When I went to college, there was a girl in my class who said, "You know what? I met one, and they're really nice!" I thought it was kind of funny, but I was glad it happened for her. I think that once you've had the chance to meet a gay person and see that they have hopes and dreams, just like anybody else, it's easier to believe they deserve to get married and be happy as much as you do.
Given my very conservative Christian upbringing, I'd never (knowingly) met a homosexual until I was a freshman in college. Up to that point, I'd been living in the bubble of religious dogmatism that inoculates a person from a broader worldview; one which taught that homosexuals were deviants and sinners and that I should view them with disgust and disdain. That's all I'd ever known.
Imagine my surprise when the first ones I met destroyed those indoctrinated bigotries by being some of the nicest, funniest, most genuine people I'd ever met whom I'm still friends with to this day (nearly 20 years later).
That self-reinforcing, self-perpetuating bubble of ignorance that many people live in is the problem. And, it's not necessarily their fault. They're not all stupid or assholes. They are victims of being born into and/or indoctrinated into a myopic belief system and surrounded by an environment that is designed to foster/sustain that belief system at all costs.
Most of the time, they're trapped in that bubble and they don't even realize it, because that worldview - living in that bubble - is all they've ever known. You have no control over the environment you're born into. That's why I try to look at people like that as sort of victims rather than assume they're shitty people (not saying anyone here has done that. Just making a general point.).
Once that bubble is burst, though, lives are immediately changed.
