Meet Carla and Molly.

Carla and Molly have been committed and together for ten or twelve years. They have been legally married for less than a year.  They’ve raised a daughter together, share a home, have gotten through family deaths together, and yes, they finish each other’s sentences.

This is the face of love.  This is the essence of why I believe in marriage equality.  When I sit across from Molly and Carla at Sunday breakfast, as I do once or twice a year when I visit Fayetteville where they live, I have no doubt that even before they exchanged vows in a state distant from their home, a state which had already made same-gender marriages legal, Carla and Molly were married, in every sense of the word but the legal one.

They’ve laughed together.

They’ve cried together.

They’ve sat beside each other in sickness and in health; through lean times and times of plenty.  Through worse and through better.  They’ve budgeted and saved, they’ve planned and dreamed. They’ve parented, along with their daughter Kori’s birthfather with whom they share her.

I took this picture on our last visit, in June of this year.  I came across it today while I was looking for something else, and I realized that I cannot stand silent when there is a loving consenting adult couple in these United States denied the right to marry.  With fifty percent of heterosexual first-time marriages ending in divorce, how absurd is it to even intimate that same-gender couples threaten the institution of marriage?

What threatens the institution of marriage is stress, poverty, immaturity and crime.  Other threats are greed, poor communication skills, infidelity and disagreement over essential values, strategies and parenting.

The fifty-percent statistic has been documented well before any state of this nation legalized same-gender marriage.  The divorce rate among heterosexuals has not been created by, nor is there evidence that it has been increased by, the legalization of same-gender marriage.

I’m quite certain that a correlative number of non-heterosexual partners — legally married or not — have been confronted with these stressors.  Some of their relationships have failed for these reasons. And it might well be true, that their legally sanctioned marriages might face similar or identical challenges. And fail.

But should the face of love not have as much chance to shine from Carla and Molly, as it does from your spouse and you?  I say yes.  I say it is time. And the fact that there are still some of these United States — including my own — which have not  yet legalized  same-gender marriage is something that I have no trouble making an exception to my year without complaining.