Boies, wearing a flag pin on his lapel, said that the state of California is engaged in “gay bashing.” He spoke intensely about the gay and lesbian plaintiffs, who offered poignant testimony about their loving relationships and about wanting to be liked and accepted: “These people are people you would want your child to grow up and marry. You can be a child molester and get married. You can be a wife beater and get married. You can be a child-support scofflaw and get married. The importance of that emotional relationship is so vital to the pursuit of happiness that even prison felons, who aren’t really procreating, have a right to get married.”

Noting the rabid effort being made to restrict marriage to only those who can protect its sanctity, a chuckling Olson reeled off some names: “Tiger Woods, Eliot Spitzer, Mark Sanford, Kobe Bryant, Bill Clinton.”

I asked Olson if he misted up, as many in the courtroom did, when Jeff Zarrillo, a 36-year-old manager at AMC Entertainment, testified that he loved his partner “probably more than I love myself.”

“Yes,” Olson replied, noting that he finds himself getting weepy a lot, including when a bright lawyer in his Washington law firm approached him in the library to tell him she was a lesbian mother of two and she was grateful to him.

“I think there’s something the matter with you if you don’t care enough to feel the suffering that they’ve been through and if you’re not emotionally upset about the fact that we’re doing an immense amount of harm to people,” he said. “We’re not treating them like Americans. We’re not treating them like citizens.”

Read the rest of Maureen Dowd’s New York Times column here.