On Fri­day, the US Supreme Court de­cid­ed by a nar­row 5-4 but nonethe­less land­mark de­ci­sion to le­galise same-sex mar­riages in that coun­try.The move end­ed a hodge-podge of leg­is­la­tion in that na­tion which var­ied ac­cord­ing to each state's at­ti­tude to the con­tentious is­sue, and the de­ci­sion will not end the de­bates and dif­fi­cul­ties that will fol­low the de­ci­sion.Mis­sis­sip­pi was se­ri­ous­ly con­sid­er­ing halt­ing the is­suance of mar­riage li­cens­es al­to­geth­er.

The state's House Ju­di­cia­ry Chair­man Andy Gip­son, a Bap­tist min­is­ter, vowed to do every­thing in his pow­er "to pro­tect and de­fend the re­li­gious free­doms of Mis­sis­sip­pi." In an un­usu­al turn, many of the most pop­u­lar and high­ly placed re­sults on search en­gines were not about such po­lit­i­cal con­flicts and dis­agree­ments, they were, in­stead, posts about the le­gal ram­i­fi­ca­tions of the change, which rep­re­sents a tec­ton­ic shift in the un­der­ly­ing law for same-sex cou­ples.

For the first time, on a na­tion­al ba­sis, the same laws ap­ply to all mar­ried cou­ples, putting part­ners of the same sex in the same le­gal cat­e­go­ry as oth­er life part­ners.This ap­plies to per­son­al af­fairs such as es­tate plan­ning and joint fi­nan­cial arrange­ments.The stun­ning Supreme Court de­ci­sion did not hap­pen spon­ta­neous­ly, like some mirac­u­lous flar­ing of good­will.

It was the re­sult of decades of stress-test­ing the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple that all men and women are cre­at­ed equal and should en­joy the same rights un­der the US con­sti­tu­tion.In decades to come, the im­pact of that reaf­fir­ma­tion by that the high­est court in the Unit­ed States may be­gin to fade, like mem­o­ries of law­ful dis­crim­i­na­tion against African Amer­i­cans or the dis­en­fran­chise­ment of women vot­ers.

The law may not al­ways be suc­cess­ful­ly en­forced in the face of re­li­gious doc­trine and per­son­al or even com­mu­ni­ty prej­u­dices.But what is note­wor­thy, and what makes the ques­tion of wider adop­tion less than straight­for­ward, is that some strong op­po­si­tion to it, on re­li­gious grounds, has come from places such as the African-Amer­i­can church.

Notwith­stand­ing the fact that many had drawn par­al­lels be­tween the civ­il rights and gay rights strug­gles, the re­li­gious con­vic­tions of the black lead­ers would not al­low them to coun­te­nance mar­riage as be­ing any oth­er arrange­ment ex­cept be­tween a man and woman.The strong­ly held and deeply root­ed re­li­gious ob­jec­tion to same-sex mar­riage should give pro­po­nents in T&T pause.

At­ti­tudes in this coun­try to gay and trans­gen­der peo­ple–as shown by vit­ri­olic so­cial me­dia re­ac­tion to the mere men­tion of trans­gen­der ac­tivist Jow­elle de Souza in po­lit­i­cal dis­course–are still a work in progress, even though, gen­er­al­ly, they have soft­ened over the years. The ques­tion of same-sex mar­riage is an al­to­geth­er dif­fer­ent, and tougher, propo­si­tion than sim­ply demon­strat­ing more en­light­ened at­ti­tudes to gay peo­ple.

So, in our coun­try, that dis­cus­sion re­mains on­go­ing. No-one ex­pects any of the par­ties to try to push T&T to the bench­mark that the US has set. But there re­mains much that could be done in ad­dress­ing the an­cient and dra­con­ian laws that re­main on this coun­try's books re­gard­ing mat­ters that should, sen­si­bly, re­main the per­son­al choic­es of con­sent­ing adults.

T&T, along with 41 of the 53 mem­ber states of the Com­mon­wealth still re­ly on British leg­is­la­tion more than 200 years old to crim­i­nalise re­la­tion­ships be­tween same-sex cou­ples.That de­bate about sep­a­rat­ing the guid­ance of the Church from the re­spon­si­bil­i­ties of State, is per­haps one worth en­ter­ing in­to.