At least one US Supreme Court justice is on the record as wanting to overturn the landmark same-sex marriage decision, so California voters will consider Prop 3 in November, which would enshrine gay marriage into the state constitution.

Just this past February, we celebrated the 20th anniversary of the first same-sex marriages performed at SF City Hall by then-SF Mayor Gavin Newsom. It sure escalated the culture wars during that much-less progressive era when George W. Bush was still president, and California voters smacked Newsom down in 2008 with Prop 8, effectively a same-sex marriage ban. Prop 8 added a line to the State of California Constitution saying, “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

But the US Supreme Court struck down Prop 8 in 2013 (and right before Pride Weekend, no less!), and same-sex marriages resumed in California. Just two years later — and again, right before Pride Weekend — the US Supreme Court ruled same-sex marriage should be legal nationwide, in the famed Obergefell v. Hodges decision that seemed to enshrine gay marriage as the law of the land and a permanent right.

Not so fast. That outdated “only marriage between a man and a woman” line is still technically in the state constitution. And when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas came right out and said in his concurring opinion that the court should overturn same-sex marriage too.

So state Senator Scott Wiener and Assemblymember Evan Low (who’s now running for Congress) got Prop 3 on this November's ballot, which would enshrine same-sex marriage as a guaranteed right in the state constitution.  

According to its official wording, Prop 3 “Amends California Constitution to recognize fundamental right to marry, regardless of sex or race. Removes language in California Constitution stating that marriage is only between a man and a woman.”

The Chronicle writes in its endorsement of the measure that “Prop 3 is critical to reaffirming and protecting Californians’ right to marry who they love — and, as proponents note, to ensure all married couples have access to the legal benefits of marriage, whether they relate to parenting, taxes, insurance or hospital visitation rights.”

For their part, opponents at the California Family Council will say in your Voter Guide that “Proposition 3 removes all rules for marriage, opening the door to child marriages, incest, and polygamy,” and that, “By making moms and dads optional, it puts children at risk.”

That sounds like the No On Prop 3 crowd may not have a lot of sense, and they certainly don’t have any dollars. CalMatters just ran a Prop 3 explainer which notes that there are no campaign contributions whatsoever to the anti-same-sex marriage drive, while Prop 3 supporters have raised $4 million to help the measure pass.

We do not have specific polling on Prop 3, but a poll last year found that 75% of Californians support same-sex marriage. So Prop 3 may win by a landslide, but as the last eight years have taught us, we can’t take certain rights for granted.

Related: SF's Anti-Gay Archbishop Not Likely to Be Giving Blessings to Same-Sex Couples Anytime Soon [SFist]

Image: LGBT marriage, equality and laws concept. Wedding rings, wooden gavel and LGBT flags. (Getty Images)

It was two days before Valentine's Day in 2004 that then-Mayor Gavin Newsom decided to press on the culture-war scales a bit and allow gay and lesbian couples to marry at San Francisco City Hall, marriage certificates and all.

They called it the "Winter of Love," and it was a moment in San Francisco's history, now two decades old, that bore a number of a parallels to the present moment. It was a time of rebuilding after the dot-com bust, when San Francisco was being viewed as washed up and hungover from an ill-advised escapade with tech. It was also an election year, with the Republican candidate, George W. Bush, using the culture wars and same-sex marriage in particular as a wedge issue. And while Newsom hadn't discussed any presidential ambitions at that point, they were certainly back-of-mind.

"Sometimes a city just has to step up," wrote Mark Morford in Mother Jones at the time. "Sometimes your hometown just has to drag itself off the floor, shake off the dust and rust of its former glories, and stomp its foot and plant its flag and shout its presence as the nation’s most oddball, spiritually variegated, intellectually fiery, funked-out, messy, semi-radical bubble of cultural anarchy. With really great coffee shops."

Critics thought Newsom, who had just taken office a month earlier, was being foolish and perhaps self-promoting in taking the step of issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He was testing something that was not legally sound and stoking the culture-war fires at a time when Democrats were hoping to unseat a not-especially popular incumbent in the White House. And while it created heart-warming images of couples lined up on Valentine's Day and beyond, to seal themselves to each other with a locally quasi-legal ceremony and document, was this all just a big, distracting stunt?

