(A brief digression: The legalization of same-sex marriage, and the legal recognition of such marriages throughout the US, are in fact desirable goals of the highest priority to many Americans, including at least one regular reader of Grist.  To be sure, the subject of "gay marriage" has been over and over exploited by Republican leaders, the president in the first place, as a wedge issue, to help their electoral politics, as though "gay marriage" were threatening, tsunami-like, to overwhelm any day now all the good Christian towns and parishes and households of the American heartland.  But to suggest -- as no doubt was done most inadvertently -- that to environmentalists it should be a matter of little real importance, down there with flag-burning, skirts offensiveness awfully closely.)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

I believe the implication was that a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage is a matter of little real importance -- to the country, not just to environmentalists.

   The constitutional amendment is of great importance to gay Americans and their friends and families, and those of us who believe in social justice.  But I am sure David mis-spoke.

   The amendment is also a distractor for the Republicans to draw attention away from other issues.

    Now, as in 2004, any question to a Republican is likely to be answered by shouts of "gay, gay, gay".

patrick

An actual amendment to the constitution banning gay marriage would be a big deal. But there will be no actual amendment. Nobody on either side of the aisle thinks or expects that there will be an amendment. This is purely political theater on the part of desperate Republicans.

This kind of theater is hurtful, of course, but it's of no particular substantive import. Certainly not on the scale of, say, the coming energy crisis.