[intense_dropcap font_color="primary"]A [/intense_dropcap]merican history tells a story of rights and recognition extended to formerly excluded people. Going back to the 19th century, movements of the peripheral and the persecuted have risen up, won emancipation, and eventually had their struggles memorialized in the national story. For good and ill, the Founders bequeathed us a regime capable of absorbing a tremendous amount of social change without altering the fundamental constitutional structure.

But these things take time. It took a bloody civil war to abolish slavery, but de jure racial apartheid persisted for another century after Appomattox. Forty-six years separated the Stonewall Riots in 1969 from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell decision, which asserted a right to gay marriage in the Constitution.