It turned out to be just the shot in the arm that liberals and liberal jurists needed to get the marriage movement actually moving. The legal battles that ensued from those first marriage licenses, with the help of the ACLU, led to the California Supreme Court's landmark ruling in May 2008 that same-sex couples had a constitutional right to be married.

Yes, it led directly to Prop 8 four years later — a stinging loss for the LGBTQ community on the same election night that put the first Black person in the White House. But outrage over Prop 8, and subsequent outrage over challenges to marriages that were sanctioned by other states — including in Massachusetts, Iowa, Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and New York, which had all legalized same-sex marriage by 2011 — helped galvanize a tidal shift in public opinion. Civil unions were no longer the separate but equal solution that we had to accept. Marriage, as many Americans began to understand, was something the government shouldn't be denying two people who love each other, and everyone should have a right to the benefits and respect that marriage confers.

Back in February 2004, the decade-long legal fight over same-sex marriage had only barely just begun. Republicans were banking on it being an issue they could campaign against — making frequent reference to the slippery slope from gay marriage to bestiality, and bigamy. And in his State of the Union address that January, George W. Bush was already foreshadowing his reelection campaign, vowing to get a constitutional amendment passed codifying marriage as being a strictly heterosexual right.

Bush was reacting to the first major legal decision permitting same-sex marriages, which had come down in Massachusetts a few months earlier — though marriages were not set to begin there until the spring. Newsom, who'd been invited to attend the State of the Union as a friend of Nancy Pelosi, got an idea for one of his first acts as mayor, which would of course steal some thunder from Massachusetts.

"[I thought to myself] He is president of the United States, and I am just a guy who does stop signs and tries to revitalize parks,” Newsom told the New York Times in 2004. "I know my role. But I also know that I’ve got an obligation that I took seriously to defend the Constitution. There is simply no provision that allows me to discriminate."

Newsom was also uniquely positioned among big-city mayors: San Francisco being a city and a county, and marriage licenses being issued by counties in California, he had the ability to open the county clerk's doors — and the progressive SF Board of Supervisors had no desire to stop him.

Video of the lines outside SF City Hall, which were broadcast on television screens worldwide and bounced around the still nascent internet, were moving to say the least. There was not much in the way of protest, and no one was really sure where this would lead, but the pictures of beaming, hopeful faces were a new, contemporary image to add to the national civil rights movement.

The images made heroes, locally and nationally, of elder lesbian couple Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, who at that point had been married in all but the legal sense for 51 years. And other longtime San Francisco couples, like Nicholas Parham and James Martin, who moved here from North Carolina in the early 1980s to live more freely, got to add the imprimatur of a San Francisco City Hall license to their 23-year-old relationship.

"I will always cherish that sort of collective elation we felt that day, even though everybody there probably knew it may not last," Parham tells the Times this week. "We thought: Let’s just have fun. Let’s show the world what we want.”

"We have been wildly, dizzily emboldened by the notion that, no matter what the final outcome of our explosive gay marriage initiative, no matter what comes of BushCo’s sneering promise to alter the U.S. Constitution to codify homophobia and protect the sanctity of, well, hordes of terrified antigay right-wing moralists who genuinely believe gay marriage will lead straight to bestiality and wanton incest, these past few weeks will go down as one of those defining moments, a hot, seminal point in American history," wrote Morford, with the breathless optimism that many of us felt at the time.

It was also an indelibly hopeful image for young LGBTQ people who were only coming into their own political awareness in 2004. Writing in the Chronicle today, Tony Bravo writes of coming of age in the 1990s, when Ellen DeGeneres famously came out on her eponymous sitcom (only to get canceled), and when Will & Grace had begun to humanize (if not sexualize) white gay men to a broad national audience.

"But my adolescence was also shaped by events like the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student in Wyoming; the 1999 Oscar-winning film Boys Don’t Cry, about the murder of transgender man Brandon Teena in Nebraska; and much closer to home, the 2002 murder of trans woman Gwen Araujo just across the Bay in Newark," Bravo writes.

