Gay America Celebrates

Parties went late into the night last night in The Castro in San Francisco and in Oakland. There were rallies in San Jose, and in West Hollywood the streets have been closed since this afternoon to accommodate the crowd gathered to celebrate a victory that only a few years ago seemed decades away.

Today’s landmark Supreme Court ruling equates gay marriage with heterosexual marriage and confers all the health care, fiscal and social rights that come with it, including the ability to reunite with foreign spouses. But the real strength of the Supreme Court decision is symbolic, as it unequivocally decrees the supremacy of civil equality without distinctions, whether arbitrary or “divine.” This is a necessary and important step in a secular and liberal democracy that ends 30 years of gay rights action and a decade of struggle over the definition of marriage.

No matter what you may think of marriage as an institution or as the objective of a movement, denying it to a portion of the population is an impossible position in a secular and liberal democracy. The universal right to marriage is advancing by inexorable steps to its inevitable conclusion with years of support behind it. It’s the last great battle for civil rights in a society like America — physiologically heterogeneous — whose cohesion depends upon overcoming, at least nominally, social differences. As it was during the struggles against racial segregation, the desperate attempts of the theocons of the right to apply a system of “partial equality” for gays was a retrograde battle and constitutionally untenable. Besides, if the struggles for civil rights in America have taught us anything, it’s that when public opinion is aligned with political will, institutional progress becomes inevitable. In the case of gay rights, it’s evident that this was destined to happen even faster than expected.