California, which at one time seemed destined to be the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, meanwhile awaits a decision from its Supreme Court on the validity of Proposition 8. The controversial ballot initiative, passed by a narrow margin in November, outlawed same-sex marriage, which had just been legalized via a California Supreme Court decision the previous May.

In fact, in the space of five days this month, the number of states where gays and lesbians can legally wed doubled, when Vermont and Iowa joined trendsetters Massachusetts and Connecticut. Vermont’s approval of same-sex marriage on April 7 was not surprising. After all, Vermont pioneered civil unions in the U.S. in 2000.

Vermonters have had nine years to observe that allowing gays and lesbians to enter into legally binding partnerships did not herald the end of the world. Fire and brimstone didn’t rain down on the land, plagues didn’t smite their iconic maple trees and most important of all, children in these nontraditional families were just as well-adjusted as their peers with straight parents.

The paths to legalizing same-sex marriage are quite different in Iowa, Vermont and California. Iowa, like Massachusetts in 2004 and Connecticut in 2008, relied on Supreme Court decisions to change the law. Vermont’s law, on the other hand, was voted in by the state Senate and House of Representatives, promptly vetoed by Gov. Jim Douglas, and then overridden by the Vermont Legislature. At first glance, the Iowa Supreme Court’s vote may appear surprising, especially to the-world-revolves-around-me Californians, but Iowa has an impressive history of pioneering civil rights legislation.

Iowa abolished slavery in 1839, 26 years before the passage of the 13th amendment in 1865. Iowa disallowed separate but equal racial segregation in schools in 1868, 85 years before the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of education outlawed it nationally. And in 1873, Iowa again protected racial minorities, extending anti-discrimination to public accommodations, 91 years before the U.S. Supreme Court. Iowa was also the first state to allow women to practice law. “I think Iowa’s tradition played a big role in the victory,” said Camilla Taylor, lead counsel for Lambda Legal, which represented the couples seeking to marry in Iowa.

It’s a good thing that laws aren’t always left to the people. In Iowa, if the amendment had been put to a popular vote, as it was in California, it probably would not have passed. According to a University of Iowa Hawkeye telephone poll just before the Iowa Supreme Court vote, 26.2 percent of respondents said they supported gay marriage, and 27.9 percent opposed marriage but supported civil unions, while 36.7 percent opposed both. However, the younger voters were more accepting. Talk about a generational divide — among voters under 30, 60 percent supported gay marriage, and 75 percent supported formal recognition of gay relationships.

California’s position on marriage equality has lobbed back and forth. It has been defined through popular vote (2000′s Proposition 22, which defined marriage as a contract between a man and a woman), a maverick decision (San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom’s short-lived permission in 2004 for gays and lesbians to marry) and a Supreme Court decision annulling those marriages. And that was just the beginning; in 2008, a Supreme Court decision reversed Proposition 22 and allowed same-sex marriages again. Then came another popular vote — Proposition 8, which reversed the Supreme Court ruling and left about 18,000 couples who wed between May and November of last year to wonder if their marriages are valid.

Despite California’s reputation as freethinking and liberal — it was the first state to recognize domestic partnerships in 1999 — it has its own conservative heartland, the Central Valley, and Republican enclaves like Orange County that tarnish that reputation. Public opinion is divided — some polls show the majority opposing same-sex marriage, while others show the opposite. But polls in Iowa, California and Vermont show that among the younger voters, the majority favor marriage equality. All three states have this in common: They have a history of being on the forefront of civil liberties legislation.

California was the first state to dismantle anti-miscegenation laws in 1948 with Perez v. Sharp, 19 years before the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed it in Loving v. Virginia — a very unpopular ruling at the time. The first Gallup poll on the subject, ten years after California’s landmark decision, revealed an astonishing 94 percent of Americans still opposed interracial marriage. Even ten years later, after the federal decision, 72 percent opposed it, according to Marriage Equality USA. Vermont never enacted anti-miscegenation laws, and was the first to abolish slavery.

The decision in Loving v. Virginia relied on the concept of equal protection found in the U.S. Constitution and that of all 50 states. It calls marriage one of the “basic civil rights of man,” and states that “to deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law.”

Supporters of same-sex marriage believe it is a civil rights issue, and hope that the courts will enforce existing laws. “It’s not that we need a new constitution,” said Evan Wolfson, executive director of Freedom to Marry. “We just need a renewed commitment. Properly enforced, the existing equal protection would require equality.” So what worked in Iowa and Vermont? Activists and legislators made the issue personal, taking a cue from Harvey Milk, who advocated that people tell their stories.

One Iowa, an organization formed in 2006, just after Lambda Legal filed Varnum v. Brien, began holding forums across the state, in big cities and small towns, bringing together same-sex couples, legal scholars and people of faith to talk about the importance of marriage equality. Justin Uebelhor, communications director for One Iowa, said the group recognized the need to build support for marriage equality.

