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Change is hard for those who have lived under one set of rules and assumptions when those rules and assumptions change.

In my life the greatest moral and civil change I have witnessed was the civil rights movement. It challenged the deepest rules and assumptions of white society, most especially Southern white society.

That black men, women and children and yes, some whites stood up and risked their lives challenging Jim Crow was a remarkable moment in American history.

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The white South - its governments, its courts and too many of its churches and peoples -- reacted with defiance and sometimes violence. They claimed that whites and blacks could never live as equals, that no federal judge could change God's natural order and the pressure to integrate white Dixie would tear it apart.

"The society is coming apart at the seams. What good is it doing to force these situations when white people nowhere in the South want integration? What this country needs is a few first-class funerals." Alabama Gov. George Wallace said on Sept. 5, 1963.

And for a while society did seem to come apart at the seams. Later that same month a bomb planted by KKK cowards in a Birmingham church killed four little black girls.

Eighteen months later, in Selma, early on a March Sunday, black marchers and some whites were viciously attacked by state police and Dallas County deputy sheriffs as they marched for voting rights.

In two weeks we will celebrate the 50th anniversary of that Bloody Sunday.

My point is that the changes the civil rights movement gave birth to were hard. But with the exception of unrepentant Confederates, most of us today recognize those battles expanded freedom for millions of Americans living then and millions more yet to be born.

I thought of that time when I read the reaction of Rep. Mike Hubbard to Friday's ruling by a Mobile federal judge that Alabama's ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional.

Hubbard is speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives. Its members like to call it the people's house. He is a powerful and influential man.

This is what he said of the ruling: "It is outrageous when a single unelected and unaccountable federal judge can overturn the will of millions of Alabamians who stand in firm support of the Sanctity of Marriage Amendment. The Legislature will encourage a vigorous appeals process, and we will continue defending the Christian conservative values that make Alabama a special place to live."

Christian conservative values. In other words Alabama will fight like hell to preserve an old status quo that courts are ruling unconstitutional while an increasing number of states pass laws to remove the governmental barriers that have prevented people who love one another from marrying each other.

I have no doubt Hubbard will get his way. Alabama will resist change. The politicians will pander, just as they did in the 1950s and 1960's when they defended Jim Crow saying Alabamians (white ones) didn't want their children to go to school with black kids.

And they will lose. Why? Because the American people, including many Alabamians, have decided that gay marriage does not mean that the society is coming apart at the seams.

Almost all of us know gay people. They are our co-workers. Some are our children or grandchildren. Some are our fellow church members. Some are our soldiers. Some are even our legislators.

That the battles will go on are certain. The U.S. Supreme Court will later this year decide the issue, just as it did in 1954 when it struck down school segregation.

I'm not going to contend that the fight for gay rights is equal to the fight black Americans waged five decades ago.

But it is a fight about expanding our definition of freedom. And I think it's a fight where the outcome, no matter what the high court decides, has already been decided.

Why? For two reasons. The first is something Martin Luther King said long ago.

"The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice." The long fight over gay rights now bends toward justice, I think.

And the second reason? Well it's because the law banning gay marriage has been struck down in the last place you would expect that to ever happen--Alabama.