I Implore You

          Amendment One passed in North Carolina, and I feel sick seeing people I know supporting it.  I wonder if I'm more likely to see support for bans in Utah, but there are still tons of people that I see just as outraged as I am.
           I don't think that a lot of people realize that same-sex marriage actually doesn't pose a direct threat to nuclear families.  (We're talking about legal marriage here, not necessarily religious marriage.  Different religions have different views on homosexuality, and I'm fine with that.)  People don't "make" other people gay*.  Gay people aren't less loving than straight people; their children won't be more likely to lead unhappy lives.  Heterosexual marriages won't become less important or less protected.
           I do understand that it will seem like there are more gay people once they are actually given constitutional rights (like all Americans are supposed to have), probably because they'll actually be legally protected. 
          I equate this to another old issue.  Should interracial marriages be outlawed?  The majority of people now would say, easily, "no."  Yet, at one point, it was seen as threatening to family values, threatening to children, threatening to the beliefs of men and women who traditionally were in relationships with the same race. 
           Just as we see all races as being humans worthy of constitutional rights, are not gay people as human as heterosexuals?  I don't ask for support from anyone who isn't willing to give it on their own.  But I do ask, from everyone, to not deprive fellow Americans of their civil rights.
          One more step towards equality of people comes when all of the other states, including my own, remove bans on same-sex marriage and laws that allow discrimination of homosexuals. 

*by "gay" I mean LGBTQ