" A Seperate Fountain"

That's the title of this article on The Huffington Post by Sara Whitman, who has been legally married to her same-sex spouse in Massachusetts for nearly three years.

Her state is facing a challenge to legal same-sex marriage as there is a move in the state legislature to put the right to marry of couples like hers up for a public referendum vote. She writes about how that vote could impact her and other same-sex couples:

More than 8,000 gays and lesbians married in the last three years in Massachusetts. Amazingly, not one plague of locusts has descended, nor a single drop of fiery rain fallen.

In the 13 years before being legally married, my wife and I wrote legal documents to avert any questions about what would happen if either of us died, which may or may not have stood up in court. Luckily, we're both still here.

We have three children. We pay taxes. We go to school meetings, Little League baseball games and pick up endless pairs of socks that seem to multiply in dusty corners of the house.

Unlike our straight counterparts, who I'm sure have socks lying around, too, we had to do second parent adoptions so our kids would have as much protection as possible. We had to buy one family health insurance policy and one individual, because we were not considered legally a family.

When we're all swooping out the door for a vacation, with everyone is assigned their bag, their seat number and marching orders about who is not to touch whom, I dare anyone to tell me we're not a family.

Until three years ago, though, we legally were not. We did not have access to the 1,000-plus benefits of marriage. We put together as much legal protection as possible only because we were fortunate enough to be able to afford to do so.

Recently, someone told me that civil unions were an equal institution but that marriage is about religion. His church - an institution by law that is to be separate from government - said gay marriage was wrong. It was an argument of separate but equal, made by an African-American man. I wondered if the colored-only water fountains ever felt equal. Still a water fountain, after all. Just a separate one, so the purity of the white fountain would not be sullied.

Just like the purity of his definition of marriage, in his church, would not be sullied.

He was asking me to drink from another fountain. If marriage had no legal relevance and was only a religious symbol, I could go with it. But it doesn't. It is woven into the legal system, government benefits, and tax codes. It is a civil right. The laws and understanding of it comes about from years and years of legal precedents. It can't be replicated in a meaningful way.

Civil unions, in other words, are still a separate fountain.

There's more in her article. She offers a lot to think about and will hopefully encourage others in her state to lobby their representatives to vote against having civil rights put up for a popular vote.