This Sunday marks one year since the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic decision that finally, at long last, made marriage equality the law of the land, permitting gay and lesbian couples to marry in every state.

I’ll never forget the moment I heard the electrifying news. My husband, our kids and I were vacationing with my parents and other family members in my folks’ rural cabin, high in the mountains of western North Carolina. My brother called to me as the story came across CNN, and the goosebumps that followed— chicken skin, for kamaaina readers — seemed to last the rest of the week.

Gus and I had celebrated our 18^th anniversary just a few days prior. We were married in Tampa in 1997, just 16 days after that state enacted its “Defense of Marriage Act” limiting legal marriage to opposite-sex relationships, and exactly nine months after the federal version of DOMA took effect.

We later married again, when marriage was briefly made legal in Portland, Oregon, in 2004; the state later vacated those marriages. And we finally married for a third time in December 2013, getting our license on the first day that they began being issued under Hawaii’s brand-new marriage equality law.

Our arduous personal journey toward full recognition of our relationship mirrors in so many ways the LGBT community’s long slog toward marriage equality, so being able to celebrate the historic moment of the Obergefell v. Hodges decision with family was something I’ll always cherish — particularly the fond memories of beautiful pictures and touching comments that streamed across social media and television as the news swept the nation and the world.

As we collectively mark that special anniversary this weekend, few would have expected that we’d be recovering from the unspeakable horror of the Orlando Pulse nightclub attack less than two weeks ago. And yet, the nation’s response to that murderous rampage has proven that the shift the Supreme Court made through Obergefell was not just legal, but the predicate for a profound, fundamental change to American culture.

As we’ve seen these past 12 days, a change decidedly for the better.

From Grudging Tolerance To Warm Embrace

If the attack that killed 49 and wounded 53 at Pulse shone a spotlight on so much that is awful about our country, the response to it revealed a nation that no longer offers its lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender neighbors grudging tolerance, but embraces us as the friends, family members, neighbors and colleagues that we are.

At no time in the history of the civil rights movement for the LGBT community has America shown such immediate empathy for LGBT people. Not during the worst of the AIDS epidemic, when gay men were dying by the tens of thousands; not during anti-gay policies that drove more than 100,000 men and women out of the armed forces, solely because of their sexual orientations; and not during multiple marches on Washington and scores of campaigns to pass anti-discrimination laws, hate crimes bills and other legislation pointing to the fundamentally unequal space that LGBT people occupy in this country.

A few illustrations of that empathy bear emphasis:

• In the wake of the Pulse attack, scores of cities around the country, in states blue and red, held large vigils in support and shared grief. In Orlando itself, more than 50,000 people turned out to mourn one week after the attack and to block a Kansas hate group from defiling victim funerals. Said the county mayor, “Every person that was lost was the fabric of our community. Each person’s life was a beautiful story — a story that was so cruelly and abruptly ended.”
• In both the U.S. Senate and House, unprecedented efforts were launched last week and this to pass gun reform measures preventing terror suspects from legally purchasing firearms, in recognition of the fact that the Pulse attacker was for a time on a federal terrorist watch list. A filibuster led by Sen. Chris Murphy leveraged not only four immediate votes on reform measures, but compromise legislation that passed its first critical test on Thursday morning. An equally dramatic sit-in led by Rep. John Lewis that brazenly defied rules signaled the possible beginning of a changing environment for gun control in the heavily Republican-controlled House.
• Just 11 days after it was established, the leading online fundraising campaign for victims affected by the Pulse shooting had brought in more than $6 million from more than 114,000 donors against a constantly upwardly revised goal of $7 million. A second fund has taken in $7 million, mostly in large donations from corporate donors. Both funds are giving the entirety of donations directly to the almost exclusively LGBT victims of the attack and their families.

These are not the actions of a nation that still sees LGBT people as expendable. They are the actions of neighbors and friends, family members and colleagues who have watched us serve with courage, witnessed us struggle and persevere, seen us love and marry. The actions of a nation that has looked into our faces, joined hands in support and embraced our humanity in the process.

To be clear: The attack at Pulse was an abomination, carried out by a madman for reasons that as yet are unclear. Like many of you, I have grieved deeply over the past 13 days over the 49 lives cut short by that massacre and the 53 who now will bear its scars for life, and no amount of ensuing good will ever make what happened to them OK.

As we’ve seen in the accelerated pace of change in recent years on these issues, our national culture is transforming, becoming something far different than what it was. Something better.

But the lingering glow of those 49 souls may illuminate the dawn of a new era for this country, one in which LGBT people actually matter.

America still has much work to do to make that era reality. It remains perfectly legal in most states to fire or deny a job to a person simply because of his/her sexual orientation or gender identity. Gay and transgender people still suffer disproportionately from hate crimes, assaults and workplace discrimination. But as we’ve seen in the accelerated pace of change in recent years on these and related issues, our national culture is transforming, becoming something far different than what it was. Something better.

As we mark the one-year anniversary of Obergefell this Sunday and two weeks since the Pulse attack, I’ll be with my family on an airplane to Orlando. Our travels will take us near Pulse, through nearby neighborhoods and around a city still deeply wounded and struggling to find its feet. We will see friends and others directly impacted by the shootings, still trying to make sense of and draw meaning from the events of the past two weeks.

I plan to hug often, comfort where I can and, like the Hawaii delegation that delivered a one-mile lei to the Orlando memorial earlier this week, spread aloha as generously as possible, knowing that in unprecedented numbers, Americans across the country will be celebrating and grieving, too.