Salon’s Sara Miles writes an excellent personal essay on the N.Y. gay marriage ruling — explaining that the gay marriage ban hurts the children it claims to protect. (Ad wall)

Salon.com: July 10, 2006 | There’s nothing like a judicial ruling — in this case, the extremely tortured one written last week by Judge Robert S. Smith of the New York Court of Appeals against gay marriage — to make me feel simultaneously all-powerful and helpless. On Friday, my family read the news over breakfast. I was on my way to volunteer at my church food pantry; my wife was finishing the endless paperwork for our 17-year-old daughter’s college loan, and Katie — one of the “children” in whose interest the court said it ruled — was on her way out the door to her summer job.

Who knew we could have such a grandiose impact? Just by hanging out in our kitchen, the three of us challenge what Smith called the “accepted truth for almost everyone who ever lived, in any society in which marriage existed, that there could be marriages only between participants of different sex.” By asking for the legal benefits of marriage, we threaten the already unstable institution of the heterosexual family. link

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