What can we learn of immediacy from classic literature? We can of course reach back to the antiquity of Sapphos to appreciate today's Supreme Court ruling — or, one may be surprised to find, we may also look to the early and more puritanical modern era, which contained the rebellious genius of William Blake and his 1793 "Visions of the Daughters of Albion":
Till she who burns with youth, and knows no fixed lot; is bound
In spells of law to one she loaths: and must she drag the chain
Of life, in weary lust! must chilling murderous thoughts, obscure
The clear heaven of her eternal spring! to bear the wintry rage
Of a harsh terror driv'n to madness, bound to hold a rod
Over her shrinking shoulders all the day; & all the night
To turn the wheel of false desire....
Blake regarded 18th-century English marriage laws as relics of a misappropriated Christianity. And though here he writes of the burdens of loveless heterosexual marriage, the possibility of an Obergefell v. Hodges opens wide.
We're not quite the swiftly evolved modernists that we fancy ourselves. As the much older literature of perhaps Solomon's Testament put it: "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun."
For me it's a mystification that today's conservatives — our traditionalists! — so consistently misapprehend what humanity has understood throughout the ages.