For Better Or For Worse?

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. --Reported by Perry Bacon Jr., John F. Dickerson, Viveca Novak and Douglas Waller/Washington; Chris Taylor and Laura Locke/San Francisco; Anne Berryman/Athens, Ga.; and Barbara Maddux/New York with other bureaus