Which side are you on?

Earlier tonight, on Facebook, I posted this:



This video - its emphasis on white men notwithstanding* - affected me tremendously. Yeah, I cried. I lived through some of these moments, and many more not featured in this video - both mass media moments and the ones that weren't caught on camera, like the first time a friend came out to me, terrified too see how I'd react.

(*There are gay women other than Ellen and Rachel, as awesome as they may be.)

It was in that spirit that I posted this clip. The way I felt watching this must be how my parents feel watching archival footage of Bull Connor's men spraying civil rights demonstrators with fire hoses. And that's when I knew something I've always suspected - that LGBT rights are the civil rights struggle of our time, and that someday my children will think of these moments the way I thought of the Montgomery Bus Boycott when I was a kid.

And that's that they're wrong. For me growing up, as a very small child, the KKK was roughly akin to Darth Vader - that one-dimensionally opposed to fairness and common-sense morality. The people who are going on TV today to compare same-sex parents to dogs will know that feeling one day. That state legislator pushing through a Constitutional amendment to ban same sex marriage will one day find his picture in a history book next to that of George Wallace.

The now ex-friend who left a bigoted comment in response to my post didn't surprise me, but he disappointed me. He's got a right to his opinion, because in this country we don't police people's thoughts. But we do govern behavior, and we do so fairly and impartially. If marriage is so good for society's stability that we incentivize it with thousands of legal perks, than those benefits are open to all couples.

There is no logical argument against marriage equality. There is no moral argument. And, for those of us who belong to the church whose leader told us that there is no law above treating others as we would want to be treated, there is certainly no Christian argument against it.

Which side of history are you on?