Marriage isn't a bus or restaurant. Marriage is something else entirely, it is not needed for survival.
For the record, if I had to vote for gay marriage, I'd vote yes - but mainly to shut people up about it because I'm sick of hearing about it.
This is because I don't particularly believe in marriage to begin with. So if I hold such a low opinion of marriage to begin with, how do you think I'm going to react when I visit okcupid to find them discouraging my fav web browser because someone donated $1000 back in 2008 to.... you know the rest.
Please don't draw parallel lines between gay marriage and the struggles of minorities to achieve equal rights in basic services such as catching the bus. That's completely different.
Marriage has been declared a basic civil right in more than one Supreme Court case, including but not limited to Loving v. Virginia and Turner v. Safley. The first one being about interracial marriage.
Court rulings from 50 years ago won't help - the context then was race, not sexuality.
This is another example of drawing parallels with obviously blatant racism from well before the 60s and hoping it fits the modern argument.
Further ramblings:
If one of the main functions of marriage is a platform for starting a family, then right away gay couples have a problem. If they marry, the mother or father is sorted out, but not both. And only one of the parents is biologically linked to the child. A third person is needed, and marriage by definition excludes a third person. Something new is needed that brings in the third person. Because who wouldn't want to know and keep in contact with their biological parent? Even if it was a "sperm donor", it's still the biological father.
Obviously we make the best of the situation, but it still goes against the grain of the billion year old natural process. It's like trying to force normality by applying an existing ceremony (marriage) to a biologically unnatural situation, all for "love" and "health benefits". Well, I think you can have love and legal equality in a recognised same-sex relationship without calling it marriage. That's what I now argue for after this Firefox thing because I don't like tactics where certain groups push their opinions in such a manner. So I'm in favour of giving gay couples legal rights for all those things such as medical emergencies - but stopping short of marriage.
You need to disconnect the argument from the person making it, they are not one in the same.
Most of the people who argue against gay marriage are fine honorable people, who are very sincere in their beliefs - but totally dead wrong when measured to any objective standard.
Being wrong doesn't make you reprehensible, it just makes you wrong - to borrow from judeo-chrisian ideology "Hate the sin, not the sinner".
Were black people who fought against separate-but-equal segregation policies "bullies" to you, too?