Legal advocates for same-sex marriage did not foresee that the movement would need just a little more than a decade before the Supreme Court would declare marriage a basic right for all in 2015. And without Newsom's and San Francisco's boldness 11 years earlier, it's not clear that the issue would have come to a head so quickly. You needed a critical mass of couples who now had certain rights in California that they wouldn't have if they moved to two dozen other states, and all that started here.

The fight, of course, isn't necessarily over, and there are plenty of conservative jurists — most notably Justice Clarence Thomas — who would like to see the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling overturned on the same grounds that Roe v. Wade was in 2022.

There is a ballot measure headed to the November ballot here in California that will, once and for all, codify marriage as a civil right. Yes, here in 2024, we are still needing to protect same-sex marriage, and the ballot measure will formally repeal Proposition 8, 16 years on, and add an amendment to the state constitution saying that the "right to marry is a fundamental right."

And, just last month, Kim Davis, the former Kentucky county clerk who made a national villain of herself (and a hero to the antigay right) when she refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples on personal religious grounds in 2015, was ordered by a federal court to pay $260,104 in legal fees and expenses for one of couples whom she denied. Davis is expected to continue appealing the ruling, but this comes on top of $100,000 in damages that a federal jury awarded to the couple last fall, which Davis is also on the hook for.

Top image: Newlyweds Amber Weiss (L) and Sharon Papo depart City Hall with their family, after getting married in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Kimberly White/Corbis via Getty Images)

After Pope Francis issued a new declaration Monday that same-sex couples could receive blessings from Catholic priests and bishops, San Francisco's notoriously conservative archbishop Salvatore Cordileone issued his own terse response.

Pope Francis surprised many with his new guidance this week about the treatment of same-sex couples in the Catholic church, in yet another of several moves he's made to show that LGBTQ+ people may be embraced by the faith. The pope's declaration made clear that while priests should be free to offer blessings to same-sex couples in private meetings or other scenarios, these blessings should not, to avoid confusion, be performed in conjunction with any rite or ceremony like a civil union.

The Vatican's head of the office of doctrine, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, gave an introduction to the pope's declaration Monday, as the New York Times reports. In it, Cardinal Fernández called this "a real development" and an "innovative contribution to the pastoral meaning of blessings."

But, he said, the declaration does not change "the traditional doctrine of the church about marriage."

The introduction further said that one should "understand the possibility of blessing couples in irregular situations and same-sex couples without officially validating their status or changing in any way the church’s perennial teaching on marriage."

While he has not made an outright, public refusal yet, one can imagine that Archbishop Cordileone is not going to be performing any such blessings himself. As the Chronicle notes today, this is the guy who helped lead the charge on Prop 8, and in 2012 called same-sex marriage, "the ultimate attack of the Evil One."

He has no doubt not budged in his stance, and he has proven time and again that he cares little for this pope or his opinions. Even as Pope Francis was encouraging everyone to get vaccinated against COVID two years ago as a "moral obligation," Cordileone was taking the road of conspiracy theorists and right-wing radio pundits, claiming he had naturally "strong immunity" on his own. (We do not know if he procured ivermectin, however.)

His statement on the blessings doctrine is a study in diplomacy, while making fairly clear that he feels no love for gay relationships.

"I encourage those who have questions to read the Vatican declaration closely, and in continuity with the Church’s unchanging teaching," Cordileone said in his statement. "Doing so will enable one to understand how it encourages pastoral solicitude while maintaining fidelity to the Lord Jesus Christ."

The phrase "pastoral solicitude" seems to be Cordileone's, but the pope's declaration seems to have more generous phrasing. While it does, indeed, stop short of saying that same-sex marriages should be formally sanctioned, it tries to carve out space for those who are in them to be embraced.

"In order to help us understand the value of a more pastoral approach to blessings, Pope Francis urges us to contemplate, with an attitude of faith and fatherly mercy, the fact that 'when one asks for a blessing, one is expressing a petition for God’s assistance, a plea to live better, and confidence in a Father who can help us live better,'" the declaration reads.

