It's Freedom to Marry Week

It's Freedom to Marry Week, a time to talk about love and equality and fairness.

If two unrelated adults who are in love, building a life together, in many cases raising children together, want the benefits and protections of marriage, they ought to get them. It shouldn't matter whether they're two men or two women or a man and a woman. It's a matter of equal protection under the law.

The campaign of fear, the scare tactics, that opponents of gay marriage use are deeply offensive to me. To imply that allowing gays and lesbians to marry threatens children or heterosexual marriage is bigotry, pure and simple. It's immoral and unAmerican.

My friends who are gay and lesbian pay taxes, are good citizens, decent people with the highest values. They shouldn't be treated like second-class citizens when it comes to marriage.

I look at their loving, committed relationships and I compare them to John Edwards and Eliot Spitzer and Mark Sanford, three heterosexual married men, with children, who did not take their vows seriously at all. I wonder: Who presents the real threat to the sanctity of "traditional marriage?"

I know how fortunate my friends feel to have found the love of their life. And I know how truly happy and fulfilling their lives are together. The longer I know them, the more strongly I feel that they should have the freedom to marry the person they love. They will certainly honor the sanctity of marriage better than Spitzer, Sanford and Edwards.

In Sunday's New York Times, Frank Rich wrote about the push to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," which prevents gays and lesbians in the military from serving their country openly. He said, "Most Americans recognize that being gay is not a 'lifestyle' but an immutable identity."

Like a lot of straight people, there was a time when I didn't know many people who were openly gay or lesbian. But times change and so, too, should our concept of equality. This comment sums up how I feel:

"As more gay people have come out — a process that accelerated once the modern gay rights movement emerged from the Stonewall riots of 1969 — so more heterosexuals have learned that they have gay relatives, friends, neighbors, teachers and co-workers. It is hard to deny our own fundamental rights to those we know, admire and love."

In the week leading up to Valentine's Day, that's a statement worth taking to heart.

Freedom to Marry

We love one another more than anything in the world and want nothing more than to share that love with one another, and know that we are each protected and recognized as each others' spouse. We don't need the validation of the government to make our love or relationship real, but we do need the recognition of the government to protect our rights.
Jeffrey Brunelle
Boston

Today is Freedom to Marry Day. Freedom to Marry is a gay/straight partnership working for marriage equality across the United States. Every year, the organization holds a week of activities designed to engage Americans in the movement for fairness and equality. On its Web site you'll find stories from families relating how marriage discrimination affects their everyday lives.

On May 17, 2004, same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts. In the Bay State, MassEquality works to promote and defend marriage equality. On that organization's Web site you'll see the flip side. You'll find hundreds of stories from gay and lesbian Massachusetts residents, such as Jeffrey Brunelle, talking about what being able to marry has meant to their everyday lives.

Too often, the subject of gay marriage is used as a wedge issue by politicians to divide us, or as a way for hatemongers to stir up fear. We don't hear enough about the very real love stories of ordinary, everyday Americans, the men and women whose relationships truly embody family values.

As someone who lives next door to Massachusetts, knows many people there and goes there all the time, I can tell you that there is nothing to fear. No heterosexual marriages have been harmed. Nothing has changed in the state, except that having the right to marry has made our gay and lesbian friends, neighbors, coworkers and family members feel happier, more secure and better protected. And that only strengthens our society, just as the ending of legal discrimination against African-Americans did nearly 50 years ago.

There is nothing I could possibly write, no argument I could make, that would be as poignant, as clear, as eloquent, as these stories. So please take five minutes to read a few of them.