Holding their marriage license, Samantha Head says the last person she told about her sexual orientation was her grandmother. She was afraid a woman in her ninth decade would object. Instead, the grandmother told Samantha, “Screw the conservatives and screw the die-hard Christians. You love each other. So I love my Sammies.”

It’s easy to demonize conservatives and Christians. It’s harder to recognize that faith is a stern master, especially among African-Americans whose animus toward homosexuality runs deep. We should know by now that social change takes times, but the American public tends to eventually get things right.

“The arc of the moral universal is long but it bends toward justice,” Martin Luther King said of the fight for racial equality. Five decades later, Donaldson and his wife posed for pictures in front of the Little Rock Nine monument and dismissed the fight for sexual equality. In the not-too-distant future, their views on homosexuality will pass into history. Nobody can stop the arc of justice.