[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Maya Harris
Executive Director
ACLU of Northern California

Today is the day we’ve been working for—a watershed for basic fairness and human dignity. The California Supreme Court has recognized that equality means that everyone must be free to marry the person they love.

Profound social change starts in California, and does not end here. It influences the rest of the nation. Today’s decision means that Californians will extend the franchise of fairness to gay and lesbian couples who enter into the committed, loving relationship we call “marriage.” And this decision will take its rightful historic place alongside those that have formally recognized what we, as Americans, have always aspired to: a more perfect, more egalitarian union of free people, free to choose our destiny, including whom to marry.

Californians consider bans on interracial marriage an embarrassing relic of bigotry—and so does the rest of the country. But in 1948, when the California Supreme Court struck down the state law barring interracial marriage, it blazed a brave new path for California and the nation. That decision changed California, and then it changed America.