“This decision was controversial in the eyes of some, courageous in the eyes of others,” she said of the SJC ruling. “But I think we will all come to see that this decision was undoubtedly correct.”

As couples listened to the speakers and music, some of them wiped away tears, others held each other and one couple sang quietly under their breath, “We’re going to the chapel and we’re going to get married.”

And the ceremony was punctuated with cheers from the throngs gathered outside who filled the City Hall lawn and across Mass. Ave.

“I’ve never been so proud to be from Cambridge,” said Arthur Lipkin of the Cambridge Lavender Alliance, a gay and lesbian advocacy group.

He added after hearing cheers from outside, “They’ve never been so proud to be from Cambridge!”

The couples who filed in Cambridge were among over one thousand same-sex couples to be married across Massachusetts in the first days after the court ruling took effect.

Twenty-three couples in Cambridge and more across the state obtained court waivers of the three-day waiting period and received their marriage licenses on May 17.

AFTER THE HONEYMOON

Following the court decision in Massachusetts, several other communities across the nation—from Oregon to New Jersey—defied their own state laws to award marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

San Francisco issued 4,200 licenses until the state’s Supreme Court ordered the city to stop in March, and the mayor of New Paltz in upstate New York faces criminal charges for granting licenses to 25 gay couples.

But even in Massachusetts, the only place to issue state-sanctioned licenses, the future of same-sex marriage remains uncertain.

In February, after the state senate asked the SJC for an advisory opinion on whether a compromise bill allowing civil unions would satisfy the court’s ruling, the justices responded in a 4-3 decision that only marriage would be constitutional.

“The dissimilitude between the terms ‘civil union’ and ‘civil marriage’ is not innocuous; it is a considered choice of language that reflects a demonstrable assigning of same-sex, largely homosexual, couples to second-class status,” the justices wrote in their majority opinion.

The court’s decision followed the advice of 18 Harvard Law School professors who joined 72 other legal scholars from across the country in January to urge the SJC to reject the civil unions proposal.

“I thought it was important, as did a large number of the best constitutional law scholars and legal historians in the country, to weigh in on whether there really is any ambiguity,” said Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law Laurence H. Tribe ’62, who wrote the friend-of-the-court brief. “I thought it was clear that there wasn’t any.”