That is why we have decided to take an unprecedented step here at Sexiest Men World Headquarters. We have in the past fought epic, bloody internal battles over men like Zach Galifianakis, Al Franken and Louis C.K. But we have never, in our sexy, sexy history, revoked a man’s title. Until now.

We understand that the Roman Catholic boxer has to be true to his beliefs, and we would never insist that falling in lock step with Salon’s own socialist, American fabric-destroying agenda is the only criterion for making the list. It’s just that we suddenly don’t feel like going a few sweaty rounds with a dude who thinks civil rights “adulterate the altar of matrimony.”

So instead we’re passing on the crown to one of last year’s runner-ups. Like Pacquiao — and also like our beloved first Sexiest Man, Carell’s former “Daily Show” colleague Stephen Colbert – he’s a happily married, self-described “born and bred” Catholic. But this one says, “I stay clear of declaring my political choices,” insisting humbly, “I feel like my voice is no more valuable, no less valuable than anyone else’s.”

What really makes us go weak in the knees is how he turned a bumbling, inept bag-of-wind character and made us care when he said goodbye to “The Office.” And, last summer, he took a broken, pathetic, recently divorced dad and made him so tenderly romantic (and so darn good-looking in a tailored suit) he nearly made us forget Ryan Gosling in “Crazy, Stupid Love.” We’ve had a thing for him since before he became a 40-year-old virgin. We’d choose him as our friend for the end of the world. How could we ever have been so blinded by that pugilistic piece of beefcake? That’s why today, we’re asking newest Salon Sexy Man Steve Carell, will you gay marry us?

Today’s ceremony is freighted with extra excitement. Only three days ago, President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage. The subject is much discussed here at the wedding. Of course, as an invitee mentions, Obama’s endorsement alters not a jot of law, not a tittle of policy. Yet a cultural barrier has been crossed, a taboo forever retired. The highest officer in the land and, by extension, his political party and half the country have embraced today’s ceremony as their own. We are a sideshow, an outlier, no longer.

The think tank’s auditorium is transformed by draperies, flowers, gentle lighting, rows of plush chairs. Lovely. It occurs to me, as I reflect on the week’s events, that only one decoration is missing. An American flag would be very much in order.

Chamber musicians play as I take a seat. A few rows ahead of me sits a restless boy, perhaps 8 or 9 years old. My mind pitches back to an earlier time, more than four decades ago, and another boy, about the same age. He is sitting on the piano bench in his house in suburban Phoenix. I remember exactly the spot, exactly the moment, though I could not tell you the date exactly. Suddenly, out of the blue, the boy realizes that he will never be married. He does not know why marriage and family are out of his reach. He will in fact not understand why for almost 20 years, when he comes to understand he is homosexual. But children understand marriage long before they understand sex, and this boy knows, intuitively, that he is different in some way that rules out the kind of life that other people take for granted. He will always be an outsider to family life.

I look again at the boy in front of me and try to imagine what it is like to be him. He will never experience the desolate realization that I had long ago in Phoenix. He will never even be able to comprehend it. The wedding he now witnesses seems ordinary to him. For the whole span of his life, whether he is straight or gay, there will be a destination for his love within the folds of marriage. I find I envy him.

The grooms are walking down the aisle, Joe accompanied by his father, Paul by his mother. In front, two candles are lit for the parents who are not here. I wonder how Joe’s father feels, giving away his son to a man in a legally recognized ceremony. I think back on a conversation with my own father. This is in 1995, not so very long ago, but an eon as it seems today. He is urging me not to write about gay marriage, a subject I will soon take up for the Economist and the New Republic. He knows and accepts that I am gay; that is not the problem. It is my career he is worried about. The idea of a man marrying a man or a woman marrying a woman, he tells me, is such an outlandish idea that if I associate myself with it I will no longer be taken seriously as a writer. People will think I’m a nut. At the time, his prediction seemed plausible.

My gaze alights on one of the absent parents’ candles. My father lived to know and love Michael, who became like another son to him. He lived to see same-sex marriage legalized in Massachusetts and then in several other states. Alas, he died only a few months before Michael and I could legally marry in Washington, D.C. Had he been at our wedding, he would have blessed us, happy to see his prediction proved so blessedly wrong.

The officiant begins the ceremony and the grooms join hands. There are readings from Robert Frost and Plato’s Symposium. Later, Joe will admit to worrying that the readings might seem hackneyed. But the words have their intended effect as my eyes well up. They have an unintended effect, also, as I realize the improbability of what I am witnessing: a thoroughly conventional same-sex wedding.

