Andrew Sullivan has it all wrong. I’m sorry, but just because gays can’t get “married” doesn’t mean they’re being marginalized by society. Of course, this is an argument that has been used by the gay rights groups for the last thirty years to advance their cause. They falsely assume that marriage is a right. Admittedly, most heterosexuals also get this wrong. Marriage is not at all constitutionally guaranteed, nor is the family mentioned anywhere. This causes some people problems, especially if they’re on the conservative side, since presevervation of family and marriage has primarily been a conservative bulwark.
I happen to agree with Sullivan that Bush will be alienating his gay constituency by attempting to codify a marriage amendment for the Constitution. Not only that, but unless I miss my guess, it would be unconstitutional on all but the most twisted and convoluted level. I disagree with Sullivan about limiting gay marriages to the states in which they were performed. Unfortunately, my one “weakness” (at least in terms of legal tenability) is based on moral reasoning for keeping marriage heterosexually oriented; my argument holds nearly no water in a legal sense, other than through precedence and tradition.
I believe that Bush is doing what he believes to be the moral thing, and it would seem that at least a majority of people agree with him. Indeed, this could prove to be quite a prickly thorn come election time: even most Democratic presidential candidates oppose gay marriage.
But here’s where it gets interesting. From the article linked above:

Despite the differences over gay marriage, the Democratic presidential candidates agree with most of the policy positions of the Human Rights Campaign. They expressed support for anti-discrimination laws, hate crimes legislation, increased funding for HIV/AIDS research and treatment, and federal domestic partnership benefits.

I wonder how this equates to “marginalization”. Sullivan and the entire gay movement would have you believe that opposition to gay marriage is the civil equivalent to preventing blacks from drinking at the same water fountain as whites.
How much tolerance are the gays shooting for, anyway? The tolerance movement has long since passed into the normalization movement. Tolerance implies acceptance, if only on a limited basis. This the gays have. But they’re not shooting for tolerance anymore. It’s about creating a society where the idea of gayness is as blasse as microwaving a Hot Pocket. After all, that’s what heterosexual marriage is, and in that case, far too many Hot Pockets are simply thrown out after a couple of bites.
What to do, what to do? I do not like the idea of gay marriage; it goes against every moral code I believe in and every traditional idea of marriage that I am familiar with. Yet I cannot argue against it from a Constitutional, legal standpoint.
The only thing that I can even remotely use in my defense is the democratic process. This is a system that, in theory, gives the majority of a group of people to decide the laws of the land. In practice, I know that normally quite the opposite occurs, and with the seeming redefinition of the Constitutional powers granted to the Judicial system by the Judicial system leaves me little hope that a true “democratic process” will prevail in the future of this debate.
According to the democratic majority of the United States, most oppose gay marriages. Even in states like Massachusetts and New Jersey support for gay marriages trickles barely over 50%, with opposition running at about 44%. According to a Globe/WBZ poll, most people favour civil unions over marriages for gays in Massachusetts. A Pew Center poll in 2001 showed only 35 percent of people favor same-sex marriage (see website for full article, and here’s a second source with the similar info, including some graphs charting the polls on various issues such as gay marriage).
By that measure, it should be the people deciding whether they want gay marriage or not. Which falls to the state, not the federal government. If states want gay marriages, let them have it. If not, don’t piss and moan and say you’re being marginalized. If you’re gay and you want to be married that badly, then you’ll do what it takes to do so (make all the inferences you want from that).