It started as a short conversation. A friend of a friend saying, “I just registered Republican.” I stared away and gritted my teeth, and not just because my politics are somewhere to the left of Barney Frank.

There’s a lot of young people now, at the Stern School of Business, who call themselves Republicans but are quick to distance themselves from their party’s positions on gay rights and race. “Well, I’m an economic conservative,” they say. “I’m totally for equality, but I just think the Republicans have the right economic answers.” Several of these people – many of them my friends ­– posted their Chick-­fil-­A Appreciation Day pictures on Facebook, smiling in front of the chain’s trademark posters of cows.

What gay rights are about, fundamentally, is whether our society will accept gay people as human beings. What’s at stake for me in any discussion or debate about gay rights is whether I walk away from the discussion between myself and the other individual with the agreement that I am fully human. There is essentially no argument against gay rights that doesn’t begin with the belief that gay people are not equal to straight people in some way.

While a majority of Americans are coming around to the view that gay people are just that – people ­— a majority of American institutions of power still do not operate on that assumption. The Republican Party and Chick­-fil-­A are two of those organizations. The Republican Party (starting with Reagan, who believed AIDS victims were “getting what they deserved”) has spent 20 years and millions of dollars demonizing people like me in political attack ads: using me and people like me as a threat issue with which to win elections. Chick­-fil-­A has donated large sums of money to organizations that seek to heal or fix gay men and women (organizations that work to deny gay marriage rights in the United States and promote Kill the Gays bills in Africa).

If you’re a registered Republican, and/or posing next to a greasy chicken sandwich on Facebook, you’re making one of two statements to me. Either you don’t think that I’m fully human and therefore I shouldn’t have rights similar to your own or, even if you think I deserve equal rights, those tax cuts (or chicken sandwiches) are more important. That your waffle fries and your belief that Wall Street should remain essentially unregulated are more important than the rights of Janice Langbehn, a Seattle woman who was forbidden to be with her dying wife for eight hours because a Florida hospital was not permitted by state law to give Langbehn visitation rights. The Republican Party, and the recipients of Chick­-fil-­A’s contributions, fought for that law to stay on the books and still fight to put it back there.

In 50 years, we’ll look back on this debate through the hindsight of history. We’ll still be fighting, but we’ll be able to pause and remember the heroes of this phase of our movement. The people who registered Republican and posed for their Chick­-fil-­A appreciation day pictures will be remembered as those who vacillated on or opposed one of the defining human rights issues of our time. People who are genuinely committed to gay equality shouldn’t ally themselves with organizations that seek to deny gay rights. And people who aren’t should look inside and ask: Are my gay friends human? That’s the only question that needs answering.

A version of this story appeared in the Aug. 26 print edition. Ben Miller is a staff columnist. Email him at [email protected].