Tradition is a powerful adhesive, as anyone who trifles with one, large or small, can attest. You’re up against the sticktoitiveness of human nature, the force that keeps us in our orbits, the one that makes the world go round.

Oh wait.

That’s a different one. That’s the one hurtling gay and lesbian couples toward California courthouses this week, to obtain wedding licenses. Last month, the California Supreme Court ruled, in effect, that love trumps tradition.

Tradition knits us together. But love goes right to the heart of individual liberty, the court wrote. For that reason, it said, “We cannot find that retention of the traditional definition of marriage constitutes a compelling [the court's italics] state interest.”

The very first wedding Monday illuminated the point. Together for more than 50 years, Del Martin, 87, and Phyllis Lyon, 84, are starry-eyed newlyweds today, as well as teary-eyed oldyweds.

Critics of same-sex marriage argue that all of this tramples the institution of marriage. But actual couples like Martin and Lyon seem only to bolster it and burnish the tradition.

In Oregon, though, some are sitting back and watching all of this with a certain amount of detachment, wondering how it really affects us. California may be the land of cosmic vibrations, and Oregon has come under its spell a time or two. But even if our minds are open, our Constitution contains a formidable barrier.

Sure, gay and lesbian couples from Oregon will go down to California to get married. But their marriages won’t be recognized here. In 2004, Oregonians approved Measure 36, a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

In 2007, the Oregon Legislature softened the sting by approving domestic partnerships. This week, an effort fizzled that would have challenged those partnerships on the ballot next November. It would be a mistake to read too much into its collapse perhaps, but there is no question public opinion is changing — in the direction of fairness and quiet acceptance.

A wedding is an Earth-shaking day for the two people involved, their kin and perhaps a few excitable wedding guests. But for everybody else, civilization goes on, and the couple just becomes more quietly, deeply a part of it.

These two forces in collision in the debate over same-sex marriage, love and tradition, are not unchanging, of course. Ultimately, as some of the lovers in California will discover to their sorrow, marriage can dissolve.

And tradition can evolve.

Thus, for all those imagining Measure 36 has silenced discussion in Oregon, and that nothing California does will reopen it, we’d just caution: Not so fast. The speed of enlightenment is slow. But reverberations from momentous change never stop at a state border.

The universe is always in motion.

Source: The Oregonian

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