In today’s world, it is perfectly acceptable for a man and a woman to fall in love and marry, regardless of things as trivial as race or religion. Most of the developed countries in the world claim to have moved on from segregation and discrimination based on ethnicity and gender. So I find it impossible to believe that we can’t see the justice in allowing people of the same gender to marry.

Everyone has a right to a family—to marry and have children. It isn’t a law because it doesn’t need to be a law; it’s simply accepted as a human right. Stripping same-sex couples of such a basic human right is immoral. You wouldn’t take the right to marriage away from a man and a woman, so why isn’t it allowed for a woman and a woman, or a man and a man?

We are all human—we all share the same species, the same binomial name. We all have the same basic needs: food, water, shelter, care. Though we all appear slightly different, we are constructed of the same building blocks, the same parts. We all crave attention and social interaction to keep our minds busy. We all long for acceptance, for satisfaction, and for love. It is inevitable that, if you were to chisel away our personalities, quirks, and what separates us from others, you would be left with a planet of perfectly identical Homo sapiens. Boil us down, and we’re all the same—so we should all have equal rights.

If we’re all human beings, we deserve to have our love for another individual recognized by the government in a legal matter. And yet, in the United States of America, an overwhelming majority of states practice the Defense of Marriage Act, which says that marriage is between a man and a woman. You would think that in this age—the age of technology and discovery, of advances in everything from medicine to entertainment devices—we would come to terms with reality and accept the 700,000 or so same-sex couples in America.

We, as humans, are programmed to shun and question things that are different—things we don’t fully understand. But this has to change; gay love in America isn’t going away anytime soon. If anything, the numbers of same-sex couples are rising. It is up to us to acknowledge this and act upon it—and hopefully embrace it, as many European countries already have.

Love is love, no matter where it’s found.