Freedom to Marry, a national organization working to full marriage equality for LGBT couples, is rolling out their new Students for Marriage campaign.

Andrew Blumenfeld, the groups Summer 2010 New Media intern, has put out the call for more youth involvement in the nationwide movement for marriage, but admits it's an issue on which many youth find difficulty in identifying.

He writes on Freedom to Marry's blog:

As a student- in high school, in college- it may not always be easy to see why the freedom to marry is something to which we should devote a whole lot of time or thought. We’ve seen our friends, family members, and neighbors find and commit to that special someone later in life than most of our grandparents would have ever considered typical. So when it comes to marriage equality and “winning the freedom to marry,” it can be difficult- at least initially- for the younger amongst us to summon a whole lot of interest.

Blumenfeld says, "I think that’s a big mistake."

Blumenfeld is working with Freedom to Marry to launch their Students for Marriage initiative, a campaign, he writes, "to effectively inform and mobilize young Americans around a new goal in the marriage equality movement: never having to wait for justice."

The group is initially organizing the youth campaign on Facebook: www.facebook.com/StudentsForMarriage.

Blumenfeld explains why marriage is a youth issue:

It’s not uncommon for marriage campaigns to utilize the images of elderly same-sex couples who have been together for decades to convince voters that these individuals deserve the right to marry one another. Jen and Megan have been together for 30 years now—shouldn’t they share in this wonderful thing we call marriage?

Now, it’s easy to see why the marriage issue, after seeing a message like this one, might become very salient to a crowd engaged in their own years-long relationships. But if we as young people don’t see the direct plea to our demographic in that message, then we’ve just missed the whole point.

Of course marriage equality ought to be what we can offer to Jen and Megan and every other committed couple holding their relationships together for years just waiting for their government to recognize them. But marriage equality truly is a youth issue. It is a fight for the freedom from ever having to appear in one of those campaigns, sitting next to the one you love and have devoted a life to, pleading with our communities to acknowledge it.

It’s not often that the progress worth fighting for can be realistically expected in its entirety in any one lifetime or generation. As the young people of this generation, we are primed to see this issue come to a resolution in a timeframe that might mean we enter full adulthood with one less struggle, one less fragment of institutionalized intolerance that weighs on us as individuals and as a community.

The opportunity to realize this potential- to create a society in which our children might never know what a world with marriage discrimination looks like- is real. And not unlike many issues of the past- where a rising generation expected a little better than what the previous generation was planning on leaving behind- this issue will require great effort on the part of the youth, of students.

"I don't blame them," a friend told me, taking sympathy for Target, as I explained their anti-gay donations and the ensuing boycott threats from LGBT community members.

"What do you mean?"

He responded, "They're just playing both sides of the aisle. I don't blame them. I would too."

(Photo right: An image from a Facebook group urging a boycott of Target, via Minnesota Independent)

My friend has a point: Large corporations often give donations and contributions to all sorts of organizations of all sorts of ideological stripes. In Target's case -- wherein more than 250,000 people have pledged boycott over its donations to an anti-gay PAC in Minnesota -- the political contributions to "both sides of the aisle" aren't nearly as even as they should be. One could make the argument that Minnesota-based Target has never been as "Tar-gay"-friendly as it's appeared.

The controversy started when Target was blasted for a $150,000 donation to MN Forward, a political action committee run by and endorsing Tom Emmer, an anti-LGBT, Republican candidate for Minnesota governor. But that wasn't nearly the end of the story. As gay activists dug deeper, they found Target employees gave overwhelmingly to the anti-gay side of California's Proposition 8 ballot initiative. According to OpenSecrets (via The Huffington Post), employees gave $3,250 to the campaign to pass Proposition 8. Only $750 was given to organizations working to defeat the anti-gay marriage amendment. (To be fair, Target has released a statement distancing itself from Proposition 8 contributions.)

And, of course, it doesn't end there. By all accounts, Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel seems to be of an evangelical Christian stripe -- a stripe that routinely works to deny LGBT people their rights as citizens and dignity and respect as humans.

Read more after the jump...