Goodnight, America. Sleep tight.

It's all over but the fulminating. Gay "marriage" is here to stay.

IT'S IN ALL the papers and on all the news wires. And it's here in the Los Angeles Times:

The California Supreme Court decided today that same-sex couples should be permitted to wed, ruling that gay unions must be given the "respect and dignity" of marriage.

In a 4-3 vote, the court became the first in the country to apply the constitutional protections reserved for race and gender to sexual orientation. The Massachusetts high court struck down bans on same-sex marriage in 2003, but under a different legal theory.

The court held that people have a fundamental right to marry the person of their choice and struck down marriage laws limiting matrimony to opposite-sex couples as a violation of the state constitution's equal protection guarantees.

"One of the core elements embodied in the state constitutional right to marry is the right of an individual and a couple to have their own official family relationship accorded respect and dignity equal to that accorded the family relationships of other couples," wrote Chief Justice Ronald M. George, joined by Justices Joyce L. Kennard, Kathryn Mickle Werdegar and Carlos Moreno.

State laws that have limited gay unions to domestic partnerships "impinge upon the fundamental interests of same-sex couples," George wrote.

Justices Marvin Baxter, Ming Chin and Carol Corrigan dissented.

The court majority "does not have the right to erase, then recast, the age-old definition of marriage, as virtually all societies have understood it, in order to satisfy its own contemporary notions of equality and justice," Baxter wrote.

One hundred people lined up outside the state courthouse in San Francisco at 10 a.m. today to purchase a copy of the decision for $10 apiece. Some people bought 10 to 15 copies, calling it a historic document. One man said he planned to give them out as Christmas presents.

Outside, couples, once denied marriage, hugged, kissed, shouted and shook their fists at the sky. Holding up a sign that says, "Life feels different when you're married," Ellen Pontac hugged her partner, Shelly Bailes.

"The best day of my life was when I met Ellen," Bailes said. "This was as good as that." (An earlier version of this story incorrectly gave Pontac's first name as Helen.)

Added Bailes: "This feels good for us. But I can't imagine what it means for all those young couples with their entire lives ahead of them."

The state high court’s ruling was unlikely to end the debate over gay matrimony in California. An initiative that would amend the state Constitution to ban same-sex marriage is expected to qualify for the November ballot.

WE'RE A VILLAGE PEOPLE kind of country, now, and we're not going to hold gay marriage to Massachusetts and California. When the sole standard of what is right and wrong in a nation revolves around "do what thou wilt," any impediment to that is, naturally, discrimination of one sort or another.

Unmoored from the cultural context of the society that birthed it -- and that society's religious underpinnings -- sooner or later the United States Constitution will be used as a battering ram of persecution against religious traditionalists who see gay marriage as a funhouse-mirror image of a holy sacrament entered into by a man and a woman.

Today, we worship the great I AM. Only we're the "I" . . . and the "AM," and it's almost like the original "I AM" never was.

So much so, that I'll bet a majority of you out there have no bloody idea to what -- or to Whom -- I refer.

I know the handwriting is on the wall (a saying of lost patrimony today, no doubt), because I have seen the leaders of tomorrow. To them, the notion that gays can't marry is as offensive as the notion of anti-miscegenation laws and African-Americans sitting in the back of the bus.

AND THE PLACE I have seen those future arbiters of what goes in America is firmly inside the Catholic Church. This is from a January post on this blog:

For years, we have volunteered with our church's youth group. And for a while now, we've been going to the weddings of kids the same age as our ghosts, then watching them have their own children.

So the years spin by and now the boy is twenty
Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true
There'll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty
Before the last revolving year is through

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return, we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

I not only cannot improve upon how Joni Mitchell describes the "Circle Game" of life, I -- and my wife -- have been doomed to not fully participate in it. My better half says there's one question she wants to ask Jesus when she dies, being that we live in a country where there's so few children even to adopt because so many parents don't want to be . . . and can make that so.

I'll bet you can guess what that might be.

We live in a society that feels free to take our pain and use it as a weapon to smash the natural law to politically correct bits. In fact, during one youth-group session, we sat there dumbfounded -- and seething -- as a "Catholic" theology professor speculated upon the possible ecclesiastical permissibility of "gay marriage" someday, on grounds that -- hey -- infertile couples can't fulfill the procreative nature of matrimony, either.

A roomful of societally brainwashed Roman Catholic teen-agers nodded approvingly.

I wanted to kill the son of a bitch. Who, naturally -- being a Catholic theologian teaching at a Jesuit university -- was impervious to objections raised on catechetical and natural-law grounds.

IT SEEMS TO ME that American Christians who stubbornly persist in believing all that Biblical crap will come to be persecuted solely because of our own failure to communicate eternal truths to the culture -- and to our children -- in this era of instant gratification.

We have failed -- utterly. We have pandered to the most inane compulsions of popular culture instead of seeking to transform that culture. That's going to bite us in the ass.

Have you ever volunteered with a Catholic youth group and watched in horror as the teen-agers charged with leading prayer for the night -- many of them Catholic-school students -- managed to conduct an entire closing "prayer" without once mentioning God or Jesus? I have.

That's because we are our own gods, and a growing majority of god says "Go for it!" Those who stand astride history yelling "STOP!" are going to get the same kind of treatment most of the Old Testament prophets did.

Not to mention the New Testament Messiah.