I just checked. The sky hasn't fallen yet even though California is issuing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples.

They sign in as Party A and Party B rather than bride and groom -- just in case you were wondering.

The first couple to tie the knot were, appropriately enough, a San Fransisco couple, Del Martin, and Phyllis Lyon, Del is 87, Phyllis is 84. They've been together 55 years.

Talk about long engagements...

At least they were married in time to have the legal right to make funeral arrangements for each other. The legal right to be there when the other dies.

Fundamentally, that's what this is all about -- legal rights enforced by a contract that they have been allowed to enter into.

A contract -- not a sacrament. Theirs is a union sanctioned by the state, not necessarily a church. It is an act of man, not of God.

Which is how it should be. Civil law is gender blind. The ability to fulfill the civil contractual obligations, rights and responsibilities imposed by the legalities of marriage is no more a matter of genitalia than it is skin color, caste, class or ethnic background -- though those factors too have been upheld as legal impediments to matrimony. This is an issue of equality before the law -- civil law -- not canon law, not sharia, not the laws of Moses nor Levitical injunctions.

And as such, it is good law.

Not God's law -- just good.