Newsday.com: One year on, Massachusetts' gay marriage ruling fuels passions

Well, May 17 will mark one year of legal marriages in Massachusetts. The sky didn't fall. There's no chaos in the streets. Life goes on. Why can't the Radical Right see that?

We need loving families in this world, no matter their composition. Consenting adults should have the right to choose their mates without arbitrary restrictions. The very basis of our democracy is the idea of self-determination and liberty to live as we choose.

The fact that marriage has been so very restrictive for so long is not a justification to continue those bigoted restrictions. It's time to throw off homophobia just as enlightened people have thrown off racial prejudice and gender bias.

We are each of us free citizens with full and equal rights. That's a simple concept, and I stand against any attempt to impose any restriction on that that divides us by the accidents of our births. Whether the genetic lottery makes us female or male or something in-between; whether we are black or white or something else entirely; whether those to whom we are naturally attracted are the same gender as we or not; we are on equal standing in the eyes of the law, and any demand that this most basic of American ideals be compromised is a subversion of our Republic.

I'm sick of domestic terrorism disguised as morality. "Focus on the Family" and their ilk are the very types of people our Founding Fathers anticipated when they established the separation of church and state. Priests have always been hungry for power. They seized control of the West when the Roman empire crumbled from conversion to Christianity, and we've been fighting their tyranny ever since. America only exists as it does because people were driven from their homelands by the oppression of the church.

The men and women who worked to build this culture did so with full knowledge that religious zealots would continue to try and control our government, and designed the American government to prevent that. The Constitutional Congress had to make certain compromises to get the country going - slavery, women's rights, the rights of indigenous peoples, and by extension, the rights of gays, had to be left for a later, more enlightened generation of free Americans.

This is it. We are here.

Let this be the generation that resists the tyranny of organized religion that seeks to govern. The whole point of our government is that we begin from the basic agreement that we are equal. That's the essence of this social contract. I'll defend to the death your right to worship as you choose, but I'll die to keep you from forcing that form of worship on me. I'll choose for myself, thanks very much, and I'll trust you to do the same.

I'll close with a quote from Margaret Cho, another great American: Any government that would deny a gay man the right to Bridal Registry is a fascist state.