In thinking about how my home state of New York is now just one vote away from the right side of history in achieving marriage equality, I have to be honest that I might never get married. It’s not that I don’t love my partner. It’s not my family, including our two-year-old daughter, wouldn’t be better protected if we were wed. It’s just that I’m not entirely sure the government should be in the business of approving — or disapproving — of our intimate, personal relationships as citizens. Let religion do that. Let government give benefits to all families, in all forms, equally.

Still, I feel the way about marriage that I feel about a lot of rights — I may not want to exercise them, but how dare anyone try and deny me the right to if I choose.

In that sense, the right of us liberal, New York City gays to get married is a lot like the right of conservative, rural manly men to own guns. And I believe in the right of law-abiding citizens to own guns, even though I would never own one myself. That doesn’t mean there cannot be reasonable limitations on those rights — for instance, you can’t own a machine gun and you can’t marry your cousin. But we would all agree that government should infringe as little as possible on personal liberty — making restrictions where it does not in order to police morality but because of legitimate, rational social concerns. We don’t want people marrying their cousins because, if they have kids, those kids are likely to have serious medical and mental health problems? Fine. We don’t want gay people to marry because we think it’s icky or immoral? Who cares. It’s not government’s job to dictate our values. It’s government’s job to protect and support us all, equally, regardless of our different values and expressions of them.

In the founding philosophy of our nation, life and liberty go hand-in-hand. We are not just entitled to be alive but entitled to the freedom to make choices about our own lives. It’s amazing to me that those who often encourage government to play a deeply invasive role in our personal lives are the same people who want government to play as small a role as possible in facilitating the economic opportunities that affect us all. Ah, but you can’t have your anti-government cake and shoot it, too. While the notion of liberty may be yanked and twisted to fit ideological convenience, it will ultimately prevail — as enduring as my love for my partner. History doesn’t just bend toward justice. It bends toward love.

To those members of the New York State legislature hesitating on their support for marriage equality: Explain to me why you don’t want the government to take away your guns but you do want the government to take away my family?