If you were pushing a huge rock over a cliff, you would start off with gravity being your foe, but as you get more of it over the edge, you reach a tipping point. Then gravity becomes your friend, and pulls the rock over the edge. (At Right: Titan (1490-1576) painted Sysyphus doing his eternal punishment of pushing a rock up a mountain only to have it roll back to the bottom every time.)

For forty years since the Stonewall Riots, gay people have been pushing hard against a homophobic boulder, trying to get it off the cliff and from blocking our civil rights. We have come a long, long way.

To be sure, there have been set backs (DADT in the US Military), and sometimes the rock does not seem to move at all, but centimeter by centimeter it nears the tipping point.

Who would have believed the recent moving of that rock?

• Former US Vice President, Dick Cheney came out for gay marriage.
• China is having its first Gay Pride Parade.
• The US Conference of Mayors this week passed a resolution supporting the marriage of gay couples.
• A former NY State Republican Senate Majority Leader says he now supports legalizing same sex marriage in New York.
• Republican Mike Murphy wrote in this week's TIME Magazine that the GOP must change its attitude toward gay rights or the party will retreat into a political ice age.

The gay rights tipping point is at hand, and all reading these words are very likely to see it very soon.

The thing about getting a big, ugly, homophobic rock out of the way is that once it is gone everyone, gay and straight, will be relieved not to have to fight it or push it any longer.

And that tipping point is only centimeters away.