The Politics of Gay Marriage

Daily Kos has a MOST interesting post here, where someone has gone to the trouble of googling all 100 Senators to get their on-the-record comments about George Bush's proposed anti-gay-marriage amendment. The conclusion (which seems pretty solid to us) is that the amendment is already "toast."

Which is actually what astute political analysts were saying approximately one minute after the Prez made his speech about it last Tuesday ... that he KNEW it would never make it through Congress, that he cynically realized he was only tossing a symbolic hunk of red meat to the Jerry Falwell/Pat Robertson foot soldiers ... that he's counting on the move to win him more extremist votes than lose him moderates.

The problem for Karl Rove NOW is that the TV screen is full of the faces and voices of REAL people, actual non-abstractions lining up to get married in San Francisco and now in New Paltz, New York (and where else by next week?). It's gotten much harder to hate gay marriage in the abstract when real gay couples in the flesh are so palpably well-meaning and good-hearted and family-fricking-oriented in front of all our faces now (excepting perhaps Rosie O'Donnell). Which perhaps helps to explain the article in today's New York Times with interviews of highly religious fundamentalists saying, "Maybe we ought not mess with the U.S. Constitution over this."

Wouldn't it serve them right if this blatant wedge-driving and hate-mongering backfired spectacularly on them?