Is all this doom and gloom getting to you guys? I think it’s getting to me. So, let’s take a break from my pity party for a moment– shall we? I’m feeling a rant coming on, and getting pissed at the world always seems to give me a little bit of a boost.

I wrote last week about my wedding day, about the joy and emotion of the experience. It was truly a transcendent day. It was transcendent because my beloved grandfather walked me down the aisle the way I had dreamed about since I was a young girl (he died only six months later, making that memory even more poignant). It was transcendent because I got married in the same spot that my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins exchanged vows. It was transcendent because the ceremony was performed by my own father. Mostly though, it was transcendent because of the significance of the commitment I was making to the person that I loved.

Not surprisingly, I don’t know how I personally feel about the concept of marriage right now. I don’t know if I’m quite in a place where I can believe in things like forever and ‘till death do us part’. I certainly don’t know how I feel about the wisdom of getting married young, as I did, before I really even had a clue who I was or who I would become. But I certainly don’t regret getting married, not for a fraction of a second. Regret the past eight years of committing my life to a man as fine as S.? Regret the partnership that created our two girls? Regret the family we built together? Not a chance.

If this journey continues as it has been, and if the eventual end of my marriage is inevitable (oh, how even typing that feels like repeatedly stabbing myself in the heart) I can’t really say if I would ever want to be married again. But it angers me that someone else has decided that I won’t even have the option. Because I will likely find love with someone of the same gender - that my life commitment would be to another woman - I have now become second class. And in embracing my true self, someone else gets to decide that I am no longer worthy of the privilege of marriage.

How fucking ridiculous is that?

Several years ago - around the time of the last election - I was a part of a local parenting email list, and a heated discussion broke out when we started to discuss politics. There was one participant in this discussion who tried to back up her homophobic beliefs with her religion, and I got mad. I posted a rant directed at her, and I clearly remember writing that I planned to raise my children to know that true equality can know no exception.

True equality can know NO exception.

It doesn’t matter if I decide I don’t believe in the concept of marriage as currently sanctioned by government and religion. It does not matter if I choose never to be married again. It doesn’t matter what your Bible says, or what you think is immoral or what makes you uncomfortable. If you take a group of people and tell them that they are not able to participate in society EXACTLY the same as the rest - that you want to withhold from them certain privileges available to most - then you are practicing discrimination. End of story. There is no rationalization, no argument, no way to validate inequality that does not come back to prejudice, to self-righteous judgment and to narrow-mindedness. None.

It is almost beyond my ability to fathom that we have almost reached the end of 2007 and that we can still be having the same arguments about equality. The campaign for suffrage, the struggle for racial equality, and now the battle the LGBTQ community is fighting – these are radically different conflicts, but they are also essentially the same. They are the crusade of a group of people (and their allies) who are willing to stand up and say “I am the same as you, I want the same as you, I deserve the same as you and I’m going to work until I get it”.

It seems so clear to me that everyone on this earth deserves the same rights and privileges. It seems so obvious to me that we are all equal. It seems utterly basic to me to believe that love is love – and that who we love is not near as important to the universe as the simple fact that we love fully and completely. It deeply saddens me that enough people feel differently about equality that we still have to be having this discussion.

I can only hope that I will see it change, not in the distant future, but very, very soon. Because, as I said in my very first blog entry, now this is personal.

I wanted to share the video that got me thinking about all this today, from an organization called “Let California Ring”.