Elisabeth, my closest friend, told me the other day that she had something to show me. Her face was bursting with the secret, whatever she was about to show me was seeping out the sides of her smile, the glow in her eyes. We grabbed her two dogs, put them up in her truck, and drove off onto the little highway that runs not too far from the A-frame house she shares with her wife, Nan, on several acres of land.

We turned down one of the country roads, and then turned up a dirt road the existence of which had previously been unknown to me. The road opened up into a rural cemetery, and I thought, at first, she had brought me to see some of the older graves in the area, the ones I'm always searching for in an effort to understand how long this area has been settled, and then unsettled, by whites who drove the Natives off the land.

The land here was payment to American soldiers who had fought in the Revolutionary War. The Haudenosaunee confederacy was destroyed by a civil war within its ranks that was the direct result of the Revolutionary War. Their lands were given away to soldiers as payment.

Sure enough, as I walked in the upper end of the cemetery, I found markers that made reference to the War. A tall, thin wafer stone, with a large half circle at the top marked the remains of "Captain John Bush. Served as a Captain during the Revolution in Third Penn Continental. Died 1816. Aged 83 years." Below him, "Sarah Richards, his wife. Died 1822. Aged 73 years."

When I was still an historian, still chipping away at the sandstone cave with the head of a pin and thinking I was making a difference, I was frustrated by my inability to bring the dead back to life. I wanted to give some resonance, some meaning to their suffering. I wanted to redeem, with my words, those who were accused of witchcraft, and then tortured until they said anything to make the pain stop—including telling impossible, fantastic, pornographic tales of sex with demons and eating babies and stabbing the host and making it bleed—they had been stripped of their voices, stripped of their very humanity in the desire for those in power to have some form of truth that confirmed their world view that evil was afoot in the world and that its agency could be found and eradicated.

The modern-day parallels are so obvious that it seems pedantic to draw them out. Suffice it to say that we have plenty of those among us who believe that certain categories of people exist—for example, gays and lesbians—who present such a threat to the social order that they cannot be granted full rights. If we allow them to serve in the military, they'll rape other soldiers. If we allow them to adopt children (as in Florida) they'll molest them. And if we allow them to marry, they'll destroy the institution of marriage.

All of these canards would be laughable if so many people did not continue to believe them. Just as the ritual murder/blood libel resurfaced as recently as the Bosnia-Serbia conflict, so, too, in recent weeks have we been treated to sickening statements by public officials about the secret, malevolent practices of gays and lesbians.

This hurts my heart. Elisabeth is as close to me as if she were my sister, and I have come to love her wife, Nan, just as much. The two of them have been great women role models for my girls, and there is virtually no one that I trust more.

When they traveled to Vermont to register their union, I was delighted. The state we live in, however, New York, supposedly one of the bluest of the blue, has consistently shot down gay marriage rights. Please don't ask me to explain to you why. I don't understand it myself.

For me, love is love. It is in short supply in this world. If we had enough of it to go around, no child would go hungry, no soldier would fire his or her gun, no woman would be raped. Love is a precious thing. How dare anyone tell these dearest of friends that they are less-than-human by telling them that they are unfit to marry?

Anyway. I take a breath to let the rage pass.

We are in the cemetery, and Elisabeth takes me to a beautiful patch of earth. A sugar maple provides it with shade, and on that day, we listened as a mockingbird went through his repertoire of bird song.

"This is ours," she said.

I looked at her, not understanding.

"Nan and I bought this. This is where our ashes will be buried."

My eyes welled with tears. It seems the state has a lot of rules that tell gays and lesbians that they are not human, but it has not told them that they cannot be together in death.

Elisabeth and Nan will be able to have a headstone that proclaims to future generations that theirs was a great love, a true love. Even if in their lifetimes, my state never sees the light of reason and compassion and allows them to marry, they know that when they both pass, they will be together.

Forever. The state can deny to them life's basic civil rights, but it cannot take away their right, in death, to sleep eternally in each other's arms.