There have long been more liberal and more conservative factions among the leaders of the Catholic church, and it's well known that Pope Francis and Archibishop Cordileone fall in opposite camps. It is sort of baffling that, under a more conservative pope, Cordileone was assigned to one of the most LGBTQ-friendly regions in the world, during a time when same-sex marriage was front-and-center in politics. But he was, and he's still here, and he's still fond of things that put him in the spotlight — like when he declared last year that Nancy Pelosi should not receive communion due to her stance on abortion.

Nearly a year later, in March of this year, Pelosi made some withering comments about Cordileone, saying, "Every parade against women honoring their own sense of responsibility or LGBTQ, he leads. And so he’s made it very clear, maybe we’re not all god’s children."

Sidebar: Elon Musk loves a good villain, so how come Cordileone can't get this phony Xitter account that's impersonating him removed?

Previously: Unhappy That He Hasn't Been Mentioned Lately In Abortion Fight, SF Archbishop 'Bans' Nancy Pelosi From Receiving Communion

San Francisco and other gay-friendly metropolises had a joyous Pride Weekend in 2015 when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage. But the pendulum always swings the other way and this Pride will be shadowed by the despicable — and radical — decision by the Trump-appointee-heavy court we have now to overturn Roe v. Wade and leave women in a huge swath of this country without easy access to abortions.

The newest members of the court have not yet had time to show the extent of their radicalism, but George W. Bush appointees Samuel Alito and John Roberts and George H.W. Bush appointee Clarence Thomas certainly have. And whatever hope we liberals had of Roberts being some sort of meliorating force of good on the court is officially gone.

Roberts, predictably, wrote a separate concurring opinion in the landmark Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, expressing that it was not his preference to fully overturn Roe, and that he would have advocated for a narrower decision that only addressed the concept of fetal viability, upholding Mississippi's abortion law only. "The Court’s opinion is thoughtful and thorough, but those virtues cannot compensate for the fact that its dramatic and consequential ruling is unnecessary to decide the case before us," Roberts writes.

Thomas, who along with Alito has clearly been sick of voting in the minority on major issues in the culture wars for the past two decades, has not been a frequent writer of concurring or dissenting opinions. But today we get a — dare-we-say gleeful? — separate concurring opinion from Thomas as well, in which he clearly declares the radical position he holds on the court. Not only does he celebrate the overturning of Roe 50 years later, because he, as a strict textualist believes it was wrongly decided in the first place, he would like to see some more recent decisions overturned for the same reason.

Referring to the court's previous rulings on sodomy laws, same-sex marriage, and bans on contraception — the latter, known as Griswold, dates to 1965! — Thomas writes that the court "should reconsider" all of these precedents it has set using the due-process clause of the Constitution.

Alito, for his part, included a phrase in his majority opinion saying that "nothing in [the Court's] opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion." But Thomas seems to twist that mean that new opinions are now necessary to overturn these other precedents on things like same-sex marriage and contraception. And given the vitriolic forces at play in the country right now, it's not difficult to imagine a day in the near future when a case comes before the courty challenging the right to same-sex marriage — and this conservative majority would almost without a doubt through that previous ruling out the window faster than you can say Roe.

"There is no finality in the battle for civil rights," said New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, presciently, in a column two days ago. "Wins don’t stay won. They must be defended and can sometimes be reversed."

We also will now hear, at least for a week or two, from politicians attacking justices like Kavanaugh and Gorsuch who made sure to give the party line during confirmation hearings about their "respect" for "precedent," trying to suggest they wouldn't overturn Roe if they had the chance in order to get confirmed, even though this has been the not-secret project of conservatives and the Federalist Society for decades.

"How about those justices coming before the senators and saying that they respected stare decisis, the precedent of the court, that they respected the privacy in the Constitution of the United States," said Nancy Pelosi in a news conference Friday. "Did you hear that? Were they not telling the truth, then?"

"Today, the Republican-controlled Supreme Court has achieved their dark, extreme goal of ripping away women’s right to make their own reproductive health decisions," Pelosi said in her remarks. "Because of Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, the Republican Party and their supermajority on the Supreme Court, American women today have less freedom than their mothers."

