'I do' waits for 'We can'

So, during a basketball game in 1996, Sherwood proposed to her boyfriend, Jim DeLaHunt. He accepted. But DeLaHunt couldn't shake the fact that his fiancee's "role model couple" -- who had inspired her to propose in the first place -- couldn't legally marry. As an acknowledgment, he and Sherwood asked that, in lieu of wedding gifts, well-wishers make contributions to Marriage Project-Hawaii and the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund-Marriage Project, groups that had pioneered the legal fight for gay marriage in Hawaii in the early 1990s. Then they started marching in gay pride parades and joined Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). DeLaHunt eventually joined the board of Marriage Equality California, the group leading the charge for same-sex marriage here. And now he and Sherwood, both Palo Alto software engineers, lecture other straight couples on marriage -- an institution that Sherwood embraced only after she saw a long-term gay relationship up close.

Today, the issue of gay marriage is a major battlefront in the culture wars. After a decade of skirmishes, the actions of recent weeks have provoked a national debate, as Massachusetts became the first state to legalize gay marriage, San Francisco disobeyed state law and married more than 4,000 gay couples in 29 days, President Bush called for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages and the Massachusetts Legislature took on the state's high court with an amendment to do the same. The politics are personal, demanding that everyone, gay and straight, take a stand.

Never before, say gay activists, have "non-gay allies" like Sherwood and DeLaHunt been so vital. These straight people who come out in support of gay marriage identify their mission in capital letters as The Struggle or The Movement. They pepper their defense of gay marriage with references to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights demonstrations in Selma, Ala., the Holocaust and South Africa's apartheid.