marriage equality

This column first appeared in the 15 October 2009 print edition of the Purdue Exponent
Forty-six years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. lead a 250,000-person march on Washington, D.C. to demand that black people be granted the same rights as white people. At that historic march, Dr. King shared his vision for a different world—a world where humanity would no longer be divided by ignorance and hatred. On Sunday, roughly 200,000 people followed his example and once again marched on Washington to bring his dream closer to fruition. Drawing inspiration from the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s that prepared the way for the nation's first black president, protesters, many of them young people in their twenties and thirties, arrived from all over the nation to declare that the right to marry whom they choose is a fundamental civil right.