Up next perhaps: LGBTQ people. Watch out.

Top image: Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas speaks at the Heritage Foundation on October 21, 2021 in Washington, DC. Clarence Thomas has now served on the Supreme Court for 30 years. He was nominated by former President George H. W. Bush in 1991 and is the second African-American to serve on the high court, following Justice Thurgood Marshall. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

The lead plaintiff in the landmark 2015 Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage is running for the Ohio state house, and coming to San Francisco for a campaign fundraiser Wednesday night.  

Legal types often use just the shorthand word “Obergefell” when referring to the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage in the U.S. That’s because the landmark case before the court was called Obergefell v. Hodges, an appeal of an Ohio case called Obergefell v. Kasich, brought by lead plaintiff Jim Obergefell, whose marriage to longtime partner John Arthur the state of Ohio refused to recognize. And while this was the culmination of decades of work by activists and there were other plaintiffs involved, Jim Obergefell effectively has the legacy of being the plaintiff who got same-sex marriage enshrined into U.S. law once and for all.  

But now Obergefell wants more legacy than that. According to the Bay Area Reporter, Obergefell is running for the Ohio House of Representatives in November to represent his native Sandusky, Ohio area. Moreover, Obergefell will be in town for a San Francisco fundraiser for his congressional campaign Wednesday night.

"I stand for doing something that made the world a better place," Obergefell told the Bay Area Reporter. "People like to support things like that."

It could be a campaign issue that Obergefell is throwing what could be portrayed as lavish fundraisers, some 2,500 miles away from Ohio in San Francisco, and in Nancy Pelosi’s district at that. Obergefell notes that his opponent, Republican incumbent D. J. Swearingen, is also taking out-of-state money. (Obergefell is also the co-founder of a Sonoma County winery, Equality Vines, which he started with partner Matt Grove.)

"The incumbent, when I announced, in the paper the next day he made some comment that I will be raising money from all across the country. My response to that is, number one, it isn't as if he is only getting money within district," Obergefell told the paper. "He is getting money from around the state of Ohio and from organizations from all across the country. I am no different; I will be raising money from friends and people across the country because I stand for something people value.”

Can he actually win? Let’s turn to the Sandusky Register, which explains that the primary isn’t even scheduled, because Ohio’s redistricting is tied up in the courts. There probably won’t even be a meaningful primary anyway, as Obergefell is the lone Democrat in the race, and his opponent Swearingen is the sole Republican. It’s a district that flipped from Obama to Trump in 2016, but given the uncertainty of what the district’s electorate will look like by November 2022, one imagine Obergefell has a chance.

If you want to attend Obergefell’s fundraiser here in SF, which is at LGBTQ social club The Academy (2166 Market Street) on Wednesday, April 6 from 5-9 p.m, there are free tickets available, though you have to RSVP in advance, and his campaign would surely prefer you instead bought VIP tickets for $250.

Related: The Bay Area Reacts To Historic Same-Sex Marriage Ruling; Street Party Planned In Castro [SFist]

Image: WASHINGTON, DC - OCTOBER 04: Plaintiff in the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court case Jim Obergefell speaks during a rally urging the U.S. Senate to hold a confirmation vote for Supreme Court Nominee Merrick Garland outside of The Supreme Court of the United States on October 4, 2016 in Washington, DC. Today marks the 202nd day since President Barack Obama nominated Judge Garland to fill the vacancy left after former Justice Antonin Scalia passed away in February. (Photo by Zach Gibson/Getty Images)

The once-proprietors of an Oregon bakery who made headlines two years ago when they refused to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple have finally coughed up the fine they were court-ordered to pay. The owners of Sweet Cakes By Melissa, Aaron and Melissa Klein, were ordered over the summer to pay $135,000 in damages to the couple whose cake the Kleins refused to bake. After six months of delay, Aaron Klein officially paid the fine, plus accrued interest, yesterday.

Oregon's Bureau of Labor and Industry (BOLI) ruled that by refusing the couple service, Sweet Cakes By Melissa had unlawfully discriminated against them.

At the time of the state's decision, Melissa Klein doubled down, telling Fox News that she would not honor BOLI's ruling.

