Marriage is a basic human right, and it's immoral to deny that right to same-sex couples.  Just as our forefathers rejected King George's oppressive laws in 1776, we should reject today's unfair laws regulating marriage.  The government should stay out of our love lives.

Married couples get hundreds of benefits mere "partners" don't receive -- including spousal Social Security benefits & health care, tax breaks, visitation rights, and equal treatment in legal contracts.  The Vermont Supreme Court recogized how unfair this can be, indicating in a recent decision that the state "must conform with the constitutional imperative to afford all Vermonters the common benefit, protection, and security of the law."

Even more importantly, laws preventing gay marriage prevent same-sex couples from publicly declaring their love in the same manner as heterosexual partners.  Such inequities reduce homosexuals to second-class citizens.  

Though some Americans voice strong moral opposition to gay marriage, does that make the cause any less just?  How many times has a so-called "morally wrong" position been proven right by history?  Majorities once opposed intervening to stop Hitler, opposed votes for women, and made marriages between different races illegal.

The last example best illustrates this point.  All the words you hear today to decry homosexual unions as "unnatural, unpopular, against God's will" were once used to describe interracial marriages.  Today, it shames us that we once used racism to build walls between people.

We corrected the definition of marriage to omit bigotry once and we should do so again now.  Sex should be no more a basis for who gets married than the color of your skin.  Once we accept that truth, the United States will be one step closer to living out the true meaning of its creed, to creating a land where all men are created equal, and no one - not a king, not a president, not a neighbor - can tell you who you can or cannot tell "I do."