Thank goodness for groups like Equality Florida and the other plaintiffs for challenging the vagaries of the law, which is morally flawed and dangerous. It’s hard enough for LGBTQ youth to grow up in a society that stigmatizes them. Young people who identify as LGBTQ are already more than four times as likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers. The absolute last thing they need is legislation spelling out when it is and isn’t OK to discuss their very existence.

And the last thing same-sex adults need is a bunch of legislators sitting in judgment of their love, their lives, their families—debating the legitimacy of something as fundamental and sacred as who they love and what they’re allowed to do about it.

This isn’t about protecting the sanctity of the union between a man and a woman. This isn’t about protecting children from moral corruption. This is about human rights.

This is about carving out one kind of love and identity—the straight, cisgender kind—and setting it up as the legitimate one. The real one. The template. The ideal.

This is about taking the other kinds of love and identity and turning them into an aberration. A departure. An exception shrouded in shame to the point that we need laws to tell us when and where we can and can’t speak of them.

Meanwhile, the parade of straight people falling in and out of love or lust or look-at-me on camera continues unabated and unquestioned. No amount of reality TV—from “The Bachelor” to “Love Island” to “90 Day Fiance” to “Love Is Blind”—inspires laws codifying when and where teachers can discuss heterosexuality. No straight teachers had to breathe a sigh of relief when a court clarified that they could, indeed, display a photo from their wedding on their desk.

We have put straight marriage through the paces in this country, and the institution keeps on ticking. As it should. How a couple falls in consensual love, what they decide to do about it and how long they decide to keep at it is a mysterious, messy, beautiful, wildly individual process.

But let’s not pretend we’re protecting that process when we cloister it off through bills and bans. Let’s acknowledge those bills and bans for what they are, which is an attempt to withhold certain rights from a segment of the population, alienating and disenfranchising them as though their humanity counts a little less than the rest of ours.

And then let’s celebrate when those attempts get beaten back and slowed down, as is the case with the “Don’t Say Gay” law. And then let’s keep working to make the world a little safer and happier and healthier and more inclusive for anyone brave enough to love. It’s the only way.

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