Denying marriage equality is morally reprehensible

That is the only way to describe what happened to Janice Langbehn, Lisa Marie Pond and their family. Denying the family of a homosexual the rights to see him or her for the last time because they are not legally recognised as family is absolutely outrageous. And I defy anyone defending the denial of formal marriage rights to same-sex couples as anything humane or morally justifiable. Read that story, and tell me how treating fellow humans with a different sexual orientation as less human than heterosexuals is in anyway not morally reprehensible, not inhumane, and in any way justifiable.

David Link had this to add after the federal courts dismissed Langbehn's case:

As a strictly legal matter, that may be true (the decision can still be appealed). But as a moral matter, it is appalling. Hospitals came into being because of human compassion for illness and suffering. Whatever their legal obligations, preventing a woman from seeing her dying partner until the priest arrives to deliver Last Rites is a level of cruelty that should go down in the annals of depravity.

And Andrew Sullivan echoes my thoughts:

When people talk about marriage as some kind of abstract matter, an interesting debate to be had, an issue to be discussed, they forget the actual, brutal consequences of laws that treat gay families as non-families and gay people as sub-human.

Same-sex marriage is often considered an intellectual exercise. As a straight man in a happy heterosexual marriage, my discussions with friends on this issue have almost always been reduced to legal arguments. It is near-impossible for those not in the LGBT community, and even some within it, to see why this is a human rights issue and nothing less. And it infuriates me.

How is denying a person's same-sex partner the small comfort of a bedside vigil morally right? How can any law denying marriage equality, and by extension justifying this barbaric treatment of homosexuals be regarded as just? I'm not even going to dignify the contemptible opinions of "gay marriage diminishes our freedoms and straight marriages" with a response.

If anyone can justify this, leave a comment. I am just dying to find out.