There are now 30 states where same-sex marriages are legal, and the Supreme Court has said it will not review any court decision that made them so.

About time, we say.

Eleven more are beginning the process or are considering changing their laws to deal with what has become an unstoppable tide of equality rolling across the nation at breakneck speed, judicially speaking.

How did gay marriage go from a minority issue to a majority right in a single decade? Essentially, it hinged on three important Supreme Court decisions, one of which applied only to married women, but was broadly interpreted to relate to privacy in the bedroom.

That decision, Griswold v. Connecticut, in 1965, asserted that the criminalization of the use of contraceptives violated a married couple’s right to privacy. It was the first time the “right to privacy” was asserted by the Supreme Court, and it would not be the last.

In 1967, the Loving v. Virginia case was decided, in favor of Mildred and Richard Loving, an interracial couple who had been arrested for the crime of being married in a state where interracial marriage was illegal.

And in 2003, Lawrence v. Texas struck down the last of the sodomy laws in the United States, using the privacy argument under Griswold and Loving as precedent.

The only reason gay marriage wasn’t addressed in the Loving decision was that sodomy was still illegal in some 23 states, although the laws were enforced only against same-sex couples in most cases. Once same-sex behavior was no longer illegal, the obvious remedy would have been to apply Loving to couples who wished to marry. Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, and hundreds of people got married. Then the nation waited. In the summer of 2008, gay couples in California were briefly given the right to marry. That right was cruelly stripped from them by a citizen-led initiative financed by Christian organizations, the Mormons, and rightwing groups. The married couples filed suit, and won … on 14th Amendment grounds, stating that their right to marriage, granted under Loving, was being unconstitutionally kept from them. The 14th Amendment guarantees equal protection under the law.

But since then, state after state has enacted gay marriage laws, or courts have vacated gay marriage bans. In many cases, the states refused to appeal. In others, the appeal went as high as the Appellate Courts … and stopped.

The Supreme Court wouldn’t hear the cases.

This follows the pattern of what happened in the Loving decision, too. By the time Loving was decided, once and for all, 47 states had done away with interracial marriage bans, either by lower court order or Legislative action. Two of those states were not states when the Lovings got married.

Perhaps, when these 30 states and perhaps another 11 have a year or two of same-sex marriage in their states, and they discover that it has no effect on traditional marriages, the people of the remaining states will shrug their shoulders and join the modern age.

Shortly before her death, Mildred Loving said the decision that bears hers and her husband’s name should apply to everyone. “I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about,” she said.

We agree.