The Capitol Dome Just Got A Little Bigger and a Little Higher

Just wow:

Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.

 ... from President Obama's Second Inaugural Address today.

I never ever thought I would here my kind mentioned by a President of the United States in an inaugural address together with the struggle for women's equality and with the long fight for the Civil Rights of African Americans.  For the first time in my life, I feel like a part, and a historic part, of the United States.

There were a lot of shout-outs to Philadelphia architect Thomas Ustick Walter's US Capitol dome from Senator Chuck Schumer and from Myrlie Evars today.  The cast iron dome which almost did not get built, was finished 150 years ago this year in the midst of the Civil War.

The unfinished US Capitol dome looming over Lincoln's first inauguration, March 4, 1861


As Myrlie Evars said in her invocation, the US Capitol dome represents the unity of the American people and their collective sovereignty.

And it was an ex-slave who cast Thomas Crawford's statue of Freedom in bronze on top of the dome.