As soon as the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage was made public on Friday, the New York Times published a strange celebration of that ruling by Frank Bruni, the paper’s only gay columnist (and second-worst one). This is a good thing for Bruni, but a bad thing for anyone looking for an enlightening perspective on the news.

It’s easy to tell that the column is going to be bad very quickly, when with the 4oth word, Bruni starts referring to himself as “he”:

HOW will the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage alter the way Americans feel about the country, and how we feel about ourselves?

I can’t speak for everyone. But I can speak for this one 12-year-old boy.

He stands out among his siblings because he lacks their optimism about things, even their quickness to smile. He has a darkness that they don’t. He’s a worrier, a brooder. He’s also more self-conscious. He can’t get comfortable with himself.

What follows is a long-winded, third-person recounting of Bruni’s life as a gay man, from closeted teenager to partnered adult living in a house with a white-picket fence. Is it interesting? It is not.

Bruni narrates himself as a young boy who doesn’t understand his feelings and as a teenager who quickly leafs through a weird book about being gay. Then he goes to college:

I can speak for a 20-year-old college student. He has opened up to his family and to many friends about who he is, not because he possesses any particular courage but because being honest involves less strain, less effort, than keeping secrets and dreading their exposure. Also because he wants to meet men like him, develop crushes he can act on, even fall in love.

And so far, there’s been no terrible price. His family doesn’t wholly understand him, but they want and resolve to. For every friend who now keeps a distance, there’s another who draws closer.

This is written in a somber tone, but why? By any reasonable measure, this is a success story! Frank Bruni came out before he could even drink and... nothing bad happened? His parents didn’t really understand his life and he lost some old friends but made some new ones. This is otherwise known as “being in college.”

Bruni writes that “he wishes there were a way to be honest without wearing a tag,” and that he was forced to live life “as someone to be tolerated.” Bruni was in a fraternity as an undergrad, and after graduate school became a Pulitzer fellow. He worked at some good newspapers before finding a home at the New York Times, where he won several journalism awards and enjoyed the paper’s most luxurious positions: travel writer, food critic, columnist.

Bruni fucking excelled at life, and more power to him because of it. Bruni says that his life was bogged down by always having to explain that being gay is a not a choice—

And he is always having to explain, to one inquisitive person after another, that he didn’t choose this path, that it’s not a statement or a caprice, that he neither rues nor relishes it, that it’s just there: fundamental, foundational, forever. The ritual grinds him down.

—but... did he really? Is this the lasting legacy of homophobia? That a very successful man had to tell the inquisitive people of New York City that you don’t choose to be gay?

As an adult, he resides in a nice home with his boyfriend, but chooses nonetheless to live in the shadows.

I can speak for a 30-year-old man who owns and lives in a house in the suburbs with another man his age. They’re romantic partners. A couple. A white picket fence surrounds the yard behind their red brick colonial. It keeps the German shepherd from straying off.

But this fantasy has been edited, abridged. The man and his partner have never spoken of children, because that would involve special, intricate arrangements and because most people don’t really approve.

They have never hugged in the front yard, never kissed in front of a window, because what would the neighbors think? What would the neighbors do?

A good way for Bruni to show his neighbors that being gay was normal would have been to kiss his man, all the time, in front of the open windows.

We fast forward to today, where, Bruni writers, the Supreme Court has caused American society to “rupture.” He continues:

Tomorrow’s 12-year-old won’t feel the foreboding that yesterday’s did. Tomorrow’s 16-year-old will be less likely to confront, sort through and reject so many sad stereotypes of what it means to be gay or lesbian.

There won’t be so many apologies and explanations for the 20-year-old, 30-year-old or 45-year-old, and there won’t be such a ready acceptance of limits. There won’t be the same limits, period.

This is broadly true, of course, but it also would have happened—was happening, is happening—had the Supreme Court ceased to exist yesterday. Society’s progressive march forward on gay rights should not be chalked up to a bunch of elderly people on a hill, who, if we’re being generous, dunked an alley-oop that had been hanging in the air for years. To attribute the optimism of the future to one decision made by one branch of the government is at best disingenuous and irresponsible; at worst, it’s disrespectful.

The Supreme Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage will be a mile marker on the road to the hazy paradise that Bruni describes. The five justices making up the majority did not kill homophobia (to say nothing of transphobia). Hopefully they didn’t also give birth to too many more columns like this one.

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.