The California Supreme Court says it’s OK to be married to someone of the same sex — as long as you got in ahead of the court decision. Everybody who hoped to follow the 36,000 who tied the knot during the Golden State’s brief golden age for gay marriage will have to work on another constitutional amendment, go back to court or move to a more liberal place.

Iowa, for example.

Irony is never deficient in American social movements, and this episode was a keeper. Last Tuesday’s split decision had the effect of moving the state from the vanguard to the resistance in a year’s time. Officially, at least.

Only Massachusetts permitted same-sex marriage when the California high court ruled last May that gay couples had the constitutional right to wed. By the time that same court ruled that opponents of gay marriage likewise have the right to change the constitution by popular vote, legalization of the rite had taken place in Iowa, Connecticut, Maine and Vermont.

The Left Coast, always possessed of a broader right-wing streak than Republicans give it credit for, was left behind, sort of. Yet there’s the remnant of 36,000 to bear witness most inconveniently to a new age and to nurture new equal-rights litigation, already under way. Plus, no doubt, another referendum, and maybe another.

Given the trends (Iowa, for heaven’s sake? Maine?) and the generational evolution that gay marriage reflects, it’s a shame to see all those precious dollars, sore feet and hard feelings expended in a religious war whose conclusion is foregone. America is going to have same-sex marriage, even if our liberal president isn’t ready to endorse it; and the sky will fail to fall.

Isn’t that another irony of the California case, that the justices left the 18,000 existing marriages intact because it would have been too disruptive to have dissolved them? Gay people who wish to have the state sanction their households are conservative rather than subversive — though the label “radical” could be applied, I suppose, to anyone who would fight to get hitched in a nation with a 50 percent divorce rate.

As the nominal conservatives resign themselves more and more to the inevitability of change, and as that change becomes less and less noticeable to society at large, one danger will present itself, I think: that most of us will forget what the fuss was about.

After all, this does not quite rise to the level of voting rights for women or equal schooling for blacks. And the ballot box — eventually — will supersede those irksome marches and lawsuits. Why didn’t we just let democracy take its course?

The answer, fellow mainstreamers, is that rights are rights, justice is justice and neither should be put to a vote. Constitutional amendments should be additions and expansions of rights, not deletions and constrictions. If you love the one you call a sinner, remember his Creator endowed him with the inalienable. And don’t condemn him for getting nasty as you pursue your perfectly legal mission to diminish his citizenship.

An “activist” California Supreme Court might have called Proposition 8 an overstep; instead, it pleased the judicial-branch skeptics while leaving the plaintiffs a consolation prize. More irony for spectators. More agony for folks who’ve had more than enough of it.