How does one defend marriage? A model might be Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion in United States v. Edith Windsor, joined by four other Justices, which struck down much of the Defense of Marriage Act. That law, he argued, protected neither marriage nor the married. It denied to same-sex spouses federal benefits and the responsibilities of marriage—which, he wrote, were bound not only with questions of money and security but of dignity (a word he used many times), pride, and honor. “DOMA writes inequality into the entire United States Code”; it “demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects,” and “it humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples.”

Kennedy had made his worries about the well-being of the children of gay and lesbian couples clear in the oral arguments, and so it is no surprise to see them mentioned in his opinion. But it is striking—and part of the reason why anyone looking for a tribute to traditional marriage can find it in the demolition of DOMA—that he goes beyond practical concerns about the denial of health insurance or other benefits (though he emphasizes them, too). To say that it is humiliating for a child to know that his or her parents cannot marry is different from saying that there is any shame in having parents who simply are not married. There isn’t. What Kennedy is invoking are the societal possibilities of marriage, part of the reason that the government has an interest in it at all:

The law in question makes it even more difficult for the children to understand the integrity and closeness of their own family and its concord with other families in their community and in their daily lives.

Edith Windsor is a lesbian widow in her eighties. She and her late wife, Thea Spyer, had no children, but if one sees marriage as part of a loving shelter we build for family members at vulnerable stages of their lives—young and old, in sickness and in health—theirs was exemplary. Windsor cared for Spyer over the decades it took multiple sclerosis to kill her. For most of that time they were not married; they “longed to marry,” as Kennedy put it, and finally did so, in a ceremony in Ottawa that New York recognized, and that, thanks to the ruling Wednesday, the federal government now does, too.

DOMA, in contrast, “divests” couples who have been duly married under state law of responsibilities that, Kennedy writes, they “would be honored to accept were DOMA not in force.” And not only these couples: our common honor is implicated when, as he notes, “it prohibits them from being buried together in veterans’ cemeteries”; under DOMA, too, “government-integrity rules do not apply to same-sex spouses”—he mentioned the husband or wife of a Senator. (One moving aspect of the majority opinion is that it assumes the ubiquity of gays and lesbians at every level of public life.)

That is marriage. And while New York, by recognizing and authorizing same-sex marriages, “sought to give further protection and dignity to that bond,” DOMA was “designed to injure the same class the State seeks to protect.” It was unconstitutional not just because states wrote marriage laws but as a violation of equal protection under the Fifth Amendment. (This reasoning means that Windsor will likely have wider implications; Richard Socarides explains.)

Edith Windsor had standing to bring this case because she paid $363,053 in estate taxes that she wouldn’t have owed but for DOMA. Even though a lower court had ruled in her favor, and President Obama had given up defending the law—something for which, as Ariel Levy describes, Windsor thanked him when he called to congratulate her after the decision—the government still hadn’t given the money back. (My first reaction to the decision was to hope that she now gets it in the form of one of those oversized checks they give lottery winners.) And the Administration had told Congress that it could fight the appeal in its place. Because someone would have to pay, both sides had standing. This was crucial: a lack of standing was why a second marriage-equality case, Hollingsworth v. Perry, was dismissed by the Court, rather than becoming, as many had hoped, a vehicle for a decision on a constitutional right to marriage.

It is telling that none of the three dissents mention Spyer—not Chief Justice John Roberts’s tense procedural sketch, nor Alito’s lazy notes on how back in the day heterosexuality and child-rearing and marriage were inseparable, nor Scalia’s rant.

That last is not even intellectually satisfying as a rant. Scalia spends the first few pages complaining about activist judges overruling Congress—an affectation, in a week when he signed on to an opinion throwing out a good part of the Voting Rights Act, that is just boring. He puts so many words into italics for emphasis that one stops feeling berated and begins wondering if they could be strung together as a prose poem. (Maybe: “Which opposite-sex any malice the ‘purpose.’”) The majority opinion, Scalia writes, is “perplexing,” “jaw-dropping,” “rootless and shifting,” “confusing,” and “legalistic argle-bargle”—he just doesn’t get it, except that he thinks that it means gay people will ask for more things.

But what Scalia has really come to defend in his dissent is not marriage but people who don’t approve of same-sex marriage. Despite the legislative record that Kennedy cites—and the atmosphere that anyone at the time remembers—Scalia is offended by the suggestion that DOMA might have reflected any prejudice. Roberts is, too, writing in his dissent, “I would not tar the political branches with the brush of bigotry,” particularly not given DOMA’s “banal” name. But Scalia goes all out, and along the way exposes the Court conservatives’ grumpiness about attempts at racial justice, as well: “Bear in mind that the object of this condemnation is not the legislature of some once-Confederate Southern state (familiar objects of the Court’s scorn[…]), but our respected coordinate branches.” To say that disparagement of gay relationships played a role in DOMA is, for Scalia, tantamount to saying “that only those with hateful hearts could have voted ‘aye’ on this Act.” This was “quite untrue,” and “to hurl such accusations so casually demeans this institution.” There is more lèse-majesté, and more italics.

Both sides are talking about honor and dignity. For Scalia and Roberts, though, that means little more than that questioning the good will of the respectable, or perhaps of the privileged, is a grave insult. For Kennedy, and the four liberals who joined him, it means that the Court saw the honor of a widow who came before it—and, perhaps incidentally, her love.

Photograph by Pete Marovich/MCT/Getty.

[#image: /photos/5909519dc14b3c606c1038ea]Read our full coverage of gay marriage before the Supreme Court.