ON SSM, BUSH FAILED THE PUBLIC AND HIMSELF: Jonathan Rauch

In a small Texas church in 1977, a young man named George W. Bush married a young woman named Laura Lane Welch. Their marriage changed them both. "She is the steel in his back," a reporter who knew them told CNN.com in 2001. "She is a civilizing influence on him."

A civilizing influence: If marriage's magic--for individuals, for couples, for communities, for countries--were to be reduced to a phrase, that would be it. If President Bush were asked what was the single most important day of his life, I imagine he might choose, not the day he was chosen president, nor the day his twin daughters were born, but the day he united his life with Laura Welch's. Marriage civilizes, comforts, nourishes. Possibly no man in the country knows this better than Bush.

I hope, then, that it was with some measure of agony that, on February 24, he called for the Constitution to be amended to define marriage as a union of a man and a woman. At that moment, the occupant of the office once held by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Abraham Lincoln declared that millions of Americans should be forever denied what is, after freedom itself, the greatest blessing of civic life: the opportunity to marry the person you love. ...

More: In the course of his speech, as indeed in the course of his presidency, the word "gay" or "homosexual" did not pass his lips. He had nothing to say about the people to whom he would deny the irreplaceable blessings of marriage, and nothing to say specifically to them. It was as if a politician, a century ago, had announced his support for an amendment that would forever ban women from voting in any election on U.S. soil, and had done so in a speech carefully crafted to avoid mentioning women or even using a feminine pronoun. The message of Bush's omission, intended or otherwise, must surely be: Gay Americans are of no interest or concern to this president. Gay couples are invisible.

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posted by Eve at 5:16 PM VOTE

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