“We are so going to fight this, oh my gosh,” blabbered the baker. “It’s making us stronger and emboldening us to stand up to this. Aaron and I are fighting for every American out there — for their freedom. We are not backing down at all.”

Of course, the fine didn't end up hurting the couple any, because shortly after they took their defiant stand on religious grounds, much like Kim Davis after them, they became symbols of religious conservative persecution, and a crowdfunding campaign launched to help pay their fine and legal expenses according to Politico, earning them over $350,000. On the site Continue to Give, they continue to rake in donations of unknown amounts, many in the last few hours spurred by this latest news. (Maybe people don't realize they've got the fine covered and then some?) Messages with the donations say things like "Keep the faith... your not alone [sic] ... we will retake our nation...you have waken [sic] many people up to the fact of the takeover... Now it is our turn to take what has been taken and more."

The Kleins explicitly stated their refusal was based on their religious beliefs, notes CBS 5, seemingly unaware that Oregon law doesn't allow private businesses to discriminate against customers for reasons of sexual orientation.

Sweet Cakes By Melissa has since closed, but they clearly have money to open a new shop somewhere else.

All previous coverage of homophobia on SFist.

News broke late Tuesday that Air Force Major Adrianna Vorderbruggen, 36, a recent transplant to the San Francisco Bay Area, had become the first openly gay US military servicewoman to be killed in combat, while on a patrol mission in Afghanistan. She and five other U.S. troops were killed when a suicide bomber rammed a motorcycle packed with explosives into their joint NATO-Afghan patrol on Monday in outside Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, as the Daily Beast first reported.

The Taliban has claimed credit for the attack, which occurred just north of Kabul. It's the deadliest to occur in the country since August.

Vorderbruggen was active in getting the military to finally repeal the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy in 2011, and her wife Heather Lamb, whom she married in 2012 and who relocated to her mother's home in San Rafael with the couple's four-year-old son according to ABC 7, flew to Dover Air Force Base today in Delaware to receive her wife's flag-draped casket, which would not have been possible before the repeal.

GayStarNews notes that Vorderbruggen is believed to be the first openly gay person in the Air Force to die in combat.

NBC Bay Area relays a statement from Lamb, who is a former servicewoman herself. "Adrianna was the light of our lives. Our son, Jacob, and I miss her so much. She has always been my hero. Never more than now."

As Servicemembers, Partners, and Allies for Respect and Tolerance for All (SPARTA) told the Daily Beast, "Many LGBT troops have given their lives in service to our country. Thanks to the repeal of DADT, their families will be honored instead of hiding in the shadows." They add, "This is a tragedy for any family, and that’s why it is so important that we as nation embrace their loved ones and that we remember them for who they really were."

Vorderbruggen is originally from Minnesota and had recently been living with Lamb and her son in the DC area, prior to her most recent deployment. It's unclear how long they had called San Rafael home, and Reuters and others still placed their residence near DC. The above photo apparently taken at Cavallo Point in Marin County and posted to Facebook has been widely circulated, showing the couple and their son.

A relative who spoke to the SF Chronicle described Vorderbruggen as "lighthearted and goofy."

Retired Navy Commander Zoe Dunning remembered her friend Vorderbruggen as a "fighter," and said to NBC News, "Her death in some ways signifies women, gays and lesbians are truly equal. We do have the same risk out there."

Vorderbruggen also becomes the third U.S. servicewoman to be killed in combat in Afghanistan after two died in a helicopter accident in October.

Maybe because of June's Supreme Court ruling on marriage, or maybe because of Caitlyn Jenner, or just because of the tidal wave of mainstream support in general for the LGBT cause, nearly a million Americans came out on Facebook this year. And the rate at which people are coming out, according to a new internal study of Facebook data, is on track to be triple what it was, per day, just a year ago.

A whopping 800,000 people in the U.S. have changed their sexual orientation or gender identity since National Coming Out Day (Oct. 11) in 2014, and the number of people coming out per day noticeably spiked in June at the time of the Supreme Court decision, as the graph below shows.

