The right to register at Home Depot?

While I was out in the woods last week, I missed the remarkable Connecticut decision on gay marriage. And it is something. Not only did the state supreme court rule that gays have a right to marriage; it went further and said that civil unions are no substitute. The court ruled that both a law restricting marriage to heterosexuals and civil unions intended to provide all the benefits of marriage to same sex couples are unconstitutional because these laws violate the equal protection clause of the state constitution.

I think the Connecticut Supremes took the only coherent position possible, and the decision, couched as it was in comparisons to the civil rights and women’s movements, was inspiring, and nearly choked me up.

Interpreting our state constitutional provisions in accordance with firmly established equal protection principles leads inevitably to the conclusion that gay persons are entitled to marry the otherwise qualified same-sex partner of their choice,” Justice Palmer declared. “To decide otherwise would require us to apply one set of constitutional principles to gay persons and another to all others.

And then, reading down the New York Times article on the ruling, I was deflated by this, from one of the plaintiffs who’d sought the right to marry: “For 28 years we have been engaged. We can now register at Home Depot and prepare for marriage.”

Home Depot? This is what the great struggle is about?

I return to what I said in an earlier post: if the state grants marriage to any, it must grant it to all. But let’s get the state out of this bogus business altogether.