WEDDING FOOD IS , as a rule, pretty ghastly, but perhaps the gay-wedding revolution will cause a shift there, as it is bound to cause a shift in the law, sooner rather than later. Years ago I went to a friend-of-a-friend's wedding reception in the airless basement of a church in an overheated Midwestern city (why do people get married in June? a hetero thing?) and said to myself, while nibbling tepid potato salad and gravely dubious chicken in foil trays, Never again – assuming I survive. I did survive.

We are slightly overdue for some revolution in this country, I would say, and the gay-wedding business proves the status quo can be challenged and possibly even overturned with love and good humor, not violence – our own velvet revolution. It helps that the status quo in question is ossified and cannot really be reconciled with the 14th Amendment's guarantee of "the equal protection of the laws" to every citizen of an American state. It is hard to imagine a creditable argument that government has an urgent interest in restricting the legal benefits and incidents of marriage to heterosexual couples. The truth would seem to be plainly otherwise: that government has an interest in the stability of its citizens' personal lives, and stability is the goal of all political systems.

The case for gay marriage, then, though framed in the soaring constitutional language of liberty and equality, is essentially a conservative one. It appears to be a revolution but is really about binding more people more tightly into existing social and legal arrangements. For that reason, no less a right-winger than New York Times pundit David Brooks is in favor of it. And it is almost certain that when the matter reaches the U.S. Supreme Court, it will be decided by a pair of moderately conservative Reagan appointees, Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor, whose votes make the difference in most of the close cases these days. They signaled last summer, in Lawrence v. Texas, that they now regard homos as people. Once that (largely emotional) barrier is crossed, there is no turning back.

I would like to see oysters at gay-wedding receptions, or bacchanalia, or whatever they are being called. It is still oyster season, oysters are elegant, they have a strong sensual – indeed an erotic – aura, they are not the sort of thing you would find being served in a basement full of plastic furniture. If you serve oysters to celebrate your gay wedding, you are making a statement: that there will be no turning back, no return to salmonella potato salad or chicken in foil pans. You will go to the wall first.