POLITICS - The San Francisco Treat

While the attention has been focused on Massachusetts, San Francisco upped the ante in the debate about gay marriage.

Meet the first officially married same-sex couple in America, Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin (on right) and go read the San Francisco Gate article for the full poop.

What does this mean to Bush? In a word, I'd say he's "fucked". The battle lines of this election have been drawn. Kerry has the liberals, Bush has the conservatives; the fight is over moderates. They can't lose their core supporters, which means that Bush has to "defend marriage" with a constitutional amendment.

You see, Bush was waiting to see how the debate in the Massachusetts legislature resolved this issue. Many expect that the result will be a ban on "same sex" marriage, but allow civil unions with full recognition. Bush could let these legislators do all of the hard work, test the waters for various types of amendments, and then co-adopt the winning legislation into his own proposal.

Now he doesn't have the luxury of waiting for Mass. to define its own state laws. The State of California voted in 2000 to define marriage as a union between man and woman, but the city of San Francisco agrees with the Mass Supreme Court - Civil unions aren't equal to marriage.

Tomorrow Bush will be under a lot of pressure to introduce the Muskgrave Amendment. This will move the media debate about Bush's whereabouts in Alabama to whether Bush understands the difference between federal and state law. Should be fun.

So without further ado, here's the lovely couple who are destroying the very foundation of life itself (and they seem so innocent!).