It’s bigger than marriage.

Gay marriage is a worthy goal, and I have rejoiced to see Vermont, Iowa and Maine join Connecticut and Massachusetts on the righteous side of the civil-rights aisle. But wedlock for same-sex couples, while essential to giving lesbians and gay men the 1,000+ federal benefits that hetero marrieds (often obliviously) enjoy, is not the whole picture. Lack of marriage rights is a symptom of a cultural malady, not the disease itself.

The disease is second-class citizenship for queers. As long as we can’t get legally married, it’s easier to justify denying us jobs, housing, shared custody of children, hospital visitation rights. It’s easier to make the leap from “weird and different,” to “ungodly and abhorrent,” to “must wipe off the face of the planet” when society at large supports the premise that queers are subhuman. It gives gay-bashers and homophobes a free pass to bask in bigotry and violence. “Hey, President Obama doesn’t think they should be able to get married, so why should I?”

Culturally sanctioned hatred of gayness (which for males translates as femininity, weakness) enables the sick, poisonous so-called “boy culture” at the root of the recent suicides of two eleven-year-old kids, Carl Walker-Hoover and Jaheem Herrera, boys who were taunted as “gay,” “faggot,” “queer” by their schoolmates. Who knows if those boys were, or would turn out to be, actually gay? When even the perception, the possibility of gayness is frightening and ghastly enough to cause kids to hang themselves, we know gay people are not equal citizens. And President Obama, you’re not helping.

Imagine that instead of “gay,” the insult tossed around in playgrounds and locker rooms were “nigger” or “kike.” But those days are over, right? Teachers, not to mention the rest of our society, wouldn’t stand for it. Black and Jewish people and their allies have fought to make this a country where those ugly slurs are unacceptable. Why is it still okay to denigrate a sexual minority? Well, let’s see. Anxiety about sexuality runs very deep in our neo-Puritanical, machismo culture. Female sexuality is policed in outrageous ways (see: the right wing’s nonsensical, punishing attitudes toward contraception and abortion), but the keepers of male sexuality exercise equally insidious means of control. God help the boy who doesn’t hew to the he-man mold. Recently I overheard a woman telling her little boy in a store that he couldn’t have the purple sparkly bucket, because “that color is for girls.” This massive culture-wide anxiety has mothers policing their little boys about what color buckets they are allowed to like, for god’s sake.

What a society says from the top down is very powerful. Some folks might not agree with it, but they know that they can’t lawfully discriminate on the basis of race anymore. When our leaders at every level of government (I’m talking to you, President Obama) make it clear that lesbians, gay men and every other shade of queer are protected by robust anti-discrimination laws and are included under the big colorful diversity umbrella as the recipients of every right that everybody else enjoys (consciously or not), the bigots will be forced to tone down their rhetoric. And if some are too set in their ways to change, their kids will.

Why are so many people afraid of same-sex marriage? Why do they insist that it threatens their own marriages? Because when lesbians and gay men are free to marry, straights won’t belong to a privileged class anymore. They won’t be able to teach their children that they’re better than those other people. Their kids will be less likely to believe what they're taught in Sunday school when they can see for themselves that their friend's two dads or two moms are perfectly nice (if a little strict). It’s nice to belong to a privileged class, isn’t it? A lot like living in a gated community, where you can keep out the Mexicans except for when they come, bowing and scraping, to clean up your house and garden for a pittance. The homeowners association will have to get together to figure out what else they can lord over the peons. Once the pesky PC patrol has taken away race, religion, gender and sexual orientation as blunt objects with which to knock lesser mortals on the head, by gum, what’s left? Never mind, Mr. and Mrs. Thurston Howell III, there’s always class.

So, same-sex marriage isn’t the be-all and end-all, but when it is made legal at the federal level for same-sex couples, we will be that much closer to a time when anti-gay epithets will draw the universal gasp that “kike” and “nigger” do today. A time when 11-year-old boys like Carl and Jaheem might not resort to killing themselves. An era when parents won’t have to disown their gay kids, while buying their hetero kids condos. And we’ll throw in the confetti for free.