Big Step to Equality. Congratulations, United States

Today, I am proud to be an American.

When I attended my first same-sex commitment ceremony, sometime around 1980, I never thought I’d see so much progress, so fast. In 1982, I went to the first LGB pride march in Northampton, Massachusetts—and some of the marchers wore bags over their heads to protect their idenities.

In 2005, just 23 years later, my own state of Massachusetts became the first to legalize same-sex marriage. And now, with today’s Supreme Court decisions in favor of gay marriage, several major ripples happen:

• California will likely become the 13th state to legalize marriage equality, and that will mean about 30 percent of the US population will live in a place where partners of the same gender can marry
• The wretched DOMA, the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” (I prefer to call it the Desecration of Marriage Act) is invalidated, and the numerous discriminatory practices it enshrined are nullified—creating economic equality for same-sex relationships in such matters as inheritance, hospital visitation rights, and spousal benefits (DOMA is the worst kind of compromise—the kind that makes no one happy)
• The US is well on its way to joining the 14 other countries that have legalized gay marriage, and thus joined the 21st century on this issue: not just the progressive hotspots of Northern Europe, but even two countries in South America (with Brazil expected to join them soon) and one in Africa

So what does it mean? Living in a state where same-sex marriage has been legal for 8 years, I can tell you that it has broken down a lot of barriers. When people realize that the same-sex couples in their community are just neighbors, working with them on the block beautification committee or school parent association—struggling with the same issues, sharing the same triumphs—a lot of the prejudice goes away. Just as we’ve seen a huge change in relations between races after the legal apartheid of the segregated south went away, we’ll see a gradual dissipation of prejudice as people of different sexual orientations rub shoulders in multiple contexts.

Congratulations to the Supreme Court, to all my lesbian and gay friends, to the Obama administration that urged this decision—and to my country.