Rachel Maddow Gleefully Giddy About Gay America, Sad Scalia (Video)

The Supreme Court refused on Monday to hear any cases on marriage equality, effectively affirming lower courts' decisions to throw out bans on same-sex marriage in five states, and therefore another six states in the same circuits. That means that as of a week or so from now, Our Great Nation will have equal marriage rights in 30 states.

This is a cause of Great Butthurt for many decent church-going folks with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces, and a cause of jubilation for many others, like let's say Rachel Maddow, who is almost incapable of containing herself in this review of how we got here in the year and some months since 2013's decision in U.S. v. Windsor , the case that threw out the Defense of Marriage Act .

Just how giddy is Our Rachel? Here's how giddy: while describing Chief Justice John Roberts' forgettable dissent in Windsor, which claimed that the decision was very narrow and unlikely to affect much of anything beyond the case at hand, Maddow starts channeling Gilda Radner's Emily Litella character:

[Roberts] argued in his dissent that this was a very, very teeny-tiny-teeny-teeny-teeny-tiny little ruling, a very narrow ruling, he said, didn't really mean much of anything, really only applied to this one case and wouldn't have wide implications.

But Antonin Scalia's separate dissent got far more attention. Scalia called the majority decision "argle-bargle" and said that it marked a dangerous turn toward the whole damn world wanting equality, and by golly, so it has. We have to imagine he was especially delighted when attorneys started using his dissent as a roadmap for overturning bans on marriage equality, and when judges began citing it in their decisions to do exactly that.

And so, here is Rachel Maddow just squee ing like anything over a fairly awesome milestone, and for all that glee -- "Somewhere tonight, Antonin Scalia is listening to opera really loud and looking in a mirror, saying 'Argle-bargle! It's all argle-bargle!'" -- this is only the second-coolest part of her Monday show:

And now here's the actual coolest part of the Monday Maddow Show: A chat with Edith Windsor herself, along with her attorney Roberta ("Robbie") Kaplan. Ms. Windsor, who eventually got DOMA overturned when she sued to be recognized as the actual married survivor of her wife, Thea Spyer, is just about the nicest civil-rights icon you're ever going to meet, or at least see on TV. Maddow is genuinely star-struck here, and at the end of the interview can't believe how lucky she is to have a job where she gets to talk to Edith Windsor. We imagine Windsor has that effect on a lot of people. You may just want to have some tissues handy for this one.