I know that the entire queer community is not on the same page on the issue of marriage, and I don't think we need to be, but I want to say why I haven't been jumping on the marriage bandwagon, and I want to really give context to my hesitation.

The National Organization for Marriage and its hired gun, Frank Schubert, are doubling down these final two weeks before the election with phony claims that churches and religious-based charities will be sued or punished unless gay couples are blocked from the freedom to marry.

Of all the lies that anti-gay campaigns are airing to scare voters away from supporting marriage equality, the most absurd is the claim that marriage doesn't really matter -- or shouldn't matter -- for committed gay couples.

One of the anti-marriage-equality ads in Maine splashes these dire outcomes across the screen: "Fired. Sued. Fined. Punished." In it, a spokesman for Maine's 2009 campaign to repeal the freedom to marry, a school guidance counselor, claims, "They tried to get me fired."

Minnesotans United for All Families says we need to have 200,000 conversations in October if we are to win, and that we broke a record by having 10,000 conversations recorded last week. So unless things ramp up amazingly fast, it appears that we are going to lose this thing. That upsets me.

While I'm glad that the money is being raised, and while I know that we need those "vote no" ads to duke it out with the "vote yes" ones, I'm much more focused on volunteer involvement. Here's my 2-minute stump speech.