For Better Or For Worse?

Republicans believe the number of swing voters this year, usually around 15%, has shrunk to no more than 7%, many of them Catholics who might be receptive to an amendment. What matters most to Karl Rove, the President's chief political adviser, is another number: 4 million. That's how many evangelical Christians he believes voted in 1996 but did not turn out in 2000 because the Bush campaign didn't inspire them. Rove will do anything now to light a fire under them. Skeptical Democrats think the fire is called gay marriage. But many swing voters are also the suburbanites who abandoned the G.O.P. in the past when it got too wild-eyed about culture wars. "If they spend so much of their campaign talking about gay marriage," says Kerry press secretary David Wade, "it puts them back in 1992 at the Republican convention in Houston with Pat Buchanan."

That might not seem so bad to the loose coalition of conservative groups that calls itself the Arlington Group (for the Virginia city where they first convened), which began strategizing on gay marriage last June, not long after the landmark Supreme Court decision that struck down a Texas anti-sodomy law and, by extension, all state laws that criminalized homosexual acts. In his 63 majority opinion, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy insisted that the case "does not involve whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship homosexual persons seek to enter." In a concurrence, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that the "traditional institution of marriage" was not in play. But in his furious dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia warned that the ruling would nonetheless lead to challenges not only to state laws that ban same-sex marriage but also to those that prohibit "adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality and obscenity." And, for that matter, says Don Wildmon, president of the Mississippi-based American Family Association, polygamy. "I wonder why there were no three people wanting to marry in San Francisco," he says. "Why two? Why not three?"

Dedicated gay-marriage opponents still doubt that Bush will do much to push the amendment in public or in private. The Traditional Values Coalition, headed by the Rev. Louis Sheldon, will send out a fund-raising mailing called Homosexual Alert Fund to half a million households this week. Sheldon and his allies also hope to persuade sympathetic campaign donors to contact legislators and make clear that they will withhold money from candidates who fail to support a ban. "This will be the No. 1 issue in the next election," Wildmon predicts. "I think the average American has been slapped in the face by this."

All the same, it's not easy to tinker with the Constitution. Only 17 amendments have been added since the 10 in the Bill of Rights were tacked on in 1791. The most recent came in 1992, when Michigan became the 38th state to ratify a measure barring Congress from enacting any pay raises for itself that would take effect before the next general election — an idea first introduced in 1789. Oft-proposed amendments to require a balanced budget, permit prayer in public schools and ban flag burning have never made it out of Congress. The Equal Rights Amendment, which was meant to invalidate state and federal laws that discriminate against women, did emerge from Washington, only to grind to a halt in state legislatures in a process that took 10 years.

Is the nationwide mandate of constitutional change the best way to go? Thirty-one years ago, in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court imposed a single standard on abortion across a nation still groping toward diverse solutions on that divisive issue. We all know how well that worked. Now the images of gay and lesbian couples, ecstatic about getting married, are beaming across the nation. "They're putting the human face" on the issue, says Bruce Nelson of Lawrenceville, Ga., the father of a gay son, 23, and a lesbian daughter, 26. "It's not lawsuits with a bunch of lawyers arguing. I think a lot of people who maybe aren't decided, when they see that human element, probably will be swayed by it." That's true, although those same images are asking a wary nation to confront an issue it was happy to leave aside, and there's a chance politicians on both sides of the divide could be punished for it.