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But opponents felt just as passionately that America's moral foundation was crumbling completely. "The Lawrence decision is an error of biblical proportions," says Scott Lively of the Pro-Family Law Center in Sacramento, Calif. "[As a result] I predict the already enormously powerful gay political lobby in our state will consolidate its power further, and that every item on its agenda is going to get pushed through." The dissenters on the high court, led by Justice Antonin Scalia, charged that the majority grounded its decision not in the Constitution or the law but in the climate of the times. By inventing a brand-new constitutional right, they were ignoring the right of citizens in a democracy to pass laws that reflect their values without having courts overrule them. "It is clear from this that the Court has taken sides in the culture war," he wrote in an especially scalding dissent and warned of undermining laws against bestiality, bigamy, prostitution and incest. He further suggested that the court's attempt to cordon off this decision from others, especially gay marriage, was naive.
The decision was not, strictly speaking, a "liberal" one, another sign of a left-tilting court, which earlier in the week upheld the basic principle of affirmative action. Many conservatives of a libertarian streak abhor the idea of a government so vast and intrusive that it tells people what they can do in private.
Still, those who applauded last week's ruling for "confirming the dignity" of homosexuals were setting the bar rather low, given the barriers that remain. "It's one thing to say there's a fundamental right to sexual intimacy," observes Harvard law professor Richard Fallon, "and another to say there's a fundamental right to marriage." Vermont's civil-unions law is still a kind of "separate but equal" equivocation; the military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy instituted in 1993 has not stopped 9,000 service members from being discharged since then. And in most states, gays do not enjoy the same protection from employment discrimination that others do. Even as he welcomed "the homosexual emancipation," David Smith of the Human Rights Campaign lamented that "you can still be fired from your job for being gay."
Thus the activists' notion that gay marriage is an inevitable outcome of the ruling may be little more than wishful thinking. "When people say the decision means a lot," says Mary Coombs of the University of Miami law school, "what they're doing is not so much saying what it means but what they are going to argue it means. Part of what this will do is energize both the gay-rights movement and the Christian Fundamentalist right." --Reported by Perry Bacon Jr. and Mark Thompson/Washington, Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles and Andrea Sachs and Jyoti Thottam/New York