Courts Finally Catching Up to Society's Views on Gays

The California Supreme Court’s landmark decision in May to grant gays the right to marry is based on a simple but inevitable idea, Andrew Sullivan writes in the Atlantic: Gay marriage is just marriage, and gay people are no different than straight people. As homosexuality moved from being considered a disorder to just an involuntary difference, the law had no choice but to follow. California simply acknowledged “an emergent cultural consensus,” Sullivan writes.

The civic importance of gay marriage never hit home for Sullivan until he married his boyfriend. During the engagement, family and friends "had a vocabulary to describe and understand our relationship. I was no longer my partner’s 'friend” or “boyfriend'; I was his fiancé." Something changed for Sullivan: "I felt an end—a sudden, fateful end—to an emotional displacement I had experienced since childhood." (More gay marriage stories.)