Thursday was a ridiculously beautiful day in San Francisco. It was a historic day, too: as everybody surely knows by now, the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay marriage.

Now, people throw around the phrase “gay community” a lot, and that tends to irk me. My sense of community varies according to the company I’m keeping—for instance, if I stumble into the LookOut on a Friday night, I’m tempted to imagine that the only thing uniting the crowd is a shared affinity for Ginch Gonch. A community doesn't exist simply by defaulting to sexual identity.

At the moment, though, I’m feeling more of a sense of community than usual. I’m uncharacteristically sentimental about those brave couples whose persistence led to this landmark ruling. And I’m thrilled that the court pointed out, with devastating logic, the hypocrisy of the right-wing position on gay marriage.

Among other things, the court dismissed the notion that the term “marriage” has some kind of incantatory power—that it’s a talisman available only to those couples who possess a certain combination of chromosomes. The court also gestured to the fact that the ideal modern marriage is not a matter of gender or of procreation, but of simple companionship.

Of course, with an anti-gay initiative on the state ballot, we’ll be fighting this thing all the way to November. But just for today—free of snark, if only for a few hours—let’s point out that, far from weakening marriage, legal gay matrimony might just prove that the ol’ institution is strong enough to bear the weight of inclusion.

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