Timing

It was the week's one piece of news emanating from robed figures that was to the good, if perhaps cynically timed to crowd out the VRA decision.

Sam Seder's conversation with Richard Kim, is an excellent overview of the legal issues and the drama.

The Court struck down DOMA Section 3: federal government non-recognition of marriages performed in states that recognize them. Remaining sections don't touch state laws against same-sex unions; where those are still on the books, further cases will be on state levels in the coming years.

Kim addressed grass roots activism as the key to having won this one. The loss in the Prop 8 election pushed people to come forward, first in California. Then Minnesota, Maine, Maryland used the legislative process. These successes have created a public perception that history is going only one way (and Justice Kennedy wanted to be on right side). Kim notes, too, that Edith Windsor's moving fight was against an easily understood injustice.

It didn't hurt that plenty of large corporations were on board.

But the shift in public attitudes, especially among youth, has produced a clear majority in surprisingly few years. Seder says the effect of popular culture can't be underestimated, with TV shows—"Ellen"; "Will and Grace"—key to the public's evolution in seeing gays as folks next door. Kim noted that once marriage became a reality, the public realized it did them no harm—even in Iowa, where people have come to accept and even be proud of their state's equal protection.

In the context of the previous day's knife stuck into the VRA and Seder's question about whether marriage equality activism might branch out to other issues, Kim sees "a spark of social justice this whole movement has ignited." He believes there is heightened awareness, including of the threat to minority voting rights, and an understanding that gay issues include the same social and economic justice issues affecting the rest of the country.

One also has to agree with Seder: it's stunning to see this decision and remember that it was only in 2004 that fear of gay marriage was the GOP's get out the vote strategy.