Earlier that very day, as it happens, I had received an email that was like a bad LSD flashback. Objecting to a recent pro-gay-marriage article of mine, the writer identified himself as a member of the Stonewall generation. “I myself  was active in the Gay Liberation Movement way back in the beginning in the early ’70s and am now horrified by the whole cloying Gay Marriage issue,” he wrote. “It seems deranged that we should now want to ape straights; surely we should continue to do what we’ve always done best: standing aside from, and viewing sardonically, the straight world.”

When I began advocating gay marriage in the mid-1990s, and then well into the new century, I used to hear this kind of objection all the time. A gay couple first attempted to marry in 1970, just a few months after the famous riots outside the Stonewall Bar in New York City; but marriage was not then taken up by the gay-rights movement. Matrimony seemed not only out of reach but out of touch with the liberationist, libertine ethos of the time. We were supposed to be breaking the fetters of conventionality, reinventing sexuality and ourselves.

But then came the plague, and the discovery, too often, that we had only each other for family, yet we had none of the tools to care for one another that families need. We could not enter the hospital room; sometimes, we could not even enter the country. We would use our bodies to warm our shuddering “lover” (such was the term in those days — even worse than “partner”). We would hand-feed him as he wasted. Then, when he passed, we would be sent packing by the relatives who had never known or cared we existed.

Never again, we said. That was when we understood that real liberation lies in family’s embrace, not its rejection. Triple-drug HIV therapy and the gay-marriage movement arrived almost simultaneously. No coincidence, that.

Conservatives worry that gay participation will change marriage for the worse. Gay-liberationists (the few that remain) worry it will change gays for the worse. I wish they could all be here, as the grooms take their vows, to see how marriage has changed gays for the better. The ancient words wash over me. To have and to hold … for better for worse … until death do us part. These are words with the power not only to turn unrelated individuals into next of kin, to bond their extended families, to shelter their children, and to build communities; they are words that have reformed, and indeed re-formed, an entire culture.

As I sit here, I cannot help feeling vindicated by the rage of that aging gay objector. He has lost. It is over. Gays have not claimed marriage; it has claimed us.

The couple, now husbands, are returning down the aisle amid a commotion of hugs and smiles. Now there will be a cocktail reception, then a dinner, then a honeymoon — in Disney World, no less. It occurs to me that I have never seen so traditional and comfortingly familiar an occasion. It occurs to me that to be alive just now, seeing what I am seeing, is a miracle. The air around us is thick with the spirits of long-passed homosexual men and women, so many of them tormented and persecuted, who could never have dreamt of this future.

As I pass a multi-tiered wedding cake, I suddenly wish I could rectify a blunder. A couple of days earlier, in a radio interview, an interviewer asked me how I felt, as a gay man, about Obama’s announcement. I had been expecting to talk about politics and polls, not myself. Caught off guard, I rambled about being pleased and surprised and whatnot. Only now do I realize that the right answer was a single word. “Grateful,” I should have said. “I feel grateful.”

I kick myself. Why does one always think of the right answer when it’s too late? But the reproach barely registers before I am lost in the happy glow of sunshine and champagne.

I don’t mean to downplay the importance of having the president support marriage equality. It’s a decisive blow in the culture war. For years, the National Organization for Marriage, which opposes same-sex marriage, has been able to deflect criticism by pointing out that Obama shared its views.

“Four years ago in California, Prop. 8 supporters had a flyer that they passed out saying Obama opposed same-sex marriage,” says John Lewis, legal director for Equality USA, a gay-rights group. “They used his equivocation quite effectively against us. They can’t do that anymore.”

But there are key ways in which Obama can pay this forward. A few weeks ago, the president angered many in the gay-rights community by refusing to sign an executive order banning government contractors from discriminating against gay people. In most of the country, your employer can still fire you because of your sexual orientation. The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) continues to prevent the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages performed in the states, which among other things means same-sex partners who aren’t U.S. citizens face deportation. The president’s announcement yesterday, while a step forward, is hardly the end of the road.

Most immediately, say gay-rights advocates, the president should use his platform to oppose proposed bans on same-sex marriage in Minnesota, Maryland and Washington state, as well as support a ballot initiative in Maine that would grant same-sex couples marriage rights (last year, the state’s gay-marriage law was overridden by a referendum).

“I hope he speaks out on the ballot measures,” says Marc Solomon, national campaign director for Freedom to Marry. “We want the president to speak out forcefully on each of [these pieces of legislation], and I think he will.”

The president can also champion other important pieces of legislation, among them the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would make discrimination against gay people in employment and housing illegal, and the DOMA repeal currently struggling in the House of Representatives.

“The repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ did not affirmatively put into law protections against discrimination,” Lewis says.

In the same way Obama could sign an executive order preventing government contractors from discriminating against gay people, he could amend federal policy to protect gay and lesbian service members from discrimination.

