More perfect

The Supreme Court's dramatic expansion of the right to marry last week marked a sharp division in the justices' views of the Constitution. But the famous phrase from the preamble is pertinent: This watershed ruling makes the nation and many of its families more perfect unions.

Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion for the majority drew on an understanding of our founding document as an expansive and expanding promise of individual liberty and equality under the law. "The identification and protection of fundamental rights is an enduring part of the judicial duty to interpret the Constitution," Kennedy wrote. "History and tradition guide and discipline this inquiry but do not set its outer boundaries."

A modern understanding of sexual orientation as a trait rather than a choice precludes government discrimination on that basis just as it does on racial grounds. Denying interracial couples the right to marry became unthinkable and unconstitutional decades ago. Denying gay and lesbian couples the right to marry has become unacceptable and finally unconstitutional today.

Much of the opposition to gay marriage concerns the sacrosanct freedom of religion, and the ruling will raise more questions and disputes in which the religious liberty of individuals and houses of worship must be protected. But the fact is that marriage is not a purely or even mostly religious institution in this country. Governments predicate a host of benefits and rights on marital relationships, and no American should be excluded from them based on his or her fundamental identity.

One hundred fifty years after the Civil War and 50 years after the civil rights era, the court applied the Reconstruction-era 14th Amendment to expand the nation's promise of freedom once again - even as banners of resistance to the first great expansion were being belatedly lowered. The result should make us prouder still of the flag that flies over all our unions.