Where's the compassion? President Bush has announced that he is in favour of a constitution amendment that bans gay marriage. As the AP report says, this is a majority priority for the fundamentalist Christian groups that Bush is so tightly linked to. The announcement could be seen as a ploy to create a major division between Bush and the likely Democratic candidate, Senator John Kerry, in the upcoming elections. But putting aside the cynical idea of this being a political manuever, it also represents one of the biggest set backs in civil rights ever. As Andrew Sullivan writes,

The president launched a war today against the civil rights of gay citizens and their families. And just as importantly, he launched a war to defile the most sacred document in the land.... [T]his president wants to drag the very founding document into his re-election campaign. He is proposing to remove civil rights from one group of American citizens - and do so in the Constitution itself.

Check out a small sampling of the many, many letters that Sullivan has received at his page.
Nick Confessore over the American Prospect's Tapped blog, looks at the polling numbers and why Bush needs to push this issue, as it is very obvious that public opinion is moving to the more progressive side. Soon, Confessore argues, the religious right will not be able to argue that they are the ones saving families and respecting the sanctity of marriage:

The opponents of this amendment will be pleading for tolerance, dignity, love, and compassion; for keeping existing families together and bringing new ones into being. It will be hard to look at these ordinary men and women and see them as a threat to marriage and family. Indeed, as this progresses, I think it will become increasingly hard to look at those who favor a federal marriage amendment and not see them as a threat to marriage and family.

A shift is occuring in the America, a change in the publicly understood definitions of "family" and "marriage", and Bush and his followers want to put a halt on that. They can't, and this amendment will not succeed -- the left will vote against, libertarians on the right will vote against it, and constitutional purists will vote against it. And Bush will find that the harder he pushes on this, the more he will lose support from the liberal hawks and the neocons, who may have supported his foreign policy, but will be disgusted by this show of bigotry and backward thinking.