Perhaps the most significant way the Obama administration can make things better for gay people is to stop enforcing DOMA. It has plenty of cover to do so. Last year, the Department of Justice said it would no longer defend the law against the numerous challenges it faced in court, which has already been ruled as unconstitutional by two separate federal courts. It can take a similar position when it comes to putting it in place. Earlier this year, and after a lot of legal wrangling, the administration finally allowed Karen Golinsky, a federal lawyer, to add her wife to her Blue Cross/Blue Shield health plan. But the decision was a one-off, and doesn’t allow other federal employees the same benefits. While the Obama administration would need legislative approval for other things — like recognizing same-sex couples for tax purposes — extending health benefits to all federal workers is one concrete way it can show its support for gay people.

This election, social issues will take a backseat to concerns over the economy, which might be a good thing for gay-rights supporters. It allows the president to make to make inroads on gay rights without the maelstrom of controversy that might erupt were conservatives not busy trying to put us back on the gold standard or firing federal workers. In other words, Obama has plenty of room left to evolve.

That does not mean that all of the North Carolinians, for example, who voted Tuesday for an amendment outlawing same-sex marriages are homophobes. Many of them simply believe that marriage should be restricted to heterosexual couples because that’s the way marriage has traditionally been defined, and they believe that defending tradition as important. But their personal views have become irrelevant. The fact is that same-sex marriage has become a national civil rights issue, and as such, it has enormous symbolic importance. To simply stand on the sidelines and not take a position on it, as Obama tried to do until Wednesday, is to tacitly accept that gay people are second-class citizens. This narrow, legalistic approach to gay marriage only encourages bigotry and stands in the way of needed progress. It was necessary for Obama to take a risk – and take a stand.

I did not think he would do it. But he did.

Obama dislikes conflict, and he dislikes risk even more. Some of that is both understandable and justifiable. Politics is the art of the possible. You have to get elected to get anything done. And to get elected, or reelected, you have to make compromises. That is why Obama hid behind the transparently false excuse that his views on same-sex marriage were “evolving.” He wanted to avoid a hot-button issue that could potentially cost him the election.

To be sure, that was a questionable political tactic. Advocates argued that Obama faced little political risk in endorsing same-sex marriage because the social conservatives for whom this issue is crucial were not going to vote for him anyway. Moreover, they argued that the number of swing and independent voters the president would lose would be more than made up for increased turnout among his supporters.

Those arguments may be correct – but they may not be. We just don’t know. North Carolina is a swing state. It just voted to ban same-sex marriage. It is indeed possible that Obama will lose the election because he took the opposite position.

It is no secret that Obama has sorely disappointed his most ardent supporters. Throughout his first term, he has consistently refused to do anything truly politically risky. He spoke of fundamentally changing the rules and culture of Wall Street – then stood by as the same looters who destroyed the economy gamed the system. He talked up a progressive reform of healthcare – and ended up with a watered-down version of a Republican idea. He announced a bold stimulus package – then made it too small to be fully effective. He gave the best speech about the Israeli-Palestinian crisis ever given by an American president – then caved in to the Israel lobby. And so on.

But there are times when pragmatism must take a back seat to principle. And to his undying credit, Obama decided that this was one of them. He decided that it was more important for him, the leader of the United States, to stand up and defend the rights of an abused minority group, than to accept the unacceptable status quo.

We don’t know why he decided to take the risk. A cynic – or perhaps a realist – might simply say that he decided there was no risk, that most Americans would stand with him on this issue. But I prefer to think of his decision as being at least in part shaped by the two most crucial, and inseparable, parts of his identity: his blackness, and his profoundly inclusive ideals. As president, Obama has never played the race card, never asserted his racial identity in any significant way. This reticence is both politically astute and deeply grounded in Obama’s own sense of what race means – and does not mean. For Obama, race matters – but paradoxically, it matters precisely because it offers all of us, black or white or brown or yellow or red, an opportunity to transcend it. In that regard, Obama is a true child of the civil rights movement. The men and women who struggled and died at Selma and Birmingham and Little Rock and Neshoba County are his heroes, and he was not going to betray their memory. That’s bedrock for him.

What happened yesterday is that Barack Obama, as flawed and brave and human as the rest of us, just struck his own bedrock. And the sound of that pick hitting stone brought tears to my eyes.

He did not have to do it. History is filled with crucial decisions that did not have to be taken. Gandhi could have decided the Salt March was too divisive. John Fitzgerald Kennedy could have decided that extending the hand of friendship to the USSR at the height of the Cold War, in his famous American University speech, was too politically risky. Lyndon Baines Johnson could have decided the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not worth spending so much political capital on. Martin Luther King could have decided that white America was not ready for a campaign of civil disobedience. The hundreds of thousands of Arab men and women who risked their lives to demand justice, opportunity and freedom could have turned back when the club-wielding thugs appeared. The Occupy protesters who came out in the rain to demand that America live up to its ideals could have stayed home.

