There's no moving of goalposts. Constrain it to modern history (whatever that means), or within your lifetime, or within just the last 20 years, the statement stands, The "expanded freedoms" you speak of are not expanded freedoms at all, they are special rights granted to people who whined long enough and loud enough, not unlike a child, until they got their way. Gays have always, and I do mean always, in whatever goalpost distances you wish to construct, had exactly the same right to get married as anyone else. Gays have never been deprived of that right. The term "marriage equality" isn't even a thing. It is an invented term intentionally to replace "gay marriage" and same-sex marriage" in the lexicon as a means to an end of redefining marriage.
Same-sex marriage (a.k.a. marriage equality) was neither inevitable nor, until very recently, even conceivable. And the struggle for it was not, as is commonly believed, a natural consequence of the gay liberation movement that gained steam in the late 1960s. It was not until the late 1980s that merely securing legal recognition for same-sex relationships became a pressing concern of homosexuals. Prior to that, such recognition was virtually unimaginable, and not even wanted. The lesbian and gay liberation movements of the early 1970s didn't make marriage a priority, either. Quite the opposite, in fact. Most activists scorned the very idea of marriage, because that's what straight people do. Instead, activists fought police raids, job discrimination and families’ rejection of their gay children. But in the 70s a small handful walked into clerks’ offices across the country to request marriage licenses, and state officials realized that their laws failed to explicitly limit marriage to a man and a woman, which is no surprise, as no arrangement other than a man and a woman had been imagined. By 1978, 15 states had written this limitation into law.
At that time, "civil unions" were offered to same-sex couples and it was rejected out of hand, in part because the radical thought still ruled the responses, and in part because of the “traditional family values” movement that arose to oppose gay rights and feminism. Anita Bryant and other activists took aim at some of the earliest local anti-discrimination laws, and by 1979 they had persuaded voters in several cities to repeal them. Subsequently, in more than 100 state and local referendums, gay-rights activists had to defend hard-won protections. This, not marriage, consumed much of their energy.
Then the 80s hit and the AIDS epidemic, along with what was known as the "lesbian baby boom" changed everything. Gays were now dealing with family and probate courts, hospitals, adoption agencies and funeral homes, visitation rights and survivor benefits and rights, most of which were denied to them. One of a couple of long-time partners died, and the survivor had no say in anything, the house, funeral arrangements, anything. A lesbian couple raises a child, the biological mother dies, the court awards custody to the biological mother's next of kin without even considering the surviving partner. Those things are clearly wrong. Once again, civil unions were offered, and again rejected out of hand, this time because of the religious "traditional family values" movement that gays were determined to beat, and because they were spittin' bubbles because Reagan never once mentioned AIDS in public.
Couples used wills, powers of attorney and creative new legal arrangements like domestic partnerships and second-parent adoption to try to get around these legal injustices, which in and of itself was pretty impressive considering the reigning conservatism of the ’80s and early ’90s. But even throughout all of that, none of these creative legal arrangements could provide the Social Security, tax, immigration and other benefits that only marriage could bestow. The same-sex marriage movement emerged out of that mess, but it was always still about more than legal benefits.
As same-sex marriage began to gain steam in the 1990s, anti same-sex people (religious and normal people alike) fought to prevent the legal legitimization of homosexuality, which same-sex marriage would (and did) do. As part of the fight against the opponents of same-sex marriage and to cope with the various state laws that defined marriage as being between a man and a women, the term Marriage Equality was invented as a way to beat people over the head with "How can you be in favor of inequality? Reasonably intelligent people aren't in favor of inequality. And you're reasonably intelligent, aren't you? Of course you are, so you need to be in favor of equality!"
An thus we reach the point where we have reasonably intelligent people, including Supreme Court Justices, who think redefining terms so people can obtain special rights for themselves is the same as expanding freedoms and all things being equal.
Pretending that words can mean whatever we want them to mean in the name of a mythical idea of "progress," or worse, because you need to redefine them to get what you want, is both selfish and irresponsible
That doesn't even make sense. No privilege is being rallied against.
It's already having profound domino effects. There are already birth certificates in some states which no longer list the mother and the father, but rather show Parent 1 and Parent 2. That's fine, I suppose, if Parent 1 and 2 are lesbians, but it's a serious problem for male and female parents who want to be listed as "Father" and "Mother" on the certificate. But they don't have that option. Ironically, as states and business adapt to same-sex marriage, many are doing away with any domestic partnership-type arrangements that came before, forcing couples who might not otherwise want to marry to get with the program. Domestic partnerships are extremely rare for non-gay couples. Some of these gay couples are finding this extremely uncomfortable, especially those on the radical end of the spectrum who still find the institution of marriage repellent. Others want to maintain their domestic partnerships because getting married would effectively “out” them to their communities, something many don't want to have happen. SO it maay not be affecting you directly, but I think you're playing a little fast and loose with "any of our lives."
