When two people marry, why must we label it “gay marriage”? No one calls a straight wedding “heterosexual marriage”. The phrase itself betrays a lingering need to qualify equality, as if the word “marriage” still belongs to religion.
Religions have long claimed dominion over human identity. They decide who may love, what roles each gender should play, and even which emotions are acceptable. “The Bible tells us so” has been used as the final word on everything from property rights to who deserves compassion. As Christopher Hitchens once said, “The human wish to be told what to do by an authority figure is one of the things that makes religion so dangerous.”
By defining marriage as something bestowed by a deity, religious doctrine created ownership over an entirely human act. The union of two people became a contract not between minds, but between dogma and conformity. Richard Dawkins noted, “There’s nothing moral about obeying orders, even if the orders come from God.” When marriage is framed as obedience to scripture, equality becomes a threat.
The obsession with gender roles follows the same logic. The Abrahamic texts were written by men in patriarchal cultures that treated women as property and men as the gatekeepers of virtue. The same texts are now used to police identity centuries later. Sam Harris put it bluntly: “The problem with religion is that it allows perfectly decent, intelligent people to believe by the billions what only lunatics could believe on their own.”
Gender, in the eyes of faith, must be binary because nuance undermines control. If gender is fluid, if love is natural in all its forms, then the scriptures lose their monopoly on defining morality. Religion’s survival depends on fixing human experience into categories that can be managed, judged, and punished.
Yet the secular world increasingly recognises that love is not a theological question. It is an emotional reality. The phrase “gay marriage” is a leftover symptom of religious framing—a way of suggesting that something different, something less valid, is happening. In truth, there is only marriage, only love, only human connection.
Bertrand Russell once wrote, “Love is wise, hatred is foolish.” Perhaps when society stops attaching divine approval to affection, we can finally drop the prefixes and speak plainly. Marriage is marriage. Gender is human variation. The rest is superstition masquerading as tradition.