But they did not. Those people – leaders and ordinary citizens alike — took the risk. They did the right thing. And history will remember them, and honor them, when the pragmatists and calculators have long been forgotten.

The night before he was shot, Martin Luther King Jr. seemed to prophesy his own death. “But it doesn’t really matter with me now,” he said. “Because I’ve been to the mountaintop … And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Obama could lose the presidency because he stood up for the rights of gay Americans. But if he does, for the rest of his life he can look back and know that when it counted most, he did the right thing. That is something no one can ever take away from him. Or from the American people.

As the Rev. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance pointed out, “it is the Constitution, not his religion that should form the basis of his position.” Yet while Obama certainly shouldn’t say that his religious views dictate policy or legislation, his discussion of how his faith informed his own thinking may signal a political turning point. By rejecting the idea that “true” Christianity demands fealty to “one man and one woman,” Obama appeared less invested in pandering to religious conservatives like Rick Warren, Jim Wallis or Joel Hunter, Obama’s spiritual advisor, who say they’re concerned about issues beyond the culture war but nonetheless remain opposed to marriage equality.

Somehow, though, Obama will have to square this newfound position with his allegiance to anti-equality religious figures. The director of the Democratic National Committee’s faith outreach, the Rev. Derrick Harkins, for example, is opposed to same-sex marriage. While he’s not “a bomb-thrower in terms of saying things that will get a rise out of a crowd,” he told me last year, he is still opposed to same-sex marriage, calling it a “vexing” theological issue. Now the president is for it, but the director of the party’s faith outreach is not.

Republicans, though, are gloating, because they think Obama’s change of heart will energize voters to pull the lever for the flip-flopping Mitt Romney. Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, whose chief talking point following the 2010 midterms was that evangelical turnout decides elections, threatened that Obama’s turnabout “is certain to fuel a record turnout of voters of faith to the polls this November.” Romney, said Family Research Council president Tony Perkins in a statement, “may have been handed the key to social conservative support by President Obama.” And Mike Huckabee, whose name was floated earlier in the day by National Review as a possible Romney running mate to energize the social conservative base, maintained that marriage “is going to be a defining issue this election.”

There are already signs that conservatives are going to taunt Obama with predictions of losing black voters. In his statement, Perkins took pains to point out that majority-black counties in North Carolina voted in favor of Amendment 1, the constitutional amendment that will ban not just same-sex marriage, but civil unions and domestic partnerships as well. (Obama opposed the amendment, although his decision not to campaign in North Carolina in the days before the vote was seen as skittishness over alienating voters in a traditionally Republican state that gave him its electoral votes in 2008.)

Perhaps any black and Latino voters who might be moved to vote against Obama over this single issue should take a look at NOM’s own strategy document, in which the organization admits it aims to “drive a wedge between gays and blacks — two key Democratic constituencies.” Targeting Latinos, NOM wants to “interrupt this process of assimilation by making support for marriage a key badge of Latino identity — a symbol of resistance to inappropriate assimilation.” And it wants to portray Obama as a “social radical” unfit for the presidency.

Picking up on that last theme, Rick Santorum accused Obama of “radical social engineering” and blamed “cultural elites” for undermining “the institution that gives the best opportunity for healthy, happy children and a just and prosperous society.”

But public opinion is not on NOM’s side, except for the base it already attracts. While a vast majority (77-21 percent) of white evangelicals remain steadfastly opposed to marriage equality and a smaller segment of minority Christians (50-43 percent) oppose it, other groups — Catholics, mainline Protestants, Jews and the unaffiliated — support it, according to recent data from the Public Religion Research Institute. And a recent polling analysis by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that “since 2008, the proportion of African Americans favoring gay marriage has increased from 26 percent to 39 percent, while opposition has fallen from 63 percent to 49 percent.” Another PRRI analysis found that “younger black Millennials (age 18-24) and younger black Protestant Millennials demonstrate more support for same-sex marriage than black Americans overall.” The younger someone is, the more likely he or she is to support same-sex marriage, although young white evangelicals remain the most resistant.

Before Obama’s announcement, the Romney campaign had been reaching out to the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, an outspoken opponent of marriage equality and president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, which claims to represent 16 million Latino evangelicals. There’s a conventional wisdom that these voters matter a lot in swing states like Florida, or Colorado. But polling data on the religious breakdown of Latinos is hard to come by; a spokesperson for the Pew Hispanic Center told me the organization “does not have any data on the religious composition of Hispanics by state.” Rodriguez’s actual sway over or representation of voters has never been measured.

To be sure, the religious right is going to make as much hay over this as it can, through fundraising, campaigning, moralizing and browbeating. But in the end, it will probably turn out to be a definitive case of preaching to the choir.