In 1987, as a justice on the New Hampshire Supreme Court, Souter joined a majority opinion ruling that the state's new ban on adoption and foster parenting by "homosexuals" was constitutional. In a case known as Opinion of the Justices (because the court gave its opinion without a challenge from an individual litigant), the court said that the legislature could conclude that having a gay foster or adoptive parent could make a child gay! The court rejected all the evidence to the contrary and did not even bother to say why, even if it was true, it would be a bad thing. (The court did overturn a ban on operating child care facilities. Yes, that's right. The New Hampshire legislature voted in 1987 to keep gay people from operating child care facilities.)

The lesson? People can change. Not likely the people put on the Supreme Court these days. Souter didn't turn out to be the conservative he was expected to be. So the vetting changed. I'm not counting on as much as a budge out of Alito or Roberts.

But I think of my father. Horrified when I came out to him in the 1970's, by the time he died in 1998 he had spent at least a decade sending me the latest NY Times clippings on gay and lesbian families. I still remember the first time he used the word "lesbian" in casual conversation, as though it was just another word.

I don't know what caused Souter's shift. Maybe someday we'll learn he had gay friends, acquaintances, family, even law clerks. But I know I am grateful for his votes on our side, and I have no doubt that if the constitutionality of a ban on gay adoption (that's you, Florida) were before him today he would make a decision different from the one he made in 1987.

Then again...if he had ruled with us in 1987 he never would have been appointed to the Supreme Court.

And New Hampshire repealed its ban on gay adoption in 1999.