After Barack Obama historically announced his support for States’ Rights regarding gay marriage yesterday, we thought we’d take a fresh look at Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 Supreme Court case that struck down laws against interracial marriages. How, we wondered, did Earl Warren make a federal case out of it?

The Fourteenth Amendment, of course. Equal protection under the law. It was only ratified in 1868; we’ll get around to implementing it sooner or later.

But a couple of details from the decision caught our attention. The reason we were looking it up was obvious: The marriage of Obama’s parents would have been illegal in a third of the country. Hawaii was cool with it. And so was the District of Columbia, where Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving were married in June 1958.

It’s only when the Happy Couple moved to Virginia a few months later that trouble arose. That October, a grand jury indicted them for violating the state ban.

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Stinquer Andrew — and from what we can tell, the majority of Accredited Pundits — seems to think today’s announcement is a Big Fucking Deal, worthy of observing his supplied Unicorn Moment.

We, on the other hand, find ourself reaching Andy Rooney levels of curmudgeonliness, since Obama only announced his “personal” view on gay marriage, and is content to let states like North Carolina (and California!) decide the matter for themselves.

So, rather than go all Eeyore on you, here’s your Unicorn. We’ll be nursing a whiskey in the corner, waiting for our opinion to evolve.

[Daily Beast, via Sully]

President Obama Officially Affirms His Support for Same-Sex Marriage – Watch a special live report now: abcn.ws/kgR7lz

— ABC News (@ABC) May 9, 2012

But wait! There’s buzzkill!

The president stressed that this is a personal position, and that he still supports the concept of states deciding the issue on their own. But he said he’s confident that more Americans will grow comfortable with gays and lesbians getting married, citing his own daughters’ comfort with the concept.

Smart thinking. LBJ was also careful to affirm his personal support for civil rights, but let the states handle it.

President Obama Affirms His Support for Same Sex Marriage [ABC/Yahoo]

Meanwhile, at Fox Nation…

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From Stinque Book Club selection The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas: “Jonah Goldberg’s first book, Liberal Fascism, was a number one New York Times bestseller. A fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, he is the founding editor of National Review Online and has twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.” The Pulitzer part? Well, no. [MSNBC]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYJaUJun4uw

We’ve lived our entire life within an hour of the Pacific Ocean. So have our parents. And so, substantially, did our grandparents. Border to border, all our relatives are scattered along I-5.

The West Coast is all we know. Sure, we’ve visited Back East, but hey, we’ve also visited England and Japan. All are equally foreign to us.

And yet, for those of us of the European Persuasion, the West Coast remains virgin territory. Everybody came here from somewhere else, for whatever reason. There’s little history here; Southern California is fascinatingly rootless. Which means, even more than the rest of the country, we make things up as we go.

There’s no tradition to smother you growing up, nothing to rebel against when you come of age. Some things could be better — some things could always be better — but you don’t have to fight an entrenched power structure to get it.

The West is no longer the Frontier, but it’s where the frontier closed. It’s the America we are forever reviving — nobody cares about the Colonials, but everybody’s up for a good Western, classic or postmodern. The Midwestern isn’t a genre, unless you count Coen Brothers movies.

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“[Michele] Bachmann (R-Minn.) recently became a citizen of Switzerland, making her eligible to run for office in the tiny European nation… Bachmann’s three youngest children are also now Swiss citizens, and her two older children are eligible to apply for a fast-track citizenship process.” [Politico, via @BuzzFeedAndrew]