Pursuit of Happiness

The question of gay marriage has been dogging me for awhile. I have several good friends who are gay; and this coming weekend I am going to the wedding of a couple who have been together for two decades. I love them, and they are a good team. They went through a lot of hell as young twenty-somethings, trying to find their way in the world.
I thought about the founding fathers, and how suspicious they were of religious power and the abuse of individuals with "a big club" of dogma. I thought about Jesus Christ, standing before Pontius Pilate, and staying silent. And how, in every circumstance when he could have said an exclusionary doctrine, he instead reached out to include and love the ostracized persons. He did not do it for whole groups, it was always to one person at a time. The only people he excoriated as a group were the rule-setters with legal power to make other people miserable.
SO I decided that the right answer is to allow gay marriage. For each individual in our country to "pursue happiness," the right to form lasting unions must be present. And the unions must be given due dignity. The gay people I know have the same struggles as the straight people in making their marriages healthy and strong. But it is definitely a better thing to have a partnership which lasts, than shallow, serial love-affairs.
When we discuss the process of becoming a mature human being, and how to accomplish that, and how to be a gift to the community we live with, we need to consider that no human being was meant to be a throw-away. Too many murders and ostracisms happen because of one group finding fault with another, or defining themselves by who they believe are their enemies. Too many young gay people have committed suicide, because they can't find a way to be themselves in the world. I personally believe that God loves all of us to the fullness of our capacity to be loved. I don't think God is against homosexuality. But I do think that shallow relationships and secrecy, and fear, can ruin people. We all need to be loved to become who we are at our best. So the healthiest thing would be for all of us to be able to overcome whatever blocks there are to love and loving relationships. This is not about strip joints, pornography or child molestation. This is about deepening love relationships between adults, to the depth at which one can say "I want to spend my life with you."
Perhaps the answer, for those who are offended at this, is to consider a difference in sacramentality. The civil marriage is not a sacrament. Perhaps those who wish to hold the sacramentality of marriage sacred must hold onto some mysterious strength in the generative power of heterosexual unions. Even though I am a Catholic, I think this is true. It seems to me that the dogmatic position of the Church is a form of bullying people into doing something that they would not otherwise find it in their conscience to do. Catholicism is actually founded on the primacy of the individual conscience, and I think we must cling to that, in this sort of issue. I am voting for the right of gays to be married.