When a local health foundation's bi-monthly marketing newsletter arrives in my mailbox, I throw it in the recycle bin without a second glance, every time. But the issue that arrived yesterday stopped me in my tracks.

"What do you want us to grab, honey?" my mom asks me on the phone. There's a fire raging towards my house. I'm not there. Someone else has to help me. "What do you want us to grab, honey?"

She wouldn't hold hands with me, my newlywed wife, unless we hid our interlaced fingers under an airline blanket.

A lesbian may see her family lose $20,404 each year because both she and her wife are being paid less. Thus, by allowing the gender pay gap to continue, wife-wife families are being disadvantaged in a way that is not true for husband-wife or husband-husband families.

My children have felt not just tolerance, or comfort, but pride in our family -- not in spite of its difference, but because of it.

Our children know that for a few months in 2008, the law said "yes" to their family. Their moms are legally married (in California, at least). This legal recognition echoes and enforces what their moms and their community keep telling them: that we should be treated equally.