I read a little bit of the ruling, talked with some co-workers, thought about it a bit since it was all the news today, and I have this about gay marriage:

It’s great.

Why is it great?

Because why shouldn’t it be?

Let’s start with the opening paragraph of the majority ruling.

The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity. The petitioners in these cases seek to find that liberty by marrying someone of the same sex and having their marriages deemed lawful on the same terms and conditions as marriages between persons of the opposite sex.

This country was founded on one basic principle. Freedom. Freedom from tyranny and oppression. It doesn’t particularly matter if they were escaping religious persecution or the British monarchy, the people who founded The United States of America formed a country whose primary goal, was liberty and justice for all. Why this opening paragraph means so much to this ruling, is it reinforces the purpose of our Constitution, and that is we do not allow the laws we make in this country, to infringe upon our basic human rights, or our basic human spirit. People desire, on their most basic level, to seek a mate. It’s not really up to any system of government, or any set of human laws, to deny someone that basic right. They’re going to do it anyway, just somewhere else that you cannot effectively control. That’s really what this is all about, control. Who controls the word, marriage?

So what about the dissenting opinion? Well their opening paragraph is most interesting.

Petitioners make strong arguments rooted in social policy and considerations of fairness. They contend that same-sex couples should be allowed to affirm their love and commitment through marriage, just like opposite-sex couples. That position has undeniable appeal; over the past six years, voters and legislators in eleven States and the District of Columbia have revised their laws to allow marriage between two people of the same sex.

But this Court is not a legislature. Whether same-sex marriage is a good idea should be of no concern to us. Under the Constitution, judges have power to say what the law is, not what it should be. The people who ratified the Constitution authorized courts to exercise “neither force nor will but merely judgment.”

Credit where credit is due, I don’t think many of the justices here actually oppose gay marriage, rather, they oppose the word marriage being re-appropriated, by law, to mean whatever it is they want it to mean. But I would argue, like anyone else who is in favor of this ruling, that if it is not a court’s job to determine what marriage is, at least when it comes to legal benefits of a couple and household, why should it be anyone else’s, like say, the church? Because let’s face it, what this ruling has done, is effectively nullify one of the last remaining bastions of modern day religion. Marriage has traditionally been, between a man and a woman, in a church, under God. What we’ve done is told the church “No more.” and used the power the government has tied to marriage, including its courts, to drive that stake straight through the church.

Now, to be fair, I am not anti-church or anti-religion. I believe people are entitled, by the same constitutional rights, to practice religion, and uphold religious beliefs. If someone wholly believes marriage is still a man, woman, and God, they are welcome to believe that. But no longer can you, or should you, be able to leverage the legislative, executive, and judicial powers of our state and federal government, to push your agenda to everyone else, who may not hold the same beliefs as you. I realize this is rather double-edge, because many might feel the LGBT movement has done exactly that, manipulated our systems to push their agenda, but I that’s a topic for another time. The more important thing, is that this ruling went above and beyond simply validating the word marriage for homosexual people, it brought our entire country back to the reason it was founded.

Freedom, equality, liberty, and justice.

For all.