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As Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall stated in the majority opinion, “As it did in Loving…history must yield to a more fully developed understanding of the invidious quality of the discrimination…The marriage ban works a deep and scarring hardship on a very real segment of the community for no rational reason . . . Private biases may be outside the reach of the law, but the law cannot, directly or indirectly, give them effect.”

We’re getting there.

On September 15 of this year, The New York Times reported, “In a sign that the legalization of same-sex marriage has changed the political landscape in Massachusetts, the legislature soundly defeated a proposed constitutional amendment on Wednesday to ban gay marriage and create civil unions…”

People on the right are now realizing they had been wrong. According to the Times, “Senator Brian P. Lees, a Republican who is the minority leader and who co-sponsored the amendment, which received preliminary approval from the legislature in March 2004 in a 105-to-92 vote, said he voted against it Wednesday.” Lees went on to say, "Today, gay marriage is the law of the land.” Voting for the amendment, he said, would mean, "taking action against our friends and neighbors who today are currently enjoying the benefits of marriage."

Senator James E. Timilty, a Democrat who supported the amendment last year, also reconsidered. “When I looked in the eyes of the children living with these couples,” Mr. Timilty said, “I decided that I don't feel at this time that same-sex marriage has hurt the commonwealth in any way. In fact I would say that in my view it has had a good effect for the children in these families.”

If you take only one thing from this essay, I hope it will be the most important lesson I’ve learned while writing it: No matter how much we Americans claim to embrace the ideals of “equality” and “freedom and justice for all,” some of us are scared to death of everyone running around “free.”

Some folks are especially fearful of the people least like them on the loose and not subject to their personal beliefs or control. And as a result of that fear—regardless of whether it is real or imagined—they trust not in the good that men do, but in the evil that men are capable of. Pessimism poisons their reason, and with reason dead, there’s a huge void—a void has to be filled with something, otherwise a bunch of unreasonable people will be running around saying unreasonable things.

Enter: Faith.

With faith on their side, the unreasonable can argue that they are driven by a force more powerful than reason: The Word of God. As a result, they say preposterous things, like “God hates fags,” and make ridiculous assertions, like God placed black men in Africa so they’d never meet white women in Alabama — and get away with them.

As absurd as their statements are, it’s difficult to argue against those armed with the Word of God and flanked by the Holy Trinity, because anyone who tries is deemed God-less and immoral. And any attempt to reason why we’re to believe that God frowns on gay people and loves Christian people more than others is dismissed with a quote from scripture. Like a mother who dismisses her questioning child with the words, “Because I said so,” reasonable people are dismissed with, “Because it is written.”

Such insolence is not only baffling in modern times, it’s also upsetting.

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