Old-fashioned though it may sound, we are confident that the moral example being set by the spouses and children of Republican political leaders, will - in the end - prove to be more powerful that the posturing of all the anti-gay officeholders lumped together.
Now it's time for President Barack Obama to embrace full marriage equality as well.
THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL
When three of the four right-wing Republican Supreme Court justices - Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito - boycotted Obama's recent State of the Union message, they flashed the president the universal sign of scorn and derision just as surely if they had sat amidst the great and the good in the Capitol chamber with their middle fingers extended.
Now that a second Republican-appointed federal judge has found last year's health-care-reform to be unconstitutional - this time totally so - there can be little doubt that the Democrats' landmark legislation will end up before the Supreme Court.
Will this turn out to be a replay of Bush v. Gore, in which the court's GOP majority legally stole the 2000 election? It is not an unreasonable assumption.
Republican-appointed justices voted en bloc last year when, in Citizens United v. FEC, they wiped out more than a generation of campaign-reform legislation. This not only unleashed corporate America to buy Republicans their gains in the most recent national elections, it also made a mockery of conservative claims to favor of judicial restraint.
Obama's call for rhetorical civility may have temporarily chilled national debate, but that should not be mistaken for a shift in the political fundamentals. The GOP lost the battle for health-care reform in Congress. Now it seeks to win in the courts.
This raises two questions: why is the American public gullible enough to listen when Republicans whine about judicial activism? And why is the mainstream media so craven as to let the GOP get away with it?
