Via AmericaBlogGay: Andrew Sullivan and Cynthia Nixon on what marriage means

At Newsweek, two relatively famous people write about marriage.

Andrew Sullivan has a column on what marriage means to him -- and to America. It's getting a lot of attention today:

I still didn’t think it would ever happen to me. I thought I was too emotionally damaged, my emotions and sexuality severed by all those years of loneliness and arrested emotional development. I thought my heart had too much scar tissue, and I could live my life well enough with just friendship and occasional sexual encounters or dates. But when I first set eyes on my husband, I knew I had lucked out. Some things you simply know. And when we finally got married, a few years later, and our mothers walked us down the makeshift garden aisle, and my sister gave the reading through tears, and one of our beagles howled through the vows, and my father put his arms around me and hugged, I did not hear civilization crumble. I felt a wound being healed. It is a rare privilege to spend your adult life fighting for a right that was first dismissed as a joke, only finally to achieve it in six states and Washington, D.C. But how much rarer to actually stumble upon someone who could make it a reality. And to have it happen to me in my own lifetime! This joy is compounded, deepened, solidified by the knowledge that somewhere, someone just like I was as a kid will be able to look to the future now and not see darkness—but the possibility of love and home. That, I realized, was really what I had been fighting for for two decades: to heal the child I had once been—and the countless children in the present and future whose future deserved, needed, begged for a model of commitment and responsibility and love.

Worth a read.

But, I have to say, I really enjoyed reading Cynthia Nixon's post on marriage. She was on the front lines in NY, helping Fight Back New York, then lobbying in Albany:

We need more politicians to get out there and lead as they did in New York—whether that means being a driving force like Gov. Andrew Cuomo or sticking your neck out like four GOP senators here. State Sen. James Alesi was the first to come forward publicly with a yes vote. I think it was scary to go out on a limb and break with his party, but when I talked to him in Albany last month before the vote, he was elated. He said, “Ninety-five percent of the comments on my Facebook page are positive! I’m hearing from all these people that I never heard from before, and I feel like I have thousands of new friends.”

There are always going to be people who are against same-sex marriage, and our efforts to convince them otherwise will be wasted breath. But then there are people like Senator Alesi who are on the fence, who are really tortured because they want so much to do the right thing. They want to vote with their conscience. And when they do, it’s important that we remember that these people put their political futures on the line to support us. We need to be there for them in the next election, and the one after that. And we need to be there in larger numbers than the people who may want retribution against these brave allies of ours.

The fight for gay marriage is often portrayed in political terms—Democrat versus Republican, liberal versus conservative. But for couples like us, this is about something simpler and more personal. I want to be married to my girlfriend. And I want us to have a ceremony. I want all our friends and family to come, and I want our kids to be there. Just like that historic night last month on the subway platform, I want it to be a moment I will always remember. Till death do us part.