The court declared yesterday that at 10 am today it would at long last issue its ruling in the gay marriage case... a case that has been adjudicated for 4 long years. In the intervening time we have seen major accomplishments and major setbacks. We have twice passed marriage equality bills only to have our retarded pea-brained steroid face governor veto them to serve his own political agenda. We have seen the marriages of more than 3000 loving couples invalidated by the Supreme Court after that monumental day in San Francisco when Mayor Newsom heroically ordered the city clerk to register same sex marriages. We've seen countless assaults on our hard-earned domestic partnership rights by so-called Christians deflected by the courts as lawsuit after lawsuit was dismissed.

And now, more than 4 years after the Massachusetts Supreme Court became the first in the nation to uphold the principles of equality and due process (Goodridge decision, 2004), our court has finally seen fit to do the same.

I woke up at 9:45 anxiously awaiting the decision. I must have clicked reload on the news sites 100 times before giving up and laying back down in bed. It was a text message from a straight friend 10 minutes later that would deliver the good news. Proposition 22, the discriminatory statute passed in 2000 by an evil state Senator named Pete Knight, had been ruled unconstitutional.

But the court even went beyond simply striking down proposition 22. They stated explicitly that marriage would henceforth apply to both same and opposite-sex couples:

"...limiting marriage to a union 'between a man and a woman' was 'unconstitutional and must be stricken from the statute, and that the remaining statutory language must be understood as making the designation of marriage available both to opposite-sex and same-sex couples.'"

The words of the ruling speak for themselves:

"One of the core elements embodied in the state constitutional right to marry is the right of an individual and a couple to have their own official family relationship accorded respect and dignity equal to that accorded the family relationships of other couples," wrote Chief Justice Ronald M. George, joined by Justices Joyce L. Kennard, Kathryn Mickle Werdegar and Carlos Moreno.

"We therefore conclude that in view of the substance and significance of the fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship, the California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples," Chief Justice Ronald George wrote for the majority.

So this is it. In 30 days, gay marriage becomes legal in the state of California. Those of us who have been disenfranchised for so long can now realistically dream of entering into that eternal commitment with the one person who completes us.

Amazing.