Thank you for your efforts, and good luck. Being a liberal and a Hillary supporter, I've already been through enough from my fellow liberals during this campaign. I can't even turn on Air America while I drive without hearing Hillary being bashed. So there is no way I'm ready to hear my fellow gays being bashed this early. I'll wait until the Republicans join in later.

Good article. This is a classic example of the reactionary side of so much of "liberal" advice over the past half century. Liberals opposed much of the civil rights movement up until 1964, supported the Viet Nam war up until 1969, criticized those who opposed it until the end and then blame the antiwar movement for every defeat the Democrats suffered since. It is only natural that they will now criticize the CA Supreme Court decision.

Progressives' stand on principle will not guarantee any immediate election victory, but note the big changes we have made.

The pseudo-realpolitik trashing of this legal AND POLITICAL victory may be one of those "grassroots" ideas that finds itself mainly among the pundits, who are pining for kudos for justifying the lying. Then it percolates down from the pundits to the astroturf roots, particularly among the many many folk out there who are eager to get with the program and win over kudos for themselves.

EJ,

Probably I just read different stuff. I'm disappointed in E J (the other) Dione, since he's usually good. But isn't Jeffery Rosen's whole shtick being a so-called liberal who does nothing but lament liberal court decisions, especially on social issues like abortion & gay marriage? Maybe I'm being unfair to the man -- I tend to skip his writings, precisely because of this sense -- but I wouldn't call him a liberal, at least on the issues he tends to write about.

There's a whole class of commentators who claim to be liberals on issues they *don't* write about, and spend all their time taking positions against liberals on the issues they actually write about. (With all due respect, they tend to congregate at the magazine your piece appeared in.) Calling them liberals is counter-productive. They're Liberdems.

But again, I read more blogs than op-ed columns, so my perspective's probably skewed left. (Or -- which on this issue tends to be the same thing -- skewed young.) Still, my subjective impression was simply happiness for a just decision, tempered (certainly in my case) by fear that it will only last for six months.

Dear E.J.,

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your frequent words of sanity in an often hysterical surrounding. For a couple of years, I've stubled over your writings every now and then, and become increasingly impressed.

Myself, I've the fortune to come from a family where two Pietist aunts formed a partnership some time before World War One, and remained well integrated parts of the family until their deaths, including taking care of my grandmother's big brother when he was sent to town to go to school and university, and being the ones closest to my great grandfather when he became alone and aging. Of course only one of them were an aunt in the strict biological sense.

Not only to me as a child, but to our whole family, they were living (and loving) examples of how unthreathening the whole matter of same sex partnership actually is, when experienced in real life.

It's saddening to see the missteps and stumbles by queer activists in America, and by what ought to be their liberal supporters, when instead of the step-by-step approach successfully chosen by their European brethren they oscillate between Everything Everywhere Now and Don't Rock the Boat.