“We needed those folks to contact their elected officials,” he said, which they did, both before and after the vote. Lambda attorneys used a new strategy when they filed the case in Iowa: They included children of the couples as plaintiffs. They also called psychologists. “We took a lot of care in making as complete a record as possible of the social science of gay and lesbian parenting,” Taylor said. In light of the New York court’s 2006 decision against same-sex marriage that relied in part on “intuition” that children would be better off with a mother and a father (how many families lack one of those?), Lambda included statements from child development and other experts to make the case that children of gay and lesbian parents are just as well-adjusted as children of heterosexual parents.

This strategy to make things personal appears to be helping. The National Organization for Marriage launched a $1.5 million advertising campaign that included broadcasting the fear-mongering “The Gathering Storm,” which claims that same-sex marriage will infringe the rights of straight people. The video, denounced by gay rights activists, is intended to encourage Iowans to pass a law to dismantle the ruling.

When the embarrassing audition tapes showed up on YouTube, revealing that the people talking about their fear of the darkness were actors, NOM requested the video’s removal. To undo the Supreme Court’s ruling, Iowans would have to amend their constitution. So far, Iowans have not persuaded legislators to introduce a bill to negate same-sex marriage in the state. In order to change the state constitution, the Legislature must vote on the issue in two separate years. It appears unlikely that the current Legislature, which is about to end its 2008-2009 session, will vote on it, meaning that it could be changed by 2012 at the earliest.

Vermont activists, including an organization called Vermont Freedom to Marry, took a similar approach. “We had frank discussions with people: I am gay and I am your neighbor and I am your farmer and I want the same rights that you have,” said Jason Lorber, an openly gay state representative from Burlington. “In California, I don’t think those discussions took place.” California has a population of 38 million. Vermont, at 600,000, is smaller than San Francisco.

Now, attention is turning back to California, where the state Supreme Court is expected to make a ruling by early June on whether Proposition 8 is valid. The California constitution can be changed in two ways: through amendments and revisions. The amendment process is designed for ordinary changes, and can be done through the Legislature or through a signature collection that leads to a vote of the people. “California has an unusually low threshold for changing the constitution,” Wolfson said.

The California Supreme Court is currently deciding whether Proposition 8 was simply an amendment or a revision that should have gone through a more rigorous process. “It’s hard to imagine anyone considering the idea of equal protection a mere amendment,” Wolfson says. “Writing out the rights of a minority is a revision.” And if it was a revision, it’s invalid, Lambda’s Taylor said. “We firmly believe it is a revision — it redraws equal protection to permit the exclusion of some people from the guarantee of equality based on a simple majority vote.” Yet in a hearing March 6, it appeared that some Supreme Court justices were hesitant to go against the will of the people. Their decision is expected by early June.

Adding to the momentum, this Thursday, New York’s Gov. David Paterson plans to introduce legislation to legalize same-sex marriages in the state.  “We’ve got New Hampshire coming up for vote, New York and New Jersey. We’ve got momentum on our side, and we’ve got time on our side,” Lorber said. “When you talk to youth, they just don’t even get what the controversy is all about.”

Iowa’s choices in recent presidential caucuses have made it a bellwether of sorts in presidential races — hence the saying, “As Iowa goes, so goes the nation.” The Iowa decision is important precisely because it’s in the heartland, Taylor said. “It highlights for the nation that marriage equality across the country is inevitable. It’s simply a matter of time and we still have some years to struggle, but we’ve turned the corner as a nation.”

Decoding this Rosetta Stone requires just a bit of contextual information from Siena College. According to the school’s surveys, only 58 percent of New Yorkers support legalizing gay marriage, while a whopping 78 percent support raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $8.50.

Put Cuomo’s declaration next to those numbers, and the revelation emerges: in a political arena dominated by corporate money, the governor is acknowledging that politicians will champion initiatives that don’t challenge corporate power, but will avoid promoting those that do. Not only that, Cuomo is admitting this is the case regardless of public opinion.

Events in New York illustrate the larger dynamic at work. As the New York Times reported, despite lukewarm public support, Cuomo was able to get the state legislature to legalize gay marriage after Wall Street financiers dumped cash into the campaign for equal rights. Knowing that marriage doesn’t threaten their profits, these moneyed interests opted to help their ally Cuomo notch a strategic win — one that allows the governor to preen as a great liberal champion to the state’s left-leaning voters, all while he simultaneously presses an anti-union, economically conservative agenda that moneyed interests support.

Now, of course, the situation is reversed. With New York’s recession-battered voters supporting a minimum wage hike, the greed-is-good crowd is firmly aligned against the initiative. Why? Because unlike gay marriage, which requires no corporate sacrifice, the modest minimum wage boost may slightly reduce corporate profits — and that’s something the fat cats in the executive suites never permit without a fight.

