long as the two people can be together in any way, whether it should be a civil union or a marriage, it should be enough.

But after reading Andrew Sullivan’s article I realized that there really was no question at all:  marriage is marriage.  It doesn’t matter if you’re gay or straight.  The right to be married is a basic human right.  The right to be seen as a husband and wife, or two wives, or two husbands, is one that should be granted to everybody, regardless of what your sexual identity is.  To not be able to be recognized as such is ridiculously callous.  As Mr. Sullivan pointed out:  we are “people first and gay [or straight] second.”  

To get to the political point, this is not a matter of religion, it is a matter of basic human rights.  No matter what your religious conviction, aren’t human rights supposed to be available to everyone?  Not just the people who follow whatever your moral code is, but everyone: gays and straights.  The Supreme Court should not even be hearing evidence from the Bible or other religious books, because of the supposed separation of church and state.  We cannot discriminate against people because of their differences.  As Hannah Arendt, political theorist of the 1950s said, “The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which ‘the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus…’…to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs.”

Humans are humans, and so all people are in effect, the same.  So why should we take a right so basic, like marriage, away from people who are different from us only in whom they choose to spend their lives with?  To me, the answer is now obvious.