The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision striking down the so-called Defense of Marriage Act is a cause for celebration around the world, as it strikes a tone that legally legitimizes love between all people regardless of gender, and sets a standard that other nations are now going to be hard-pressed to ignore.
The day will come when it will seem, in retrospect, amazing that it took so long for such a thing to happen in our world — yet this is not a time for criticizing the past, but for celebrating the present.
From this day forward, all Federal Government benefits available to opposite-gender married couple in the U.S. will now be offered to same-sex marrieds as well. President Barack Obama lost no time in ordering his country’s Dept. of Defense and other branches of his government to rewrite regulations to immediately reflect the court’s decision.
The Supreme Court’s additional action in striking down as “unconstitutional” a ballot initiative passed by California voters prohibiting same sex marriage also blazed across the dark sky of intolerance as a comet of hope to all those who believe that the expression of true love between any individuals, announced and demonstrated through the entering into a commitment of lifelong partnership, should never be prohibited, but encouraged in a global society ravaged by a sociology of increasing separation.
With the astonishing increase in the divorce rate among heterosexual couples over the past 20 years, the ironic joke among gays has been that all they want to do is to get into what straights want to get out of.
The High Court’s decision did nothing to change the fact that gay marriage is still illegal in 34 U.S. states, but it makes it very clear that the gender composition of a marriage should have nothing to do with the flow of important Federal benefits to spouses — and, as noted above, it sends a huge message to all states, and to people throughout the world who are watching and listening, that legal prohibitions against gay couples are simply not appropriate.
Conversations with God, of course, made it clear in its messages nearly 20 years ago that “there is no manner in which the expression of a love which is pure and true is inappropriate,” directly addressing the loud announcements that had been made by some religious leaders over the years that homosexual expressions of love are against the Will of God and will be punished by everlasting damnation.
(Such denunciations came from the same kinds of people who swore with equal vehemence not very many years earlier that inter-racial marriage also violated the Will of God…and that left-handedness was a sign of the Devil.)
The human community is at long last evolving out of its primitive notions of an intolerant, judgmental, condemning and violently punishing Deity. What is perhaps most notable about the U.S. Supreme Court’s two decisions regarding gays is that they came from a largely conservative panel of judges. This makes it difficult and more than a little inconvenient for hard-core conservative Republican politicians in America to find cover for their previously highly visible and loudly intolerant views regarding gay marriage and equal rights for gays.
For those who believe in, and still see, America as the “land of the free,” it seems that it is about time this major social adjustment was made. Love is, after all, the basis of all healing and the foundation of all caring societies. It seems remarkable that anyone could have ever argued against it. Especially those who claimed to be articulating the Will of God.
For all those who love Love, this is a happy day.
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