The XX Factor: What women really think.

Gay Marriage at the Schoolhouse Door

I think I like weddings only when they’re an act of civil disobedience. When my straight friends announce their engagements, there’s always a faint sense of dread at the impending rites of veil-lifting and glass-stomping and Pablo-Neruda-poem-reciting (coupled, of course, with a sincere wish for their lifelong happiness—but I’d wish them that whether they got married or not). But those images of the San Francisco lesbian couple, 84 and 87 years old, who were wed Monday at 5:01 p.m. after 50 years together (and after a California Supreme Court decision invalidated their marriage performed in 2004) had me tearing up like a fond aunt at a rehearsal dinner. It doesn’t get any more romantic than that: Overturn our union, will you? Great, we’ll just line up and get married again the first minute—literally—that state law allows. I love imagining the two of them, frail and bent, walking out of City Hall to a mixed crowd of supporters (both women are well-known S.F. gay rights activists) and jeering protesters with placards reading “Homo Sex Is Sin.”

I honestly think that in a matter of years, this kind of image will look to us like the 1963 photographs of George Wallace blocking the schoolhouse door as two black students attempted to enroll at the University of Alabama. Good Lord, we’ll say, can you believe it was just a generation ago that people were debating the pros and cons of institutionalized bigotry and publicly protesting the right of two octogenarian women to love each other? I just hope that shift will take a lot less than 45 years and that, when Obama gets asked about gay marriage in the fall (and you know that wedge is being sharpened by the McCain campaign as we speak), he won’t fall back on that cowardly (and tautological) dodge about how “marriage is between a man and a woman.” No duh—and it’s high time we did something about it.