"I now pronounce you man and pillow."

Before, it's always been imposed on various states by sheer, raw judicial power through the dubious constitutional logic of the courts. But New York has become the first state to actually use the democratic process to legally redefine the basic unit of human society and ignore thousands of years of Western law and custom by legalizing same-sex "marriage."

The quotation marks are deliberate. Legal definitions and rights can be changed by the action of a court or a legislature, but changing the most basic institution of human society itself is beyond the power of any government. And theologically, of course, the government may no more change the divine institution of marriage to include couples of the same sex than it can do so to include couples of different species- or, for that matter, between animate and non-animate entities.

Even though the tomato is botanically a fruit (having mutliple seeds), in the United States it is legally a vegetable by virtue of the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Nix v. Hedden. Of course, Nix does not make the tomato any more a vegetable in fact, or any less a fruit. In the Dred Scot v. Sanford,  the Supreme Court held that African-Americans had no legal rights which whites were bound to respect. That did not, of course, make African-Americans any less the moral equals of whites, notwithstanding what the law at the time had to say about the matter.

And similarly- even in New York State, in Iowa, in Canada, and elsewhere where governments have presumed to give marriage a legal definition which includes relationships between individuals of the same sex- actual marriage remains what it has always been: a relationship between a man and a woman, with no other combination of partners qualifying.