Some readers may recall this post of mine from a few months back where I reprinted an older blog post from 2008 about why I thought legalizing same-sex marriage mattered as an issue of our basic humanity:

What I am saying is that I wish more libertarians would get past thin approaches that treat the marriage issue no differently than the issue of, say, whether municipal power companies are inefficient.  The marriage question is more than an abstract exercise in political philosophy; it goes to the very core of who we are as human beings and what it means to live a life of dignity.

Today, almost five years to the day after the events in that post, it was my great pleasure and honor to attend the wedding of the two female friends who were at the center of those events.   

It turns out that, until I happened to glance at the calendar last night, I hadn’t realized that it was September 1st already and that this wedding was the next day!  My wife and I were chatting about it last night when my 17 year-old daughter, who is very passionate about the same-sex marriage issue, walked in and overheard us (she knows the two women as well).  She says “why aren’t you guys more excited about this?  This is so great and it’s history!”  Then she paused and said “And maybe a few years from now, we won’t have to point out how cool this is because it will just become part of the whole idea of a wedding.”

That comment struck me for a particular reason.  I said to her: “You’re right and here’s the best evidence of your point:  all of our friends who are invited to this wedding and the two women getting married have been talking about it for months, and not once (not even once) has anyone associated with the wedding even mentioned the fact that it’s also an inter-racial marriage.”

What would have been heavily remarked upon not so very long ago (and apparently, still in some quarters, as Cheerios found out this year) has now become so commonplace and accepted, that it doesn’t even bear mentioning.  Whatever one thinks about the analogies between same-sex marriage and inter-racial marriage (and I find them mostly compelling), it is undoubtedly true that we have found ways to accept and then eventually, again for the most part, ignore race when it comes to matters of love.  I suspect that my daughter is right, and in short order the same will be true of sex.

Legal recognition, for me, is a matter of justice.  It matters because equality before the law is one of the foundational principles and promises of liberalism and modernity. The liberal west has struggled to live up to that promise for several hundred years, but we’ve made a lot of progress. Today was evidence of that continued progress and what it means for the lives of real people.  The joy and love and tears of happiness in that church today were not only what marriage looks and feels like, they were what justice achieved looks and feels like. 

But it also matters because doing what justice demands, at least in this case, has, I would argue, the salutary effect of putting an important seal of approval on change that has largely come from the bottom up.  To be clear, there wouldn’t be the demand for the justice of marriage equality if the social acceptance hadn’t already taken place in enough other places in society.  The law is following culture here.  However, the extra step of the law recognizing what many people already believe is right makes it just that much easier to continue that process of social evolution.

As the barriers to same-sex marriage fall state-by-state and, eventually, in a Supreme Court decision, we will eventually get to a day when the sex of those getting married will be as generally unremarked upon as race is in most places today.  That, in my view, is a good thing.