argument presented

Andrew Sullivan has written an essay at the New Republic that addresses President Bush's comments on Saturday in support of the Federal Marriage Amendment that would ammend the U.S. Constitution to forever ban equality for same sex families.

When President Bush says that judges have forced this issue uppon him, Sullivan writes:

There is a missing element here. And that element is the emergence of the gay community in the last two decades--the growing presence of gay people in American public life, their travails during a scarring epidemic, their experiences mothering and fathering children, their growing self-confidence and integration into society. You cannot understand the arrival of the marriage debate without this context, but since the president cannot even mention gay people by name, let alone understand or think about their social reality, he cannot see what is really going on

He further writes:

The religious right does not believe that any state should be allowed to consider equal marriage rights for gays, even if those marriages are restricted to the state in question. The existence of gay marriage anywhere offends their belief that homosexuals are mentally ill, or sinful, or a threat to society and the family. So they are prepared to abandon their conservative principles--like waiting to see what happens in the courts, rather than preempting them, or letting states decide for themselves, or allowing society to continue its evolution on the subject (large majorities among the young take a very different view of gay people than many of their elders). That's why the notion that this amendment is somehow a defensive measure is so preposterous. It's an aggressive measure to enshrine certain religious beliefs into the Constitution, before society can evolve beyond them.

As far as same sex marriages undermining heterosexual marriages, he writes:

How does including Mary Cheney, say, into the family of Dick and Lynne and her sister Liz, in any way undermine the Cheney family structure or the Bush family structure? Doesn't keeping some members of society permanently outside the institutions of their own families actually weaken the family? Doesn't forcing gay people into phony straight marriages undermine the family more effectively? Won't civil unions--marriage-lite--be far more dangerous to civil marriage, by providing an easy alternative option for gays and straights? Bush addresses none of these points. I doubt whether he has even considered them. He seems to believe that gay people and families are somehow separate entities. But gay people are born into families, grow up in them, and want to remain a part of them. This president wants to keep them permanently on the margins.