Tuesday, October 07, 2014

Yes, it is astonishing

The US Supreme Court basically ruled today that all those lower court decisions authorizing gay marriage in a number of states are constitutional.
In celebration, Andrew Sullivan has written The Astonishing Actual History Of The Gay Rights Movement, from the despair of AIDS to today's victory:

Using the institutions and self-knowledge and smarts that had somehow defeated the plague, gay men charted a future when nothing like this would happen again, when gay men would never be parted from their spouses on their death beds, when gay men’s physical and psychological health would never be treated as insignificant, when gay men would never suffer the indignity that so many endured in front of our eyes. And so we built the case for marriage equality and for open military service as a recognition of the self-worth our survival had given some of us, and to pay some kind of tribute to those who had fallen.

We went, in other words, from about the deepest hole you can imagine to a determination not just to get out of it, but to see the mountaintop in our lifetimes.

...We are on this mountaintop together, even as so many dead lie round.

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