This month, we were married in front of our families and a few close friends.  The two of us said our vows, stated our love and commitment to one another, exchanged rings, and spent the afternoon rejoicing and celebrating with the people we love.  

 

We also took a moment during our ceremony to acknowledge the shadow of discrimination that falls over our marriage, and all marriages, as long as loving and committed couples like us, but for the fact that they are gay or lesbian, are denied the right to join in the institution of marriage.  

 

Today, alongside the wedding bands that we wear on our left hands to symbolize our bond with each other, we wear silver “freedom bands” on our right hands, to symbolize the bond we share with all those couples who wish to marry and cannot. We want to recognize the black mark that legal discrimination against gays and lesbians leaves upon the institution of marriage and to make clear that we enter into that institution celebrating its finest and most noble expression - its celebration of love, commitment, and responsibility - while rejecting discrimination and prejudice.  In so doing, we hope to maintain and strengthen an institution that is threatened, not by the possibility of gay marriage, but rather by all those who would deny legal marriage to committed couples who wish to be married.  

 

Most Americans, even those who feel uncomfortable with the concept of gay marriage, know that legal acceptance of committed gay relationships, whether through marriage, domestic partnership, or other means, is inevitable and draws closer by the day.  Those “defenders of marriage” who would limit the franchise to straight couples for purposes of procreation only hasten the flight of young Americans like ourselves, who want no part of an institution that discriminates against loving couples who wish to spend their lives together.

 

Insisting that marriage only be “between a man and a woman,” and for purposes of procreation, dooms marriage to be exactly that:  an institution that young couples only partake of when they choose to have children.  As domestic partnership, civil union, and other alternative legal institutions inevitably expand in states around the country (albeit in most cases today with fewer rights than are automatically granted by marriage), even that shrinking role for marriage will become increasingly irrelevant, as young people, straight and gay, find other ways to celebrate their commitment to one another and build their lives together.  

 

Over millennium, the institution of marriage has overcome many forms of discrimination and prejudice, from the treatment of women as property, to strictures against interracial and interfaith marriage.  It is in that spirit of overcoming that we chose to marry, to celebrate all that is right and beautiful about marriage and to leave behind all that is not.  In so doing we place our faith in an American public that, despite the entreaties of those who would make marriage small, has ultimately chosen, again and again, to reject discrimination.  We expect that marriage shall overcome this latest form of discrimination too.  Until it does, we shall wear our freedom bands to symbolize our rejection of discrimination and our commitment to all those who wish to marry and cannot.