Mixing Politics and Marriage

This morning's San Francisco Chronicle led off with an article about how yesterday's California Supreme Court decision on marriage equality could affect the presidential election. Let me ask my married, heterosexual readers this: was your decision to marry your husband or wife fundamentally a political decision? Was it something that you felt belonged in presidential debates? Did you want to read about it in the newspaper, beyond a tasteful wedding announcement that you may have chosen to place there yourselves? I understand why marriage equality is, at this moment, political. I understand that folks on both "sides" of the issue feel passionate, and need to be heard. But at the same time, I cannot help but wish that same-sex couples could be afforded the same privacy, the same intimacy, about their decisions whether or not to marry that different-sex couples are. And I wish that the presidential election could be about the dangers of recession, the health care crisis, responses to global warming, a seemingly endless war, and not about whether or not the "wrong" people are being allowed to marry their life partners. At the end of the day, don't we have way more important things to talk about??