Around that time more than 26 million Facebook users applied the rainbow overlay thing to their profile pic, to show their support. And now, 6 million users of the site in the U.S. identify as LGBT, many of them having just come out as such, on the site, in the last three years. "Strikingly," the report says, "of those who are out on Facebook, approximately 78% made this change to their profile since the beginning of 2012."

As you can see, the Y-axis shows the rate at which people have been coming out, per day, and how rapidly it's risen in recent months. And, as researchers Bogdan State and Nils Wernerfelt write, "On a typical day, one out of every ten people who change their 'interested in' status on Facebook do so to reflect a same-gender interest."

And, "Since we only consider those who have expressed a same-gender attraction or list a custom gender on their Facebook profiles," they add, "it is likely that this figure is an underestimate of the total number of 'out' Americans."

As The Verge notes, this marks an important new application for Facebook's personal data and research.

The social network's research and data science teams are not typically known for examining sexual or gender orientation in their public studies; recent blog posts include visualizing crisis relief in Nepal and tracking how users express laughter across the website. That makes today's announcement one of the most personal insights into Facebook's nearly 1.5 billion-person user base ever revealed.

Related: Facebook Testing Six New Reaction Emoji But No 'Dislike' Button

A conservative group called Catholic Vote gave the internet a gift last week in the form of a black-and-white YouTube video in which a group of well meaning Catholics all speak cryptically about being "different" and "weird" and it turns out they're all talking about sticking to their guns in the belief that "marriage is between a man and a woman." As AdWeek points out, this would be a group of conservatives acting like an oppressed minority now that the Supreme Court has made a final ruling on an issue that grants rights to people who are not them — and the more you think about that, the more it's pretty hilarious, and insane. But not unexpected!

The video went up on June 25, and you can see it above, but more hilarious is the parody that's already been made in which a bunch of people, also in black and white, speak cryptically about their beliefs that might be looked down upon, such as "I love saying the N-word!" and "Where's that balance? How can I say 'Go back to Africa' and still respect someone."

The one with the hat and glasses is prolific gay YouTuber Nicola Foti, whom SFist previously featured because of his brilliant 2013 work "Just Text Me."

Castro Street was closed on schedule at 5 p.m., CNN had a live feed on the rally stage, and SF's cohort of openly gay politicians all got up to speak Friday evening, along with other activists, celebrating the major historical milestone of today's Supreme Court decision for federal marriage equality mere feet from where Harvey Milk publicly fought for far more basic rights for gay people forty years ago. The mood, perhaps because of blustery weather conditions or the distractions of the Friday of Pride weekend, was just slightly less giddy than it was two years ago this week when the court issued the landmark decisions that put Prop 8 to rest and struck down the Defense of Marriage Act. In a way, that victory was much bigger for California, and for San Francisco, and today's victory was more about everyone else who'd been left out, and about finally ending a legal battle that feels like it's been going on for decades — though technically it's only been 11 years. And did I mention it was really windy?

Nonetheless hundreds of people gathered to hear brief speeches by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, State Senator Mark Leno, Supervisor Scott Wiener, Supervisor David Campos, and former State Senator and Assemblywoman Carol Migden. Campos called for a moment of silence from the crowd, for everyone, including Harvey Milk, "who fought for this and didn't live long enough to see this day."

I ran into one man named Joel who said, "You're so young. This will show you how long I've been in this fight," showing me a pin that said "Sodomy Repeal / Civil Rights / July 11 1976." He said he was the first openly gay law student at the University of North Carolina, "And back then that meant death threats."

Crowds spilled out of all the bars along the street, and everyone was in a clearly joyful mood. And, much like two years ago, this Pride weekend is sure to be extra crazy, as the Onion has already predicted.

See our images of the scene, before and during the rally, and stay tuned for SFist's coverage of the whole, insane Pride weekend in San Francisco.

