June 26 · This Day in America
Two days after the Soviets seal off every road, rail, and canal into West Berlin, the United States answers not with tanks but with cargo planes. Operation Vittles begins. On this first day, thirty-two American C-47s lift off in West Germany and land at Tempelhof carrying eighty tons of flour, milk, and medicine to two million blockaded people. It sounds impossible. A modern city cannot live on what airplanes can carry. But the planes keep coming, around the clock, one every few minutes for nearly a year, until the Soviets give up the blockade. It is one of the strangest acts of power in American history: a superpower choosing to win a standoff by delivering groceries. The children of Berlin learn to watch the sky for the plane that wags its wings and drops candy on tiny parachutes. The Cold War had just begun, and America's first move was to keep a city alive.
Source: history.state.gov
Also on this day · 2015
In Obergefell v. Hodges, the Court holds five to four that the Fourteenth Amendment requires every state to license and recognize the marriage of same-sex couples. Justice Kennedy writes that the plaintiffs ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law, and the Constitution grants them that right. That night the White House is lit in the colors of the rainbow. A long argument with an old paragraph had moved another step.
Source: supreme.justia.com
“They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”Justice Anthony Kennedy, Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015