Equal

Quote of the Week:

Looking back on two decades of struggle, past the ashes of so many, to the clearing on which we now stand, it's hard not to weep. Two decades ago, marriage for gays was a pipe-dream. Some of us were ridiculed for even thinking of the idea. And yet here we are. Past the vicious attack from the president, past the cynical manipulation by Rove, past the cowardice of so many Democrats, past the rank hypocrisy of the Clintons, past the inertia of the Human Rights Campaign, past the false dawn in San Francisco, and the countless, countless debates and speeches and books and articles and op-eds. Yes, we have much more to do. Yes, we still have to win over those who see our loves as somehow destructive of the families we seek merely to affirm. Yes, we don't have federal recognition of our basic civic equality. Yes, in many, many states, we have been locked out of equality for a generation, because of the politics of fear and backlash. But look how far we've come. From a viral holocaust to full equality - somewhere in America, in the commonwealth where American freedom was born. In two decades. This is history. What a privilege to have witnessed it.

It was driven above all by ordinary gay and lesbian couples and their families - not activists, not lobbyists, not intellectuals. Couples and their families. It was driven by a brutal, sudden realization that we were far more vulnerable than we knew. In the plague years, husbands reeled as they were denied access to their own spouses in hospitals, as they were evicted from their shared homes in the immediate aftermath of terrible grief, and refused access even to funerals by estranged and often hostile in-laws. This day is for them, for all those who were abused and maligned and cast aside because they loved another human being.

...[Yesterday] America changed. The world changed. And an ancient and deep wound began, ever so slightly, to heal.

-Andrew Sullivan, who for the past two decades has made the most passionate, well parsed, and conservative arguments for gay marriage, on what yesterday's decision by the Massachusetts legislature to keep a proposed amendment banning gay marriage off the 2008 ballot really means.