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When Proposition 8 passed in California more than a year ago, at first all I thought was, For people who make such delicious Rice Krispie treats and interesting HBO characters, Mormons can be real jackasses.

Raising all that money to stop gays from marrying in another state was obnoxious. Yet I wasn't really paying attention. I was too caught up in the magnitude of the presidential election. Obama consumed me.

Yet Obama's victory was greeted with sadly muted joy from the LGBT community. Prop 8 had turned what should have been feelings of hope into sadness. I offered little more than a pathetic shrug. I was comfortable with my unearned cynicism.

It was a weak reaction and an even weaker outlook. The world's not dumb, but certain people are. It took several months and a sad gay friend for me to figure out what Prop 8 really was: state-sanctioned hostility toward a minority group and a huge, mystifying blow to love.

Let me explain.

All the World's a Scene Beneath a Balcony
I believe in love.

Not because I've found it. I thought I had once or twice but ended up holding only myself. Finding any measure of real love is hard. The Fountain of Youth, El Dorado ... these were trips to the dermatologist compared to the search for love. But I believe it's possible to find, because I've seen it happen.

The kind of love that makes you want to get married.

It happened to me once. I wanted to marry a woman when I was 25. I was a kid in every sense of the word. She was only being honest with me when she broke my heart. By the time I reassembled myself, I was 3,000 miles away in New York City. Such is the power of love -- it can make you fill boxes with stuff and move that stuff over mountains.

In my new city, I got a new job. My boss was funny. One day he accidentally sent me an instant message intended for a friend about some particularly harrowing digestive problems that he was blaming on beer.

A weird thing for your boss to say to you. It broke my hangover. I laughed hysterically.

Soon, he wasn't my boss anymore. We were friends, riding a log flume of booze and laughs together over nights spent in pursuit of love. Our field reports were disparate -- my escapades with women were like horror stories from clown college ("... so then I sat on a packet of ketchup and it squirted all over her skirt!"), while his experiences dating men tended toward the depressing ("He kept talking about Chomsky. The waiter said he looked like Kenny from '30 Rock' and he got upset."). But ultimately, we were both looking for the same thing. And then one day last year, something happened. He met somebody.

He fell in love.

This is where we should leave him: with the world wide open and all the promise and portent of loving another person available and, by proxy, reaffirming my belief that I'd eventually find somebody too. But we can't.

People. People Who Need People. To Be Sad.
After my friend fell in love, 52 percent of Californians voted against same-sex marriage. My friend told me he was going to march and I was like, "To where, brunch?" Always with the jokes. He said, "No. In D.C."

So I went with him. A bunch of us did, including his boyfriend and Lady Gaga (not with us, per se -- but there all the same). All of us were joined together by being mutually pissed off and really f**king confused that members of our varied, great country are terrified of Gregory and Harold being legally sanctioned to wed and happily share a Blockbuster account but never really using it.

Then Maine happened.

The state of Maine approved a referendum overturning same-sex marriage. Maine! My friend loves a wonderful man who loves him back. But they can't get married in Maine. Many opponents of same-sex marriage point to the Bible as the backbone of their argument. You know what else the Book of Leviticus says, Maine? It says eating shellfish is an abomination. Time to take off those lobster bibs and put down your pails of drawn butter.

My state, New York, had yet to weigh in on the issue. I thought that at least my friend could get married here. I mean, come on, what would New York City be without gays? (Indianapolis.) And then the great state of New York, in the last breaths of a hard decade, defeated a bill that would have allowed my friend to marry the love of his life.

Marriage: A Mental Institution
Believe me -- I know marriage is not a guarantee that two people will love each other forever, or even that they did in the first place. I've seen folks on their wedding day look like defendants in a Burmese military court. I've known some people, many, actually, like my parents, who eventually made a mockery of marriage.

On a purely statistical level, heterosexuals are pretty bad at marriage, and that's only if you're quantifying it with divorce rates. If you were to throw in all the horribly unhappy, dangerous or loveless marriages in America, heterosexuals, en masse, should probably be barred from the practice. Yet we straights fill up governing bodies in lopsided numbers and vote that homosexuals are not worthy of marriage. The majority votes to restrict the rights of a minority? Sounds familiar. I remember being taught about this -- in history class.

But marriage has traditionally been between a man and a woman, the straights wail. Look, if "tradition" is telling two sane, unrelated adults who are in love with each other that they can't spend the next 60 years arguing over where to order dinner from and then just going with the Thai place they always pick and being passive-aggressive to each other through the entirety of "The Bachelor," then I propose a new tradition: reserve marriage for people who are in love, regardless of their pieces and parts.

But marriage is about procreation, the straights counter. OK, so I guess women who are incapable of having kids shouldn't be allowed to get married? Or old people? Or people who have no desire to have kids?

Why Prop 8 Made Me Believe in Love
By falling in love and being pissed that he can't get married, my friend has not only reinforced my belief in love, but he's made me a crusader for it. Let me end on a promise to everyone who is against same-sex marriage:

A) Love is going to happen, whether you like it or not. Lots of people who fall in love want to get married. Do you want to get married? Are you married? Do you realize that other people want the same things, and some of these people (they number in the hundreds of millions) are gay? The federal legalization of same-sex marriage has to happen, just as the federal legalization of interracial marriage had to happen back in 1967. Can you imagine a world where mixed races couldn't get married? Your children will feel the same shock when they realize same-sex marriage was illegal. Which side of history do you want to be on?

B) When this happens, nothing in your life will change. The only people whose lives will change are the gays and lesbians, who will get to feel, finally, the same exact thing that I hope some woman I'm crazy about feels for me some day: utter disbelief that I'm wearing my windbreaker inside-out again.

[Redacted] Guy is the resident Single Guy writer for Lemondrop. Most of the Lemondrop editorial staff is confident they could take him in a cage fight, but this is a (mostly) untested theory. He loves rain, waterslides, and the orca show at Sea World, because they hide the fact that he's been crying. You can easily access all of his columns here.

You can send him hate mail and love letters here. Follow him on Twitter, why don't you?