Onward, Christian soldiers
The real agenda of the same-sex marriage opponents, in their own words.
By A.C. Thompson
IF YOU'RE LOOKING for a creepy read, pick up a copy of The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today. –Written by Alan Sears and Craig Osten, two of the main movers behind the efforts to stop same-sex marriage, the 229-page tome is a blueprint for stomping on the rights of gays and lesbians. Students of the Reagan-era culture wars may be familiar with Sears's name: he was a federal prosecutor on several high-profile obscenity cases and the head of then-attorney general Ed Meese's controversial Commission on Pornography.


~

Law of desire
The U.S. Supreme Court's precedents suggest that banning same-sex marriage is unconstitutional.
By Paul Reidinger
THE LAW, like the Matterhorn, is avalanche country, a place where long periods of motionless accumulation are punctuated by bursts of spectacular release. For the better part of a generation, the social and political controversies of same-sex marriage have been gathering on high peaks, vivid and visible but somehow not quite real: the Defense of Marriage Act, signed in 1996 by President Bill Clinton, the Vermont civil unions act of 2000, litigations in Hawaii and Massachusetts, a pair of small states at the edges of things


~

Civic disobedience
Newsom, gay marriage, and the politics of the revolutionary gesture.
By Tim Redmond
EARLY IN THE movie Star Trek VI, Captain Kirk, whose son was killed by the Klingons, is arguing against a Federation directive that he go on a peace mission to the Klingon Empire. In one of the great moments in Trekkie history, Mr. Spock looks at him calmly and notes, "There is an old Vulcan proverb: Only Nixon could go to China."

In (somewhat) the same vein, it's oddly appropriate that a straight, married, Roman Catholic mayor would be the one to make history by legalizing gay marriage in San Francisco. But Newsom has done more than that: a mayor who got elected by raising big money from powerful downtown businesses, who ran on a law-and-order platform, and who couldn't have taken office without the overwhelming support of Republican voters has vaulted himself into national prominence by committing an act of civil disobedience.


~

Same-sex and the city
San Francisco's gay marriages have quickened the pace of political and social change throughout the country.
By Tali Woodward
ON THE EVENING of March 11, Ben Hipp was sitting in a Mission District bar playing liar's dice with one of his oldest buddies, another gay man who's lived in the city since the 1950s. They had already heard about the California Supreme Court decision that four hours earlier put an end to San Francisco's same sex-wedding march. The two men agreed the decision was "crap," but they didn't seem a bit discouraged.