The D.C. Council’s Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary may have just spent two long days hearing public testimony on the same-sex marriage bill for no good reason. A draft report coming out of the committee and currently being circulated to the rest of the council argues that marriage equality already exists in the city, and a law legalizing it isn’t much more than a formality.

“In recognizing same-sex marriage in the District, Bill 18-482 does not redefine any concept in the law (indeed, the Committee maintains same-sex marriage is already permitted under District law), as nowhere in our Code is the institution of marriage reserved to opposite-sex couples,” reads the report. “Rather, Bill 18-482 removes the custom, or practice, that marriage is only between a man and a woman. This simple legislative act puts in the law what is already in the law: that the right of marriage applies fully to all in the District.”

In a process described as “prolonged and incremental,” the draft report cites a number of laws and initiatives dating back to 1992 that replaced gender-specific language in the D.C. Code and established domestic partnerships for same-sex couples. It also states that the factors relied upon by the D.C. Superior Court in 1995 ruling prohibiting same-sex marriage in the city have been “methodically, and purposefully, reversed by the Council or have become obsolete through societal and cultural changes.” In short, same-sex couples in the District currently enjoy all the legal rights of marriage, and the legislation currently before the D.C. Council will merely establish that fact as law and custom.

For as big a fight as same-sex marriage has been in other parts of the country, the District’s approach to legalizing it seems methodical and anticlimactic to an extreme. The symbolism of it of course matters, but the committee appears to have decided that the right of same-sex couples to marry in D.C. already exists — it just hasn’t ever been referred to as “marriage.”

The bill is expected to be marked up on Tuesday, with a full council vote planned for December 1.