The Supreme Court’s decisions this week on gay marriage and health insurance for all Americans have been microanalyzed to death, and there’s no reason for me to join in that chorus. Instead, I’ll macroanalyze them: These decisions, and the will of the Americans behind them, speak loudly about our basic human decency.

I’ve been worried for a while about our direction as a country on that front. It’s been hard to get our better angels off the ground in recent years. We had a health care system that punished you for being poor and enslaved you in many ways for being sick, and we had whole massive industries fighting to keep it that way because it was good for business. No other advanced economy in the world had any of that nonsense. And no one has ever been able to rationally explain to me why gay marriage bans aren’t straight-up bigotry; God usually gets invoked in that argument. I like to remind people that God also got invoked in the slavery argument and gets shoved into all sorts of war arguments that almost certainly piss Him off.

By the time the Supremes weighed in on both of these fronts, you could feel the ice floes melting under the opponents. I suspect many sensed they were about to get very cold and wet. Sometimes, that’s what it takes to change hearts and minds. Often, the subsequent results make those one-time opponents wonder what they were thinking and glad the world changed. I’m confident that will happen here, too.