If you're on Facebook or Twitter, you were no doubt inundated with pithy responses following yesterday's announcement that California's Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8. Some of my favorites: "California can suck it," "Shame on them!," "Fuck California," "SO over California," ":(," and my personal favorite, "Ha ha, California. Iowa is more liberal than you. Epic fail." It's that last one that seemed to make the most sense to me. Yes, this was another setback in the fight for marriage equality in the country's most populace state, and the court's logic that last November's referendum doesn't fundamentally alter equal rights under the state Constitution but simply amends it is flawed. The judgment creates a legal class of citizens (to say nothing of creating a special class of gay citizens who are allowed to remain married), denies equal protection, and plainly contradicts the language of the Constitution. But my friend's admittedly unemotional observation points to the fact that even if the people and legal system of California are still struggling with this no-brainer issue, Prop 8 and the subsequent fallout have created a wave of progress for gays and marriage equality in the U.S. The Northeast is where our founding fathers conceived and composed the nation's Constitution and Bill of Rights, and it's now where real progress is being made on this front, with older and wiser states Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine having all recognized gay marriage, and New York and New Hampshire close behind. It won't be California, that bastion of so-called liberalism, that's going to pave the way.