For Better Or For Worse?

BRIDAL POWER: These women, like hundreds of other same-sex couples, took the mayor of San Francisco up on his offer to let them wed

Two weeks after it started, the parade of gay newlyweds in San Francisco, now more than 3,400 couples and counting, just keeps on coming. So many said "I do" in city hall last week that the marriage of Rosie O'Donnell to her longtime partner Kelli Carpenter became just one more nuptial, though maybe the one that attracted the most photographers. The city's Gay Men's Chorus all but went hoarse singing The Star-Spangled Banner and Chapel of Love to an endless line of couples, with assorted children and parents and friends cheering them on. "When you have the opportunity to watch and hear a ceremony, you feel the real passion, the solemnity, the commitment," says Susan Leal, the city and county treasurer, who officiated at many of them. "If that was present in a lot of the marriages we have in this country, we wouldn't have as much divorce, I bet."

But by now the outburst of semi-legalized gay marriages has spread to places that have never been known as gay capitals, or even as cities. In New Mexico's Sandoval County, 67 gay couples were granted marriage licenses last week until the state attorney general ordered the county clerk to stop. In tiny New Paltz, N.Y., Jason West, the Green Party mayor, presided over the weddings of two dozen gay couples. George Pataki, the state's Republican Governor, quickly asked Eliot Spitzer, the Democratic state attorney general, to halt them. Spitzer refused. Meanwhile, Daniel Stewart, the mayor of not-so-big Plattsburgh, N.Y., says he supports the idea of gay marriage too. That might be expected, since he's gay. Then again, he's also a Republican.

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Any way you look at it, the once mostly abstract debate over gay marriage isn't that abstract anymore. And it's not even May 17 yet, when Massachusetts officials must start issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples throughout the state, as ordered by its highest court. In a Gallup poll taken just last month, gay marriage ranked dead last among 14 issues of concern to American voters. But that was before pictures of same-sex postnuptial smooching forced the issue into the hearts and minds and TV sets of people whose prior exposure to the idea may have been limited to that thing Madonna did with Britney Spears.

And it was before George W. Bush's abrupt announcement last Tuesday that he had decided to support a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. "After more than two centuries of American jurisprudence and millennia of human experience," said Bush, "a few judges and local authorities are presuming to change the most fundamental institution of civilization." With that, the President put himself firmly in the camp of his restless conservative base. Not incidentally, Bush also opened the way to make gay marriage the ultimate wedge issue in November, even though, when all is said and done, Bush and Democratic front runner John Kerry are not that far apart on the issue. They both oppose gay marriage and would oppose extending the 1,138 federal rights and privileges to gay couples, but support the right of states to grant civil unions.

Though on Tuesday the President did not throw his support behind any particular language, right now there's just one proposed gay-marriage amendment before Congress. Introduced last year by Representative Marilyn Musgrave and Senator Wayne Allard, both Republicans of Colorado, it would define marriage as "the union of a man and a woman." Debate is heating up about whether the wording of their measure would also forbid civil unions, which the President said last week states should be permitted to perform. Because of language in its second sentence saying that neither states nor the Federal Government can be required to confer upon unmarried couples marital status "or the legal incidents thereof," many legal scholars say the amendment would effectively ban such unions. "If you have to guess what something means, it probably doesn't belong in the Constitution," says Evan Wolfson, executive director of the pro gay-marriage group Freedom to Marry. "This amendment is being sold deceptively to the American people."

Though Bush had been voicing concern for weeks over the Massachusetts court decision, he apparently decided to support an amendment just a day or two before he made his announcement. "He did so reluctantly," says a top aide. "He felt, as others did, that the process was not bringing clarity but becoming more chaotic. The President did not provoke this. He was responding to something."

Many Republicans had been hoping all the same that Bush would sidestep the controversy and allow states to settle the issue in their different ways under the protective umbrella of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the 1996 federal law that says no state is obliged to recognize same-sex marriages performed by another state. Some conservatives fear that the Supreme Court or at least some future, more liberal configuration of the court might overturn that law, especially in light of the challenges that are certain to arise once gays who have wed legally in Massachusetts seek to have other states recognize their marriages.