THE WASHINGTON POST opened its Wednesday coverage of Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on an amendment to the United States Constitution concerning marriage with the hardly neutral declaration that “[d]espite indications that a bill to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriages has little hope of passage, GOP congressional leaders continued to push the amendment yesterday, prompting Democrats to charge that Republicans are orchestrating an emotionally divisive issue for the fall elections.”
Such transparently hostile coverage from elite media will mark the amendment’s progress through this year and the years ahead, but proponents of the amendment have grown increasingly confident that a sustained battle to defend the thousands of years-old definition of marriage will succeed. They have coalesced around language that would leave civil-union laws untouched and they have been cheered by public opinion polls showing surging support in the aftermath of the antics in San Francisco and elsewhere. Intellectual leaders of the battle are emerging, with folks like Maggie Gallagher and Stanley Kurtz producing the numerous pieces necessary to sustain the argument in today’s opinions-by-the-pound environment.
