after missouri

This week, the good, bad and indifferent folk of Missouri overwhelmingly voted to amend their state constitution to ban same sex marriages. Missouri already had a law on the books that did this, but they felt compelled to now make it a constitutional ban.

Several other states may follow suit over the next year. This past year, the Republican minority leader in the Indiana General Assembly said that this issue was the most important issue this state was facing. Some are calling it the new abortion, a political lightning rod in American politics.

Over 100 years ago, Oscar Wilde had a little snit for a boy friend who penned the lines of a poem, the love that dare not speak its name. For many years those words summed up what it meant to be gay or lesbian -- at the intersection of human love, this very love was so misunderstood or frightening that it could not be spoken aloud. In the Merchant-Ivory film of Forster's Maurice, the Cambridge don calls it the unspeakable vice of the Greeks.

We now name it. Our love, our same-sex, homosexual love manifests itself in many ways, including honest, out-in-the open relationships. And straight people know about it. They know gay people. Have gay relatives and neighbors. No secrets there.

Laws won't stop our relationships. Bad psychology and religious intention has had no affect. People love, they build families, they pursue their dreams without the permission of the state. But they also do so without equal legal protection for their families.

I am hopeful that someday, sooner than later, gay marriage rights will be achieved, that our families will be protected from the fears and bigotry of those who seek to use the law to make us second class citizens.

Disagree all you want about whether such relationships are offensive or wonderful. Skip our weddings. Don't send gifts.

But please, in an act of honesty, don't describe these new anti-gay marriage laws as efforts to defend marriage, protect marriage, uphold marriage. To do so is to lie, and it is to give comfort to legal efforts to hurt an entire class of folk. These laws have absolutely zero impact on married heterosexuals and the strength or weakness of their marital union. Zero. Instead, this legal movement is about using the government (and religion) to make it harder for existing families, and future families, to live out their lives safely and peaceably.

I am long past an age when I am invited to many weddings. That is the world of the young, starting out on their life journeys amid friends and classmates. I've never turned down an invitation to a friend or family member's wedding for political reasons. I celebrate their joy, pray for their future. If an invitation comes through the mail, I will if possible attend and be happy for the couple.

And yet, as these anti-gay marriage laws pass, I sense my own sadness and anger building inside. I hope that over time, fair-minded Americans will reach a point where they will support undoing or preventing these efforts. Indifference to these laws, or even silently opposing them, is a fairness that dares not speak its name.