Troy Brunet is here standing at 17th and Castro in San Francisco waiving this flag -- "it's like a sigh of relief" pic.twitter.com/4KsaspMWQc

— Hamed Aleaziz (@Haleaziz) June 26, 2015

Cars are already honking through San Francisco's Castro district this morning following the historic 5-4 ruling by the Supreme Court this morning. Thankfully, the justices dropped their most dramatic decision on this Friday of Pride weekend in San Francisco, New York, Minneapolis, and Seattle instead of waiting until Monday, which is their last scheduled day for releasing decisions. This means that Pride celebrations will kick off with an extra boost of jubilation, much like they did two years ago in the wake of the rulings on DOMA and Prop 8.

A 5 p.m. rally in the Castro will, like it did in 2013, come with a concurrent block party of epic proportions (likely to begin a couple hours ahead of that), as locals and tourists alike flock to one of the world's nexuses of the gay rights movement to celebrate this historic moment.

State Senator Mark Leno tells the Bay Area Reporter that the ruling "was a long time coming. [And] amid all the joy, all the elation, all the celebration, a quiet part of me says this just feels right.”

Chronicle reporter Hamed Aleaziz posted the photos above and below to Twitter showing one Troy Brunet and his big rainbow flag, standing at the corner of Market and Castro in the shadow of the much larger rainbow flag there, saying, "it's like a sigh of relief."

A 9 a.m. rally at City Hall featured local LGBT rights leaders and politicians, including Kate Kendell, the executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, who pointed at the crowd and said, "You you you you! Look what you did!"

Leno also spoke, saying that former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger "will go down in history as the George Wallace of California" with regard to same-sex marriage rights, as Chron reporter Vivian Ho tweets from the scene (see below).

Mayor Ed Lee spoke, and former mayor, now Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom was expected to speak. [Update: As seen in the tweet below, Newsom arrived late and didn't get to say much at the rally.] Newsom, of course, was instrumental in getting the ball rolling in the national debate over gay marriage when he controversially allowed the San Francisco city clerk to begin issuing same-sex marriage licenses back in 2004.

Newsom has clearly had a prepared statement ready to release for weeks now, and he begins by quoting George Washington.

’We have abundant reason to rejoice that, in this land, the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition.’ The wisdom of these words, penned by President Washington and now more than two centuries old, remind us that American Democracy is an evolving journey, perfected with the passage of time.

Indeed our present day comprehension of marriage — based upon love and lifelong loyalty — is itself an evolution in the institution of marriage.

...

This cause for celebration closes one chapter of civil right injustices enforced by state laws. To deny the value of any love, devalues all love. The nation has traveled full circle in the eleven years since San Francisco’s Winter of Love, but the underlying prejudices have not disappeared.

...

And as we celebrate, we must give thanks. Thanks to the brilliant lawyers who forged ahead with legal challenge after legal challenge. Thanks to the judges who understood this was about equality and justice. Thanks to the elected officials who supported marriage equality, caring more about doing the right thing than winning political points. Thanks to the activists who have been waging the battle for marriage for decades and never giving up. And most of all, thanks to the couples who taught us about courage and constancy.

SF District Attorney George Gascon also released a statement this morning, saying, "Love is truly the great equalizer, and today’s decision is a victory for the countless LGBT couples whose determination and love for one another led to this historic day... Today, more than most days, I am proud and grateful to live in this country."

All previous coverage of same-sex marriage on SFist.

If this video is any indication, the process by which lesbian parents conceive is a long, arduous process.

Haley Jude a.k.a. Queer Mama has been vlogging her pregnancy, and one charming episode documented the process by which she and her partner vetting sperm donors. "You know, all the profile perusing without ever being able to message the person," Jude wrote in Elle. "Then, once you choose, you have to spend the rest of your life with that person."

And very much like online dating, the women had to "consider mostly 21-year-old-ish men"—mainly college kids trying to make a little cash. "Have you ever dated a 21-year-old man?" Jude asks. "I have, and I am so glad I didn't procreate with any of them." Understandable.

Over in her column on Autostraddle, she explains that she and her partner Simone chose to go with the sperm from a total stranger after she suffered a miscarriage when they had a friend donate. Because both partners would be stuck with the resulting child for the rest of their lives, it took quite a while for the two to agree on a donor.

Once they find somebody they both liked, the sense of relief in both women is palpable in the video.

Jude says she's due in early September.