So...what do we think? Is California paving the way on the gay marriage issue or is this just going to be another battle ground for the election? Are we going to be given our rights or is this going to be some big backyard badminton game during the campaign picnic and, with us as the shuttlecocks being smacked back and forth, will we end being waved high in the air within the hand of the victor or left battered and stuck in the net as they roll up the game and put it back in the closet until the next big "ho' down"?  I say we spread some wings and fly on this issue and leave them all swatting at each other...something they all seem to be good at.
 
I have never been a real flag waiver on gay rights; while not embarrassed as being on that side of the fence, I never found the need to force people to look at me as being different.  I still thought of myself as a male, kinda good looking...I breathed in and out, fell asleep at night and woke kinda refreshed each morning ready to take on a new day of challenges.  I knew a lot of people who seemed to be of the same mold as I was.  It seems, though, that I am having more and more challenges greet me each morning, but those challenges are all based on proving my worth to a society who, for some reason, finds it necessary to meddle into my life...uninvited mind you, and decide they don't like what they see.  And now they feel they have a right to deny me something because they don't like it?  We've got problems, Houston!

Same sex marriage is only a label society felt the need to apply to something they don't understand in order to make it look like they know what they are talking about.  Yes, there may be documents or books written about marriage as a union between a man and a woman, but there was also a common belief, when such belief was initially conjured up, that the world was flat. 

Marriage is between two people who love each other.  It can be between a black man and a white woman.  Perhaps a Jewish lady looks beyond her religious upbringing and just happens to fall in love with the Catholic guy sitting a few cubes down the aisle at her job.  In either case, someone will obviously have something to say about the union, but it won't be taken as far as denying them the right to share their love and there is no law on the books or legislation pending that will legally bar them from committing their lives together.  So why bring the gender card into the deal?  All are human, so what's the difference?  Not a damn thing other than society's fear of something they don't know.

Gay marriage, same sex marriage...however you name it it is still marriage.  There is a love between two people who may be kind good looking...maybe not, but that's in the eye of the beholder.  Both breathe in and out, fall asleep at night and wake kinda refreshed each morning ready to take on a new day of challenges.  They eat, they laugh...one may have the duty to take out the trash while the other agrees to wash the dinner dishes.  And they, too, will have challenges, but things they won't have are issues like a marriage entered into by necessity or arranged for convenience, both instances a life together nurtured without love and aged with discontentment.
 
No, I'm not sitting here clicking ruby slippers together at the heels and saying same sex marriage is perfect and only good will come of such unions...there's no place like home in a same sex household.  Not my intent, but just as there are marriages that end in divorce or marriages that last for decades, so too will there be same sex marriages falling by the wayside or those celebrating silver and golden anniversaries.  Both are lives shared by people who grow to know each other and by doing so grow to know themselves.  Everyone deserves the chance to find a happy life and live it; no one has the right to deny another a chance to look for it.