The ruling was only an early step in a civil rights tradition: a testing of a questionable law by a public official and citizens....

The San Francisco decision - which somehow drew no new conservative outcries against "activist judges" - should be seen as but a bump on the way to progress. Just as California was the first state to strike down its own laws against interracial marriage, we expect that it will ultimately find a constitutional basis for the human right to same-sex marriage.