Speaking as an average American and as one of the 4,000 people who lined up to marry at the San Francisco City Hall in February, 2004, I am thrilled with today's announcement overturning CA's ban on gay marriage.
The ruling said, in part:
"the constitutionally based right to marry properly must be understood to encompass the core set of basic *substantive* legal rights and attributes traditionally associated with marriage that are so integral to an individual’s liberty and personal autonomy that they may not be eliminated or abrogated by the Legislature or by the electorate through the statutory initiative process."
And there you go.
Marriage must be understood as:
the core set of substantive rights and attributes that are so integral to an individual's liberty and personal autonomy that they may not be eliminated or abrogated by the Legislature or the electorate.
That is what we've been saying since Stonewall.
For all but the worst sort of people, this succinct statement should be sufficient to show the irrelevance of surface distinctions to the question of human rights.
PS: For anybody squawking about activist judges, the CA people changed their minds a few times. The CA legislature TWICE supported gay marriage and once voted to ban it. Swartzenegger vetoed the will of the people on supporting gay marriage. The matter went to the state supreme court for its opinion. See, the reason we have courts is to prevent the majority from tyrannizing a minority. Tyrannizing is different from out-voting. Tyrannizing is out-voting from bias in order to discriminate.
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