I was in San Francisco over the Valentine's Day weekend, visiting an old Pittsburgh friend who lives four blocks from City Hall. Sunday afternoon, we walked by the line of aspiring spouses that wound around the building. A crowd cheered every couple that emerged, contract in hand, even the straight folks, and all of them were offered a piece of cake, spontaneously set up at the foot of the stairs.

		David Conrad, an actor in Los Angeles, grew up in Edgewood and lives in the Strip District.

Being Californians, not all of them took it. (Low-carb diets, vegans, the lactose intolerant, etc.) The San Francisco police turned a blind eye to slight open-container violations of champagne distributed in Dixie cups. Most everybody took that. Passing cars honked, news folk gathered and my buddy George and I thought it all seemed pretty harmless and good-natured.

We had dinner, we went out with friends, listened to some jazz and emerged at 3 a.m. in a pouring rain. A cold, wet Bay Area deluge. On the way back to the apartment, we passed City Hall again. The line was longer.

And they stayed there all night in the downpour, huddling under tarps, curled up in lawn chairs, coffee runs made by friends on a rare occasion.

The Marriage Office had closed at 3 p.m. Some of them waited over 24 hours.

The next day when these bleary-eyed, newly minted pairs strode out of City Hall, I realized what I was watching and where I was standing. This was the country I believed in -- even if on paper it doesn't often exist.

These were its citizens still asking for the rights that men 200 some years ago told them they could have. That may seem to many a fanciful and liberal interpretation of their words. I would call it what Thomas Paine did -- Common Sense.

Maybe you can say the petitioners did it for the "benefits" or maybe you could say it was a merry political protest to re-establish some kind of sense in our legal vision of domestic union. I'd like to believe that what I saw was a manifestation of hope. However liberal the majority of them are, they still want fervently to feel and be accepted by their country and by their culture. They still want it -- the American dream -- to work.

And they, by their behavior, reveal the absurdity behind an idea so prevalent these days -- that if you're not for us, you're against us. In San Francisco, I didn't see rebels and bolsheviks; I saw "us," neighbors and people I'd pass on a daily basis. There were young couples alongside couples in their 60s, businessmen and women, together so long they resembled each other. A good number of these people certainly would have laughed if, on any other day, you asked them if they needed the approval of any branch of government. But they all came nonetheless to get the city's blessing. They want to believe just like you do that the United States can still hold us all equally and benevolently within its borders.

I'd call this patriotism of an order rarely rewarded. These are people hounded and marginalized for what most of us find the source of our greatest of joy -- the declaration of whom we love, something that happens as naturally as breathing. But for them there has been no legal covenant. So they stood in the rain and asked for it, patiently and legally, when it was offered.

Imagine waiting most of your life to get a simple stamp in a 15-minute ceremony that the majority of your fellow citizens takes as its right. Imagine your grandmother out there in the rain. Somebody's was. I saw her. She told me I had a nice face and, no, she didn't eat chocolate anymore (we handed out Hershey's hugs and kisses), but if I came by again to bring some coffee, black, no sugar.

Women couldn't vote, African Americans couldn't walk through a classroom door, gays can't marry in a civil court. It's the same backroom legacy and these few hundred folks in San Francisco are the next foot in the door, they're another spike in the old log of prejudice.