"Had those who drew and ratified the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment known the components of liberty in its manifold possibilities, they might have been more specific. They did not presume to have this insight. They knew times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress. As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom."
And so now, with our knowledge superior to that of the Founders - knowing what they did not know, and could not - a Massachusetts court has directed its fire at an institution created for the procreation of children and their healthy upbringing by a woman and a man.
Far as we may have come, there remain many miles to go.
Those who find all of this astounding in an enterprise that a generation ago elicited the response, "It's all so absurd, they can't be serious," should take care not to allow themselves to be isolated as somehow immoderate. At the center lies heterosexual marriage; lopsided (and increasing) poll majorities reject the same-gender alternative.
Still, the ideologically correct cry will go up:
"Liberation through enlightenment. The smarter you are, the freer you will be - the more open, the more accepting. Seek to comprehend and you will come to understand all diversity as good. To object is to be ignorant, insensitive, extreme. Be tolerant. Shun homophobia. Above all, do not be judgmental."
Difficult as it may be to believe that the outing of homosexuality - this cultural game of "Can You Top This?" - has advanced to the point it has, keep in mind the cliche: "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything."
Today 1920s essayist Alexander Woollcott's maxim ("All the things I really like are either immoral, illegal or fattening") has been updated to read: "If it feels good, do it!" Yet every lasting society has had legal strictures based on moral views of right and wrong. Homosexuality has always existed but never been normal. To institutionalize it through marriage would undermine, perhaps destroy, the most stabilizing force in Western Civilization - all in the name of "Do your own thing."
But then again, if in the beginning it actually had been Adam and Bruce, through the subsequent ages there never would have been all those little girls dreaming of growing up and falling in love with a guy and getting married to continue the Family of Man.