In sixth grade, I got into a fight about same-sex marriage with a classmate named William. He said gay people weren't allowed to get married; I insisted they were. Sure, I had heard playground insults that used derogatory words for gay men and lesbians, but otherwise it hadn't occurred to me that gay people were – or legally could be – treated like second-class citizens. Some of the adult gay couples I knew seemed pretty married. And the narratives I grew up with about America didn't leave room for legal discrimination: we were a country that learned the evils of segregation and discrimination the hard way, and now treated all of our citizens equally under the law. I laughed in William's...
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