We just learned that a judge has struck down the state of Utah’s ban on same-sex marriages. That’s not exactly a big headline, of course. Same-sex marriages are already legal in 17 states — New Mexico joined the list earlier this week — and the District of Columbia. The Utah case is especially interesting, however.

Utah’s law endorsed marriage as legal only for a man and a woman. And in defending that law, the state’s attorney general argued that the “traditional definition of marriage nationally promotes legitimate state interests in promoting responsible procreation, and in promoting the original mode of child-rearing.” Apart from an uninspiring over-dependence on the forms of the word “promote,” the attorney general’s argument might be questioned on several grounds.

To begin with, let’s recall that the late legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini once defined “tradition” as “the last bad performance.” True. There’s not always much good to be said for tradition. After all, traditionalists used to take adulterers and stone them to death. In the antebellum South, tradition decreed that slavery was a good thing. As for the notion that the laws denying same-sex partners the right to legally marry “promote responsible procreation,” one could wonder how exactly has man-woman marriage generated responsible procreation? With divorce rates that affect nearly half of man-woman unions, with so many children being raised by single parents, with unwanted pregnancies and abandoned kids, what does the word “responsible” mean? And for heaven’s sake, “promoting the original mode of child-rearing” sounds like a 19th century screed from a Dickens’ novel. Really.

The attorney general concluded his rousing argument by declaring that it ought to be up to each individual state to decide what the law there should be. Well, that seems reasonable, doesn’t it? Let’s think back to that antebellum period again when Congress decided each state or territory could decide whether or not it wanted to approve slavery. That was fair, except for the slaves, of course. And then later, some states wanted to give women the vote, and others didn’t. That definitely should have been left up to the states because the only ones who would have been affected were women, right? So what’s the big deal with denying same-sex marriages if your state wants it? No one’s affected except same-sex partners.

Frankly, what we have here is a long-time tradition of discrimination against various groups of people, endorsed by legal means at various times through our troubled history. So while we celebrate the sagacity of our Founding Fathers and the freedoms we cherish in this country, let us take a moment to observe that we have also spent a lot of years denying those freedoms to some of our citizens. Maybe it’s time to go to work on that once again. Maybe that judge’s ruling in Utah is another step in the right direction.