Knowing this, a hack like Cuomo — a guy who asks “how high?” when his campaign contributors say “jump” — is using his power to undermine the popular minimum wage initiative. In this case, he is cooking up a self-fulfilling prophecy about the measure being a political non-starter.

Not surprisingly, this sleight of hand is not limited to one locale. In Colorado, Democratic activists have cast Gov. John Hickenlooper as a great liberal for supporting same-sex civil unions, all while he loyally shills for oil and gas corporations. At the federal level, the Obama reelection campaign is doing the same, trumpeting the president as a progressive hero for endorsing gay marriage, all while he slow-walks tougher bank regulations.

Even on Wall Street itself, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein has lately portrayed himself as a great humanitarian. As proof, he doesn’t cite any willingness to acknowledge financial-sector crimes. Instead, he cites his decision to become the Human Rights Campaign’s national spokesman for gay marriage.

Noting all this isn’t to disparage the push for same sex marriage (I’m a strong supporter!) — it is merely to spotlight a bait and switch whereby social issues are increasingly used to perpetuate the economic status quo.

Obviously, it’s possible to simultaneously guarantee equal rights and fix the economy. But as New York most recently proves, it’s much harder to do both when money dictates political outcomes, and when bought-off politicians employ social issues as an excuse to ignore economic justice.

Throughout the president’s first term, his most ardent supporters have reacted to those of us pushing him to do – and say – more on such issues with frustration and anger, some of it nasty and personal, some of it thoughtful and well-argued. They rightly blame Congress for blocking action on key progressive priorities, but strangely downplay the power of presidential leadership. Late last year, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait twice attacked liberal Obama critics for being “unreasonable” about what the president alone could accomplish, because “liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president.”

Chait took particular aim at lefty image guru Drew Westen, a one-time Obama admirer who criticized the president in the New York Times not merely for what he hadn’t accomplished, but for failing to tell a compelling story. Chait accused Westen and other progressives of embracing:

…a model of American politics in which the president in not only the most important figure, but his most powerful weapon is rhetoric. The argument appears calculated to infuriate anybody with a passing familiarity with the basics of political science. In Westen’s telling, every known impediment to legislative progress — special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion — are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech. The impediment to an era of total an uncompromising liberal success is Obama’s failure to properly deploy this awesome weapon.

Chait caricatured Westen’s argument (and the beliefs of those who agreed with it), but he got lots of love for both pieces in the pro-Obama blogosphere, where folks finally felt they had a real diagnosis for the illness of those they dismissed as “emoprogs.” But now that we see the changes wrought by Obama’s politically risky embrace of gay marriage, maybe it will be easier for folks to understand that it’s the job of political advocates not merely to praise, but to push their leaders forward.

Steve Kornacki runs down the astonishing political changes we’ve seen in the mere two weeks since the president carefully announced his supposed change of heart on gay marriage. The nation’s largest African-American organization, the NAACP, has come out behind it – and maybe most important, recognized it as an important civil rights issue. Maybe most dramatic, in Maryland, African-American voters have now flipped to support the state’s gay marriage ballot measure 55 to 36 percent –almost the exact percentage by which they opposed it in previous polling on the state issue. And in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, African-Americans’ support for gay marriage jumped to 59 percent from 41 percent in the wake of the president’s historic announcement.

Now, I’m not going to argue that Obama’s turnaround alone caused this sea change. The arc of the moral universe has been bending toward justice on gay rights for a long time, and as I wrote last week, the president gave it an additional tug. There have been advocates within the NAACP working to make this happen for a long time, and they deserve a lot of credit. African-American voter opinion had already been trending in this direction, even if black voters had been less receptive to gay marriage than other demographic groups. There is also an emotional and personal component to the president’s stance that makes his moral suasion hard to replicate on behalf of, say, the jobs bill or the public option. (And let’s also remember it’s white voters who are most hostile on some of those economic issues, thanks to the divide and conquer politics of the GOP over the last 40 years.)

Still, it’s hard not to conclude that Obama’s words made a significant difference in the political course of this debate. Ironically, it was once critics of Obama who mocked the power of words, and specifically the candidate’s own oratorical gifts. Obama shot back at them many times.

“Don’t tell me words don’t matter,” he told Wisconsin Democrats in February 2008. “‘I have a dream’ — just words. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ — just words. ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ – just words. Just speeches.” At many times over the last three years, I’ve been amazed at how Obama’s critics and supporters seemed to change sides on the question of the power of his words.

I give the folks who call themselves “prag progs” – pragmatic progressives, as opposed to “unreasonable” emoprogs – a lot of credit for fixing attention on what the president has accomplished, and reminding others not merely to fixate on what he hasn’t. But I think it’s time that all of us acknowledge that there’s a role for constructive pressure, too. Progressive change has always required impatient agitators – and it will continue to.

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.