Ya win some

In a victory - perhaps a short-lived one, but still a victory - for San Francisco and advocates of same-sex marriage, Superior Court Judge Ronald Quidachay declined to issue an injunction ordering the city to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He combined three suits on the matter - two against the city's practice and one by the city challenging a state law defining marriage as a union of a man and a woman - but did not announce who the presiding judge would be in the combined case and did not set a date for arguments.

San Francisco's city attorney, Dennis Herrera, said his city and county are "going on the offense" with their lawsuit. "Mayor Newsom took a bold step last week, and we fully agree with him that his position is justified."

Herrera said the city's case will assert that the state law banning same-sex marriage goes against California's constitution because it violates the equal protection and due process clauses.

President Bushleague, reveling in his new-found love of the word "troubled," said he felt that way about the terrible, terrible goings-on in the city by the bay. Interestingly, while his aides keep saying he's going to endorse a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages, he hasn't done it yet. My suspicion is that they haven't calculated the political fallout - or perhaps they have and realize it's not going to be as potent a wedge issue as they hoped.

That is actually what I suspect, that is, that same-sex marriage is not going to be an effective hot-button issue for the GOPers. For one thing, while polls consistently indicate a clear majority of Americans oppose the idea, they also indicate that about 40%, give or take, approve it. That's a minority, but it's still a good chunk of people. And some of them are of a libertarian mind, people who would tend to lean Republican. Make this a big issue, you risk pushing some "small government" people away from you rather than toward you. You also risk making some people who still think of you as somehow "compassionate" uncomfortable: "Hey, I don't like the idea any more than you do. But, I dunno, this seems like going too far, y'know?"

Those risks are based on another point, an important one: There simply doesn't seem to be the passion about this that other wedge issues were generating at the time the Republicans abused them. Even after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision, even with the events in San Francisco, there doesn't seem to be any wave of fury sweeping the populace. The voices heard are the ones that have been heard all along. My impression is that overall, straight people in the US may not like the idea of same-sex marriage, they might even be downright against it. But unlike previous wedge issues like crime and affirmative action, they don't see it affecting them personally in any significant way, so they are unlikely to overlook other issues to cast their vote based on it.

I expect Bush will endorse the amendment as a means of shoring up his weakening right flank, but I don't think he's going to try to make a real issue of it. There's not going to be a same-sex version of Willie Horton.

I could be wrong, of course, I am often enough, and I do think the Democrats, if they're smart (making the bold assumption that "smart Democratic campaign" is not an oxymoron), will have something prepared for it, just in case, something that doesn't wimp out on the issue, which would probably be worse politically than an open endorsement of same-sex marriages.

Of course, I'd love to see such an open endorsement, but it ain't gonna happen this year. But I'm confident I will live to see it.

Footnote: Barney Frank, an openly gay member of Congress from Massachusetts, says he's "sorry to see the San Francisco thing go forward" because of an image of "lawlessness and civil disobedience."

Frank said he had hoped Massachusetts' Supreme Judicial Court decision upholding the right of same-sex couples to marry would serve as a national model for orderly, legal protection of gay marriage.

"If we go forward in Massachusetts and get same-sex marriage on the books, it's going to be binding and incontestable," Frank said Tuesday.

Instead, Frank said, San Francisco's move promotes the notion that unpopular laws can be broken or ignored. ...

Newsom spokesman Peter Ragone praised Frank as a respected leader on gay rights issues but denied that the mayor's decision to issue same-sex marriage licenses promotes illegal behavior.

"We don't view this as breaking the law," Ragone said. "We view this as upholding the state's constitution, which explicitly prohibits any form of discrimination."

Aw, jeez. Has it really come down to this? Have we really become so limp, so domesticated, as a people?

Of course what San Francisco is doing is civil disobedience! It's civil disobedience in the truest sense and grandest tradition. The city officials are defying a law they believe to be wrong in pursuit of a higher law - in this case, the state constitution - and using their breaking of that unjust law as a means to mount a legal challenge to it.

C'mon, folks! John Peter Zenger! Henry David Thoreau! The underground railroad! The suffragists! Martin Luther King, Jr.! This kind of thing is, well, it's, it's, well, it's downright American! Props to Mayor Newsom and his administration!

Unintentional Humor Award Dept.: A few representatives of a wacko antigay group called "Repent America" were demonstrating outside San Francisco's City Hall. One of the participants said "We wanted to just uphold the laws that already existed, lock the door, keep them from marrying, stopping the spread of AIDS, stopping the spread of perversion."

Making the I think safe assumption that the "perversion" here is sex and noting that AIDS is an STD, just how does stopping gays and lesbians from getting married stop them from having sex?