When the personal is political

Am touched by this piece about the President's announcement yesterday. It's true that there are political arguments, and then there's the immensely personal moment of recognition, of participation in civic rituals as old as time.

There's something very deep about having your government declare you a stranger to its laws, defining your love as outside all respectable recognition. For my president to stand up and say that I should belong fully to my nation, that my wife and I should be considered as fully married as my brother and his wife—well, it reopens and washes out some very deeply incised sense of exclusion, a scar inflicted when, at age 15, I first panicked at the realization that I might be queer.

I still remember a friend's adapting the Jewish custom of spilling some wine at a wedding to the statement that their joy could never be complete as long as so many of their friends could never share the same moments in their own lives. Not soon in Pennsyltucky, maybe, but the stir is clearly rising...