Amazing

It seems so simple and so clear.

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed. It is so ordered.

Our friends on the other side of this and so many other issues — like the four dissenting Justices — disagree.  Perhaps with time their views may change.

The nature of traditional marriage, which once included polygamy and seven-year olds, changes.

The natural order of things, like the Biblically sanctioned owenrship of slaves, changes.

I am still wide-eyed from those two speeches Friday . . . in the Rose Garden and, hours later, Charleston.

Amazing Grace.

John McCain and Mitt Romney are wonderful people in many ways.  But John McCain wouldn’t have made those speeches — or appointed two progressive Supreme Court Justices.

Nor Mitt Romney.

As Bush v. Gore so painfully reminds us, it truly matters who wins.

A difference of two Justices is the difference between a 5-4 decision that grants marriage equality and a 3-6 decision that denies it . . . between a 6-3 decision that upholds Affordable Health Care for millions and a 4-5 decision that, based on one sloppy line in a giant piece of legislation whose intent is clearly known to everyone, takes it away.

If you’re with Justice Scalia, Jeb Bush, Fox News, et al, on matters like these, you have every right to be — obviously — and I am particularly grateful for your visiting a site like mine and considering my views.

But if you helped elect and re-elect Barack Obama, you helped lift the nation’s sights Friday afternoon, and light her White House Friday night, and I am yet more grateful still.

Please stick with it.  Four of our nine Justices will be in their eighties in the first term of the next presidency.  Which party’s nominee gets to replace any who might retire is a matter of enormous consequence.