[CherylNYC]

I can't think of an issue besides marriage that directly affects more people, no matter what their orientation. We humans tend to partner. Those partnerships need to be legally recognised if we're to expect to keep our property or rights to our children when the doo-doo hits the fan. Perhaps my perspective has been skewed because of my personal losses, but I'm convinced that creating legally recognised family is an imperative.

Making new laws that make it illegal to discriminate against us in employment/housing/public accommodations would be great. Those laws might be enforced after people drag themselves along with a bunch of miscreants through the legal system. It won't mean quite as much as I wish it would in the current conservative court system.

Marriage equality, however, will effect an enormous proportion of our community, and it will effect us in one fell swoop. I can be driven to apoplexy by lgbt people who dismiss marriage equality as not very meaningful to their own lives. Each of those people likely has parents. If they're Americans, all those parents receive social security. Some of their elderly mothers are, no doubt, living on their husband's social security income. Those mothers weren't rousted out of the homes they lived in for most of their lives by their husband's families after their husbands died. Many of those doubting homosexuals and their mothers were likely carried on their father's health insurance. Because they were recognised as a legal family. I could go on and on, but we all know this drill.

The part that gets disconnected is where we forget that WE also will need the same legal protections our parents assumed. It's all very nice to have our relationships officially validated and all, but the real value to marriage comes in a crisis. If you've never faced the hostility of your partner's family after their sudden death, you're a lucky soul.

Many of us have lived so long as outsiders that we don't know how to think about our lives and relationships with the long view. The trajectory that straight people grow up thinking about, (school, marriage, family, old age), was never a model for us. Until now. It's scary for people who have always valued themselves by how non-mainstream they are by dint of their queerness, to contemplate that their ID might become a little less edgy once they can have a legal husband or wife just like everyone else. It's coming. Some of us are going to be just like everyone else. Some of us will continue to be very edgy because we happen to be edgy people. But not simply because we're queer. It's time to get used to it.