My dear friends, what I’m here to tell you today is this:
Love is love.

Beneath our skin and the rings on our fingers, we are all the same physical symphony of bones. It does not matter whose lips our lips touch nor whose hands our hands clasp. Only that love is love.

Boy and boy. Girl and girl. Boy and girl. Ask yourself. Does it even matter? No? Then why do we live in a world where laws impose limits on who we can love? If that isn’t already shameful enough, we parade around claiming to be a tolerant, accepting and open-minded society. But we’re not. We preach in bold - loud words like ‘justice’ and ‘equality’. But we don’t mean them. The truth of the matter is that we belong to a world where everyone is not equal. Anyone who is homosexual is unfairly and cruelly shunned. Girls can’t cut wedding cakes together and boys can’t take romantic strolls.

Love is supposed to be fair; it’s beautiful and all-encompassing, right? It rises above colour, religion and gender, the subjects of countless, mindless wars. But apparently not. Apparently not.

Love is love. But do we keep it pure? Do we keep it free of all ‘wrong’?

Right this very moment, a sizeable portion of our world suffers because they’re oppressed by laws that stringently ban homosexuality. Do not ask me why this is so. Do not ask me how we can be so inhumane and overlook, or rather casually condone, anyone’s suffering. Our nations are becoming independent, rapidly-developing and free-thinking but our people are not. Our societies are not. Because somehow, we don’t give each member of society the right to love who they want. And that pains me and disgusts me so much, that I can barely find words to say to you right now.

The solution is simple: abolish those laws. Homosexuality is not a sin, as many like to say. It is not a choice either. I can guarantee you that no one, absolutely no one, would want to deal with the hardships that come with the thorny social stigma that is attached to being gay or lesbian.

To every homophobic person out there, I’d like to ask them what they would do if they discovered that their brother was homosexual. Or their sister or son or daughter. Would they stop loving them? Would they stop accepting them for who they are? Or better yet, I’d like to know what they would do if the tables were turned and people began to harass them for being heterosexual. How would they feel?

Would they say then, with tears in their eyes, that ‘Love is love’?

Do not tell me that it is unnatural. Science, the rational, solid backbone of every argument nowadays, has proven that homosexuality lies in a human being’s DNA; it is a result of chromosomal equations and hard-core biology. There you go. Solid proof! Who are we to question that?

Do not tell me that God does not condone it. Doesn’t every religion say that we are all God’s children and He will love us no matter what? What right do we have then, to try to play God?

Ask yourself. Ask yourself if you can really sit back and let people cry and suffer and kill themselves rather than be who they are. Ask yourself if you can stay voiceless and passive and retreat in to the safe cocoon of your comfortable existence, remaining ignorant to the homophobic crimes that erupt all around you, like rape ‘cures’ and hateful murders.

Ask yourself if you can really stand to live in a world where people would rather see two men holding guns than holding hands.

Love is love.

And I know that this speech can’t fully capture the injustice I speak of – something so grave and deep and hurtful that so many cannot bear to face it. I know it isn’t going to change the world. And neither is an official piece of paper, a liberating law. Yet there may be just a little spark that might take us a step closer to the luminous ‘equality’ we speak of.

And that is as good a place as any to start.

Because love is love.

Love is love.