The federal case to overturn Proposition 8 began today, and the case will, no doubt, be a touchstone for the future of the marriage equality fight (for better or worse, no?).

I really enjoyed Ted Olson’s piece, “The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage,” in “Newsweek” (if you haven’t read it, you really should. It’s a terrific argument for marriage equality), and I enjoyed, for once, someone calling marriage equality what it is: an essentially conservative idea.

Isn’t it funny: An issue that makes most red state conservatives’ heads explode is, at its core, a classically conservative idea (not the new “conservative,” not the one that screams at us from FOX News, barks at us from Limbaugh’s microphone and winks at us behind Palin’s glasses, not the kind of conservative that isn’t really anything like conservatism at all).

I’m essentially a Blue State kind of boy, but on the issue of marriage, I have to admit: I’m a conservative, old school. I believe in the primacy of the institution of marriage and its power to reap benefits not only to the people who enter into it, but for communities that embrace and support it. I think life is better with a little marriage in it, regardless of who you’re wanting to marry.

And now, at this moment when the argument for marriage equality has become so elegantly articulated by people who, traditionally, should oppose it, puts our community in a unique position:

Now that we’re moving closer to actually getting it, what in the hell are we going to do with it?

My proposition is, of course, a conservative one: Marry well. Respect marriage for what it is, not what we want it to be. Sign up for the responsibilities as well as the benefits of marriage. Embrace what is conservative about marriage and make it a part of our un-conservative lives.

Because marriage does more than tie two people together through law. Marriage ties two people together and, in turn, ties us to our community.

Tony Kushner wrote, “The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.” (And this from a progressive! There’s no one bluer than Tony Kushner, there’s no mistaking him for a Republican, not even in a dark alley after a Valium and a weekend-long bender.)

That smallest human unit is marriage. For all its rules, for all its restrictions, for all its failures in recent decades, it remains that wellhead of community: the place we abandon a world centered on ourselves and begin seeing the world through the lens of responsibility to another.

Winning the right to marry will only be a meaningful win if we, as a community, do what we can to strengthen and heal the institution. It’s time for us to move past our focus on who we are without marriage. The fight is rolling along, and while we’re still far from complete victory, the light at the end of the tunnel is more visible every day. It’s time for us to start thinking about who we will be with marriage: what will we bring to the institution, as well as what it will bring to us.