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The older I get, the more I grapple with all the things wrong with me that would make me an impossible candidate for a mutually loving relationship, the more I accept my eternal "spinsterhood" and make peace with it. This slowly won, but fairly easygoing acceptance, however, does not change my views or deep belief that love is out there for other people and that all couples in love do deserve (very much) to be together, legally, spiritually AND safely. It breaks my heart that whether two people in love (who just happen to be of the same gender) deserve to get married is even still an issue in this day and age, but it is...still an issue. This is an excellent op-ed piece from last Sunday. Below follow some of the best parts, but you can read the whole article here:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/sunday/frank-bruni-gay-marriages-moment.html?_r=0


Nothing about it feels quick if you’re among or you know gay and lesbian Americans who, in a swelling tide, summoned the grit and honed the words to tell family members, friends and co-workers the truth of our lives. Our candor came from more than personal need. It reflected our yearning for a world beyond silence and fear, and we knew that the only way to get there was through these small, aggregate acts of courage.


Same-sex marriage isn’t some overnight cause, some progressive novelty, especially not when it’s put in its proper context, as part of a struggle for gay rights that has been plenty long, patient and painful.




But it’s not so dizzying or difficult to comprehend when you think about the simple logic behind same-sex marriage: You can’t relegate the commitments and loves of an entire group of Americans to a different category, marked by a little pink asterisk, without saying that we ourselves don’t measure up. You can’t tell us that you consider us equal and then put perhaps the central, most important relationship in our lives in an unequal box. It’s a non sequitur and a nonstarter.

There have been ruined careers, scuttled adoptions, sanitized obituaries. There have been millions of same-sex couples who were married in the eyes of each other, of everyone around them and of any truly righteous god, and they waited and waited for the government to catch up.

Ask Jim Obergefell. His is one of the cases that the Supreme Court is about to decide. He sued Ohio to have his name added as a surviving spouse on the death certificate of his husband, who died in 2013. It wasn’t just a few years before then that they began making their life together. It was two decades earlier.

Ask Edie Windsor. Her protest of the estate taxes that she was ordered to pay — but that a widow with a dead husband instead of a dead wife would have been spared — prompted the Supreme Court to gut DOMA two years ago.

She was married in Canada in 2007. When her wife first proposed to her, she gave Windsor a brooch instead of a ring, so that the diamond didn’t prompt questions from co-workers.

That was in 1967: nearly half a century ago. So don’t tell her that the idea of same-sex marriage needs more time to ripen.