You may have heard that the California Supreme Court has ruled that the state has no pressing interest in inquiring into the gender of two people wishing to declare their undying love for each other.

And this time, couples might might end up with something more than a souvenir like this one (the marriages conducted San Francisco’s 2004 spring and summer of love are alas, still null and void.) As Mark Morford writes in the San Francisco Chronicle:

It might not be such an easy trick this time. This is the good news. It is the twilight of the Bush Endtimes and the right wing hate machine is no longer the nasty Hummer of bloviated pain it once was. What’s more, there’s this pesky thing known as a $3 trillion war. There is brutal economic recession. There is environmental collapse. Really, who cares about happy gay people getting married when it costs 4 bucks a gallon to get to Wal-Mart? Priorities, people.

What’s more, it was one thing for an uppity and slick San Francisco mayor to try and make a name for himself and enter the gay history books by allowing all those happy gay people to stand in the rain back in 2004 and get married in City Hall, only to have it all annulled by the courts.

But it is quite another when a powerhouse seven-member Supreme Court — six of whom are moderate Republicans — of the largest and most potent state in the union says, hey, you know what? It appears we’ve had it wrong all along. It appears there is actually nothing the slightest bit wrong or unlawful or even dangerous about allowing people of the same gender to buy overpriced formalwear and drink way too much champagne and dance to crappy ’80s power ballads in the Chardonnay Room of a low-rent winery up in Napa, and call it a wedding.

Who can argue with that? Hell, to this very day, cultural conservatives still have no idea exactly why they hate gay marriage. There is still zero articulation. There is a complete lack of fact or understanding and I have yet to meet a single person of any political stripe who can adequately explain exactly why gay marriage is so dangerous, or who’s threatened, or how. Same as it ever was? Yes. Only now, their misunderstanding feels quite a bit less dangerous, and far more pathetic.

Finally, this is the funniest response to the ruling I’ve seen yet. The joke isn’t exactly new, but they do it so well and they’re just so darn cute!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 12:20 pm and is filed under American Culture, Civil Rights, Humor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.