Gay Marriage

In the 1920s we fought for women’s rights. In the 1960s we fought for black’s rights. Now in the new millennium we’re fighting for gay rights.
What I don’t understand is why gays have been denied the right to get married. Yes it’s weird, yes it’s a sin in many religions but none of those reasons are valid.
The main argument I have heard is that it’s against one’s religion. Well under the constitution there is a separation of church and state. Meaning if gay marriage is to be made illegal it has to be for a non-religious reason. People need to realize that although a lot of us associate marriage as a religious event, it’s not entirely it. Think about it, if marriage was a religious event that would mean that atheists, agnostics, and other non-religious people couldn’t get married. Houses of worship, such as churches, temples, etc. are private institutions. They get to make their own rules. If they don’t want gay couples getting married in their institutions then they have every right to kick them out. Gay couples should at the very least, be allowed to go to the county clerk’s office and get a sheet of paper saying that these two people are married.
As a side note. If people are so true to their religions and want the law in accordance to their religious beliefs, then why aren’t they fighting to ban divorce or birth control?
I know a lot of people dub being gay as abnormal and weird. Well there are plenty of other weirder things out there. The town drunk, the crazy cat lady, someone covered from head to toe with tattoos and piercings etc. Those people are just as weird, if not weirder yet we seem to allow them into society.
Living in California and hearing all those Prop 8 campaigns, one topic made me very angry: Teaching gay marriage in schools. For starters, I don’t even recall being taught about heterosexual marriage in schools, except for maybe watching a princess movie or two. Another thing, unless you home school your child, really restrict his/her friends, ban television, and put extreme blocks on Internet, they are going to know anyway. Think of everything your parents tried to block you from knowing when you were a kid, but you now know anyway. I remember as a child my parents really tried to prevent me from learning swear words, too bad, I know them anyway. If gay marriage ends up being taught in schools, wouldn’t you rather have children being taught in a truthful neutral environment than in a mixed bias environment from their friends? If a parent wants to tell a child that gayness is bad, be my guest. Evolution is taught in public schools but it is taught from a neutral point of view. In the privacy of their own home, parents are more than welcome to tell their child why evolution is bad.
I can only vouch this for California, not for other states. Being a student of the California public school system since the first grade, I recall when it came to teaching children about family life, there was a law stating that the school must get parental permission. Even if it was for something as ordinary as learning about periods and fetal development. Regardless what race, religion, culture, or nationality one is, a girl is still going to get her period and a baby is still going to develop the same way. I remember in my high school freshman health class when it came to learning about dating, birth control etc. parents could decide what their child was allowed to learn. One girl in my class could not stay for the birth control and dating lectures because birth control is not allowed in her religion and in her culture dates are arranged and supervised. During those lectures, she attended a class on bike safety.
We are now in the Twenty-First Century, we should know better by now. We no longer own slaves, women have equal rights as men, blacks are no longer separate from whites. Isn’t it time gays were given the right to marry.