The edge that gays had over straights from time immemorial was that they couldn’t say yes to marriage.

Now they may not be able to say no.

This, bet me, will be the unintended consequence of Tuesday’s ruling by the high court of Massachusetts requiring the licensing of same-sex marriage.

If you love me, why won’t you marry me?

“To be or not to be?” is nothing next to that one.

But the law protected gays and lesbians from the question. They couldn’t say yes, so they didn’t have to say no. And this insulated them from the consequences of the wedding bells.

If you can’t marry, you can’t divorce. The sanctity of marriage, promoted both by those who oppose gay marriage and those who favor it, now shows numbers running close to 60 percent on the divorce ledger.

A good piece of this number is based on adultery. Under the new Massachusetts ruling, gays will for the first time come under the adultery laws of the state. Does anyone, gay or straight, believe that the divorce rate will thus drop? Vegas, guaranteed, will run it up, big time.

And palimony cannot be far behind. For the first time, a gay passing for straight can be outed by an order to show cause. I lived with him for 10 years, and he was married, and now I’m to be left with nothing?

Or any old divorce case.

Just name a man or woman as correspondent, and suddenly this gentleman from Boston or that lady from Springfield is exposed, must defend himself/herself.

And it’s not just Massachusetts. Anybody can get married in a state that allows gay marriage.

You don’t have to be a citizen of such a state. Remember when couples drove to Maryland or Connecticut to beat the Wasserman test?

Pity poor Vermont and Howard Dean. Massachusetts has turned Vermont into typewriters against computers.

Why take the civil-union stuff without the vows against Boston?

Imagine a lover refusing to go to Boston when he or she says it’s forever. What, you won’t pay the air fare?

Of course, it’s not clear whose daddy pays for the wedding – even the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court hasn’t yet wondered who the bride’s father is. Which is nothing next to the child-support questions.

Gay men in large numbers now adopt children, and lesbians either adopt kids or mother them through artificial insemination.

Divorce lawyers must be salivating over the potential fees – this is a whole new world for them.

And for constitutional lawyers, too. In 1996, Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act, which provided that no state shall be required to give “full faith and credit” to another state’s recognition of same-sex marriage. But the U.S. Constitution allows no such exemption.

The Supreme Court has shown its contempt for the words of the Constitution – see Gore vs. Bush – but this one will be hard to ignore.

So while I don’t want to seem disrespectful to marriage – 41 years to the same girl, and a new grandson – I think fairness to gays requires my saying all I’ve said above.

Told in a song by the great, late Cousin Joe of New Orleans: You got what you wanted, but you lost what you had.

Sidney Zion is a columnist for the New York Daily News.

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