It’s a hobby of mine that when some great progressive victory is torn from the frothing jaws of conservatism, I head not to the snug back-patting enclave of liberal blogs, but to the Daily Mail and Telegraph websites. There are few things more fun than sorting comments on the articles of those two honourable publications by “recommends” – you get to see humanity in all its baroquely misanthropic splendour. So it proved with Tuesday night’s victory for gay marriage in the Commons.

The Daily Mail’s average armchair pundit had fortified their armchair with barbed wire and was standing atop it with a shotgun in preparation for the coming gay apocalypse. There was a tone of sheer disbelief at what was happening to Britain. If you wanted to distill the comments section into a single image, it was that of an old, white man spluttering indignantly over and over again: “But you… you just can’t!” But we can, and we did.

I have more sympathy for some of the opposition than might be imagined by my smugly liberal schadenfreude. Over Christmas I had the gay marriage debate with my grandma, who was pinko commie back in her university days and remains staunchly left wing. Despite having gay friends in a civil partnership, whose ceremony she had gladly attended, she wouldn’t budge from the idea that marriage was between a man and a woman. In the end, I gave it up as a bad job, putting it down to generational differences.

There you have it, really. 95% of Cambridge students are perfectly happy with the open presence of gays and their participation in our society and institutions because we’ve grown up with them. Casual homophobia remains, but pin just about anyone in their twenties down on the issue and they’ll agree that gay love is basically the same as anyone else’s. For the older generation, though, this has all happened very quickly. We’ve gone from having the openly homophobic Section 28 on the statute books to legalising gay marriage in under ten years. I repeat: under ten years. It’s the fastest civil rights movement ever seen in this country. Unsurprisingly, those who grew up in a very different country are not keeping up.

The most dismissive response I found was a Telegraph blog from Brendan O’Neill, who snarked in his post: “Gay Marriage? Meh” that no-one actually cared about your stupid gay marriage anyway. There is a really uncomfortable part of me that agrees with the “meh” part. Wonderful achievement as this is, it was always going to happen. There was no way my generation would get to their 40s living in a country where gays couldn’t marry. Whereas when watching the welfare state come under savage attack or rising global inequality, we don’t have the luxury of running out the clock. Put up the bunting, cut the cake, for this is a lovely victory – but it’s the easiest one we’re going to get for some time.