The argument against gay marriage I hear most often is that our country was founded on Christian principles. The founders, so the argument goes, were religious men who, with pen in hand, inscribed their pious beliefs upon the pages of our Constitution.

This argument is entirely inaccurate.

Though they may have believed in God, they knew the perils of combining organized religion and government. And for that reason they deliberately worked to separate church and state. In that vein, the uprising around Proposition 8 is justified. Let’s argue against tax breaks for churches. Let’s argue for limiting their ability to influence legislation. And if we want to remove marriage as a legal entity, to strip the very word from our laws because it is a religious, not legal, institution, let’s come together and argue for that.

But if what we are arguing for is the right to marry, as ordained by law, this uprising is misguided from the start. We cannot, from the left sides of our mouths, support one constitutional staple (personal liberty) while from the right violate another (separation of church and state). The issue here is not marriage, but the organized religious infiltration of our government. If we want proof of the devastating side effects of the coupling of organized religion and politics, look no further than the current Republican Party. Once champions of liberty and freedom–a party that ended slavery and fought to give women the right to vote–, they are now a castrated political entity. Their mouths may move but the words that come out are seldom their own.

Organized religion and liberty are mutually exclusive. The sentiment of the organized religions is that it’s OK to believe what you want as long as it’s what they want you to believe. Liberty is as they define it. And that, not two men or women spending their lives together, is a complete betrayal of what we stand for. That is a plague that will systematically destroy what we care most about.

If we’re going to fight, let’s attack the root of the problem. The biggest issue we face today, the number one problem preventing progress, is the power that religious organizations wield over this country and its government. They have hampered the progress of science, education, and civil rights for too long. Their beliefs last only as long as the ignorance they are based upon. Liberty endures. And a country based on liberty will endure, as well.

So if this debate is to be about reason over dogma, about prying our country out of the crushing jaws of organized religion, and about fighting for the rights of not just gays but all people who want to be free to make up their minds about what’s right for them, it’s one worth waging.