Society derives myriad benefits when couples form committed, enduring relationships.
Such unions help keep communities stable. They form the most successful environment in which to raise children. They are a main bulwark against poverty.
Accordingly, civil law in America accords multiple benefits, legal and economic, to committed couples.
With one proviso. In most states, their union has to be between a man and a woman. If not, all bets are off, no matter how much commitment the couple shows.
Tuesday, the Supreme Court of the commonwealth of Massachusetts ruled, by a one-vote margin, that this distinction is illogical, in violation of the state constitution, and wrong.
The court was right.
In a nation whose Constitution provides for separation of church and state, and equal protection under law, gay and lesbian couples should not be denied the civil, legal and economic benefits that government makes available to heterosexual couples.
You may have noted that the paragraphs above avoid one word: marriage. Because inside that word - with its heavy freight of history, emotion, theology and confusion - lurk pain and contention.
On the issue of same-sex marriage, America is divided into three parts. One part, 41 percent in a recent poll, supports it. Another group recoils, sincerely believing homosexuality to be morally wrong, an abomination in God's eyes.
The third group consists of people who support some rights for gays, but draw a boundary at the word "marriage." They don't want gays to be mocked, brutalized, discriminated against on the job. But, to them, marriage is a sacred institution, a Biblically ordained union of a man and a woman for the purposes of raising a family. They see, perhaps grudgingly, the logic of offering gay couples some legal protections - but only under a rubric such as "civil union" or "domestic partners," not marriage.
To many gays - not all, but many - such thinking relegates them to second-class citizenship. They yearn for their unions to receive the full endorsement of society, an endorsement symbolized by only one word: marriage.
