Fiddling while Al Qaeda plots

In the wake of a devastating, bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report on the remarkable failures and errors that justified the Bush war and concludes that Iraq did not pose a threat to the United States, and of Tom Ridge's latest report that Al Qaeda is planning an attack on the United States, what steps is President Bush taking to protect America?

Why, just what any President would do under these circumstances: he's urging Americans to amend the United States Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. In his weekly radio address, Bush assailed the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court for calling marriage "an evolving paradigm." He doesn't actually say the word "gay" or "homosexual" in his talk; instead, he refers repeatedly to what he calls "traditional marriage." It's clear that he intends us to understand this phrase to mean "heterosexual marriage." Yet "traditional marriage" could refer to many things, including the contractual denial of a woman's right to own property and the conferral on a man of the right to beat his wife. Surely Bush would not advocate those things, in public anyway.

The major professional organization for US historians has gone on record opposing the FMA, saying that "diverse types of families, including families built on same-sex partnerships, have existed across time, even as law and government have accorded some of those families unequal status." Yet Bush declares that "changing the definition of traditional marriage will undermine the family structure."

What's the evidence for this? That's the question we need to ask Mr. Bush, who has proven once again that he will do almost anything in the complete absence of supporting evidence---e.g., provoke World War III, violate the due process rights of American citizens, order nonadherence to the Geneva Convention in the handling of prisoners, and urge the permanent exclusion of a class of citizens from a major collective institution.