BOSTON -- Now that we've arrived at the wedding, can we take a minute to describe how the laws walked us down this aisle? After all, the laws emerged from two different backgrounds and went down two separate paths. Then they came together before the justice of the peace, as groom and groom, bride and bride.
On Tuesday, the Massachusetts high court ruled that gay couples have the right to marry. In the same decision, the justices redefined both gay rights and marriage. And yet for all the hoorays and all the boos, the decision may be as evolutionary as it is historic.
Consider first the path of gay rights. For generations, the state labeled some lovers as criminals. When the last laws against sodomy finally fell this year, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia dissented. He argued that if moral disapproval wasn't enough to make sodomy illegal, nothing was: "What justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples?"
He was bitter ... and right. The statutes that made homosexuals outlaws had to end before they could become in-laws.
Meanwhile, marriage was on its own winding path. Historically, a woman who entered the institution lost her legal identity at the altar. Until 20 years ago, a husband was still exempt from rape charges in New York, because a wife didn't have the right to say no.
In 1965, the state lost the power to control sex within marriage when the Supreme Court overturned a Connecticut ban on selling contraceptives to couples. In 1967, the state lost its power to define the race of the person you could marry when the court overruled the last laws banning interracial marriage. And gradually throughout the 1970s, the state turned over the right to decide why a marriage could end. A wave of no-fault divorce laws gave that decision to the people.
Each one of these changes -- ending the subordination of wives, ending race restrictions, de-coupling marriage from decisions about children, sex and divorce -- set off alarm bells. But marriage today is less about an institution and more about a relationship, less about the state and more about individuals.
The evolution of gay rights and marriage laws now merge into the definition of marriage written by the Massachusetts court: "We construe civil marriage to mean the voluntary union of two persons as spouses, to the exclusion of all others."
