For Better Or For Worse?

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Democrats are also deeply suspicious that, as Election Day nears, Republicans might try to force a vote on the amendment bill, even a vote that they know they will lose, as a way to put pressure on congressional Democrats in tight races. A perfect date might be just before the Democratic National Convention, scheduled to start July 26 in gay-friendly Boston. But an amendment vote could hurt Republicans as well. The party's pollsters show that nearly two-thirds of Americans oppose gay marriage in principle, but are evenly split on the wisdom of a constitutional amendment. It tells you something about the local complexities of the gay-marriage issue that Colorado, the home state of both sponsors of the amendment proposal, has a law banning gay marriage but also has three cities--Denver, Aspen and Boulder--where gays can affirm their unions as domestic partners.

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?"