Yes. At last. So fast, though too long coming.
Gay marriage is legal in the United States of America.
No, not gay marriage. It's just marriage now, for one and for all.
Astonishing, inevitable, right.
The will of the majority.
Justice.
One day, the Americans who follow us will look back and marvel at how it used to be. They'll tell stories, quaint and horrific and heartbreaking, of a time they can't quite imagine.
Can you believe gay people once had to hide the fact that they were gay? Couldn't openly love who they loved? Couldn't partake of a fundamental social institution?
Had to go to Iowa to get married? Iowa!
Can you believe there was a time when it was actually a debate whether two women together, or two men, could marry and raise a healthy, happy child?
Those future Americans may shake their heads, mystified, over the legend of the Indiana baker who wouldn't make a cake for a gay wedding.
One day it will all seem so long ago.
Today, though, we still see clearly everything that led to the radical shift that was legalized on a Friday morning in June of 2015.
We know the struggle, the confusion, the fear, the ignorance, the ugliness that led to this justice and jubilation.
Those future Americans will have trouble understanding that many of us had to learn what it meant for someone to be gay before we could even begin to imagine gay marriage.
If you were born before, say, 1975, you probably didn't grow up knowing gay people. Let me restate that. You didn't grow up knowing you knew gay people.
You grew up in a time when gay people were so in the closet that you didn't know the term "in the closet." Back before "gay" meant what it means today, when it was common and acceptable to demean gay people with the words "fag" and "queer" and "poof."
Those future Americans won't understand how a society could be so backward, or how it shifted its thinking one story at a time, one family at a time.
But we know.
The Supreme Court's decision won't end discrimination against gay people. It won't end the ugly rhetoric. It won't confer on gay people any greater chance at a happy marriage than any other person has.
The four justices opposed to the Supreme Court's ruling expressed a range of objection that will be echoed by many people, including, no doubt, some of those future Americans.
In a dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia sneered at the opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy.
"The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic," he wrote. "Of course the opinion's showy profundities are often profoundly incoherent."
Here is what is entirely coherent: Regardless of their sexual orientation, human beings who want to marry can now marry within the law.
Mary Schmich is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Contact her at [email protected]. You can follow her on twitter.com/maryschmich or contact her on facebook.com/maryschmich.