On Friday, a Federal Judge declared Virginia’s ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional. This decision has been appealed, of course, and the state is allowing the legal process to play out before issuing marriage licenses to couples, but really, it’s all but over. Sooner, rather than later, Virginia can drop the “but only if you’re straight” asterisk from the Virginia is For Lovers tourism brochures.

You know, I don’t really care how you feel personally about two people of the same gender being married to one another. I don’t care whether your church supports it or not. I don’t really care about your feelings about “tradition”. However, I do care when a government tries to use those sorts of arguments to deny equal protection under the law. No one’s asking you to marry anyone you don’t want to. However, they are keeping numerous friends of mine from marrying who they want to, and I’m glad that the state in which I reside will (hopefully very soon) allow those friends to enjoy the same rights that I do.

Many of the objections to same-sex marriage in Virginia stem from “tradition”, which, if you’ve spent any time here at all, a big deal in the Commonwealth. They made the same sort of arguments against interracial marriage a few decades ago, and it took the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision on Loving v. Virginia to overturn that one. That’s why I’m glad Judge Wright Allen directly called out Loving in the decision (this is the whole 41 page document – I encourage you to read it), leading off with an extensive exerpt from Mildred Loving.

I also feel that given Virginia’s history with this sort of thing, this decision, and what’s to follow in the Commonwealth, is a big victory for those supporting legal same-sex marriage in the United States. Virginia is going to be a turning point, I think; a big victory in a state that is mired in difficult history and tradition, but whose population has trended toward more inclusive ways of thinking, socially and politically, in recent decades. It shows that the balance has really and truly tipped, and that the law will finally start lining up with the will of the people – a majority of Virginians support marriage equity (which was not the case in ’06 when the original state constitutional amendment was passed).

Tradition may indeed be important; however, however, not all traditions are worth holding onto.

I’m personally rather a fan of one particular statement from the decision:

Gay and lesbian individuals share the same capacity as heterosexual individuals to form, preserve, and celebrate loving, intimate, and lasting relationships. Such relationships are created through the exercise of sacred, personal choices—choices, like the choices made by every citizen, that must be free from unwarranted government interference.

It doesn’t get much clearer than that, does it? It’s a shame that it takes a federal court case to get some people to realize it.