WATCH: Rachel Maddow Celebrates Historic Week for LGBT Rights

In a week marked by two cases on marriage equality being heard in the Supreme Court, Rachel Maddow ended it appropriated by toasting a "historic week" in LGBT history.

On her show Friday night she featured footage of a protest by gay activists at a New York City marriage license bureau in 1971, read a letter from a gay soldier's father, and discussed Edie Windsor's love for her late wife. Windsor is the plaintiff in the challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act that was argued before the high court Wednesday.

"There are all sorts of people and all sorts of fights that technically are not still around," she said. "But they live, and we can see them. We can see their light in some of the biggest -- deal and most difficult things that we do today. Whether or not you see equal rights for gay people as your particular fight --whether or not you even agree with that particular fight--this was a really big historic week for that fight, and therefore for our country. All the work, all the generations of work to get here, in fact, got us here. It worked."

Then, noting Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's remark this week that unequal treatment of gay couples' marriages makes them "skim milk marriages," for her "cocktail moment," Maddow mixed a "full cream" Brandy Alexander. "This is no skim milk cocktail, and I think America's about to leave skim milk marriages behind," she said. Watch below.

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