If at First You Don't Succeed...

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But how real is the "threat"? Amid the hysteria, it's worth reassessing the facts. Gay couples have the provisional right to marry in only one state, and that state's voters will decide in 2006 whether that right will remain. Thirty-eight states have legislative bans on marriage rights for gays and on recognizing other states' gay marriages. The federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 underlines the right of states not to recognize marriages from other states. Four states have constitutional amendments barring marriage to gays; as many as a dozen have scheduled referendums to consider this. In Massachusetts, there has been no collapse of traditional marriages--just a heartwarming flurry of new ones as well. There is, in fact, no danger to traditional marriage at all--just a move to bring the last remaining citizens into its embrace. As I've argued for more than a decade, giving gay couples the right to marry is, when you think about it, a conservative measure, demanding of gays that they live up to standards of fidelity, responsibility and commitment never before asked of them. It is pro-family, uniting those gay family members with their siblings and parents in the unifying ritual of civil marriage. Why cannot marriage be defined by the virtues it includes rather than the people it excludes?

In order to believe that this threatens heterosexual marriage, you have to believe it's a zero-sum game. If gay couples get married, then somehow straights will not. But why not both? Why cannot marriage bring us together rather than tear us apart? The answer, alas, is that this President has decided it will help him politically to tear us apart. His base is restless over government spending and Iraq, and this is a means to placate and energize it. If that means turning a tiny minority into a lethal threat to civilization, so be it. If that minority's sole crime is to seek to live in fidelity, uphold the family, support responsibility, then that also is beside the point. In this battle, the President has shown his true colors. He is a divider, not a uniter.