Disney legalizes same-sex unions: real social change doesn't come from Washington.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Walt Disney Co.

Gay couples are now free to buy a Fairy Tale Wedding package at Disneyland, Disney World, or Disney's cruise ships, with "a ceremony setting befitting the dreams of a princess." The company already allowed same-sex couples to tie the knot on the premises, but this is the first time their unions are being given the formal sanction implicit in the assistance of an official Disney wedding planner. The Magic Kingdom has thus proved itself more progressive than the motherland, or as progressive as you can be while throwing around the word fairy.

The reactions have ranged from the anti-gay activist Sonja Dalton's remark that this would be "a fantasy wedding indeed" to the gossip site TMZ.com's depressed discovery that homosexuals can be tacky too. (It's called camp, darlings.) But the most interesting fact here is just why Disney would change its policy. It wasn't because regulators ordered it to do so. If anything, the government has been increasingly unfriendly to gay unions, with multiple states passing laws refusing to recognize same-sex marriages. Nor was it pressure from activists, though The Advocate reports that the decision followed some criticism in the gay press. (From the other side of the issue, the Southern Baptist Convention boycotted the Disney empire from 1997 to 2005 because of its "promotion of homosexuality.") It was the fact that two potential customers asked to purchase the service, and the company decided it had more to gain from saying yes than saying no.

This development embodies what you might call the Hayekian case for gay marriage, after the economist F.A. Hayek, who celebrated social orders that emerge from below rather than being imposed from above. Gay marriage is evolving in an impeccably Hayekian fashion, as folkways appear and are gradually ratified by imitation, then market acknowledgement, and then, only lastly, by the law.

For eons, same-sex couples have quietly lived as though they were married. As social mores changed and gays came out of the closet, so did those longtime-companion relationships. Before long, lovers were holding their own marriage ceremonies, which were not recognized by the government or (at first) by any established church but did carry weight with family, friends, and neighbors. Couples started to draw up marriage-like contracts, in an effort to establish rights privately that they couldn't acquire publicly. Businesses had to decide whether to extend benefits to gay spouses; with time...