Miley Cyrus, Adorable Equal Marriage Rights Hero

I guess Miley Cyrus is probably getting too old for me to think of her as young and adorable (Annie Liebowitz photoshoots aside), but I’m glad that one of her acts of goofy late-teenaged rebellion turns out to be tattooing an equal sign on her right ring finger to celebrate the first day gay couples could legally marry in New York. I tend to be skeptical about the impact celebrities have on actual adults, and it’s true that the gesture is more than a little bit flip. But I think there’s a real utility to a star who is technically branded as if she’s from the heartland and whose main appeal is to tweens and teenagers taking a firm pro-equality stand in front of the 1.8 million people who follow her on Twitter. If kids these days are going to use their Internet machines to threaten Justin Bieber’s girlfriends or whatever, they might as well get an earful of the idea that celebrating the full lives of gay people, not merely accepting their existence, is important enough that a major star in the market got a permanent reminder of it.