I agree with much of what Charles Krauthammer has to say about the gay marriage fiasco. For him and many others it is the gay activists and activist courts that have raised the ugly conflict over gay marriage, forcing Bush's hand in favoring an amendment to the Constitution. Andrew Sullivan points out that Krauthammer is wrong about the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution being applied to marriage for gays. That is, marriage in one state must mean that it be legally binding in all others. The domino effect of gay marriage is a red herring. Sullivan reminds us that the legalization of so-called inter-racial marriage was not forced on all the states but determined state by state.

I do insist I cannot vote for Bush because he has chosen to push this amendment. I find this a huge disappointment because he is the only man qualified to assume office in January, 2005. But I also understand that many Americans, of any ethnic background, do not want marriage for gays and that this must be respected. The last thing I want is that the American people be alienated by gay activism that runs rough shod over their beliefs and convictions. If there is to be marriage for gays or, at least, civil unions for them, they should be won in the court of public opinion, through the legislature. They must win the "hearts and minds" of the American people. They should not be dictated by the courts. Nor, however, should their prohibition be dictated by an amendment to the Constitution. As Krauthammer states, let's not have another Roe v. Wade.

We know what short-circuiting democracy does. Thirty years after Roe v. Wade, abortion still brings masses of demonstrators into the streets. Roe v. Wade, Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, "halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue."

The same with marriage for gays. I am totally sympathetic toward people, many of them members of my own family whom I love, who do not want such marriage. I understand that it runs counter to so much that is customary and rightful in the eyes of tradition. Andrew Sullivan makes the argument supporting marriage for gays more compellingly than anyone else but for those who will not be swayed no force should be plied for them to accept by judicial fiat something they either abhor or find incomprehensible.

My rage over what Bush has done is also directed at the gay activists themselves with whom I have never felt comfortable. It is also directed at the gay community itself with which I have never felt comfortable or at home. If I am not home in America— admittedly an overstatement in my previous blog regrettably written in the heat of the moment—it is much more true that I am alienated by a gay activism that is outright repulsive and an affront to decency.

Gays have a genius for maintaining their "outré" status, their life on the edge of reality. This is not true of all gays, maybe not of the majority, but those who get media exposure—the activists themselves—are what matter and it is they, not your ordinary gay citizen, who hogs the limelight. It is particularly unfortunate that the mainstream is exposed to the coarse, anti-establishment gay "lifestyle" peddled in San Francisco. By comparison, gays in New York City are genteel and well mannered. How much more true for those living in Iowa, Texas, or Nevada.

Take the vulgar notion of "gay pride." What exactly is that? Well, one caricature would be that it is a Marxist cri de coeur over stigmatization, with the secular hope of redemption through revolution. It commemorates its liturgical re- enactment of "coming out" (that is, coming to terms with one's emotional and sexual reality both privately and publicly) by a manifestation or parade held once a year. I have always hated this twisted carnival of freaks and body-flexing narcissism. Yes, it has brought comfort to ostracized souls who don't want to feel alone but what, when the evening news comes on, are Americans watching when they turn on their TVs?

Of course, gay activists, almost to the man or man/woman, will tell you they have nothing but contempt for "middle America." They don't care what America thinks and say so with a vehemence that is chilling in its hatred. In the world of minority politics, it is always fair game to hate the majority, the other "other" that is supposedly persecuting you. Many blacks hate whites in the same way. Women who pledge their allegiance to feminism often hate men. Gay politics, like feminism, like the racism of "negritude," is a straightjacket (pun intended) of thought policing. Not only is there the party of gay parades and sexual license, there is the party line and you better toe it.

What does one say to one's children when gays are exposing themselves as freaks or are willfully disobedient in flouting California law yet cry persecution when society rejects them? The televised images of some gay men "marrying" while one of the pair sports a bonnet only a church-going woman would wear are not helping the case at all. It is not only not funny, but an act of hostility, which, I might add, is exactly the point the participants wish to make. Just how seriously can one take marriage when everything is "camp"—life reduced to scare quotes and hyper-irony? The whole notion of getting "married" in San Francisco when the law will not recognize such marriages, when the governor understandably calls for the law to be obeyed, has all the making of a cartoon activism in which the giant anvil falling on the coyote is not really real but meant for laughs. Yet, who's laughing? Cause we know who's crying now.

And this ain't no Rosa Parks either. The American people reacted with shock and sympathy over the horrible indignity that woman had endured. She helped spark a social revolution. White people of good will followed. Necessary legislation was passed. Blacks were finally released from the apartheid existence under segregation. In contrast, where are the American people now when gays are "marrying" in San Francisco? At the very least, they snooze with the boredom of it. At most, the president comes out in favor of an amendment that would do much more than prevent marriage for gays but render null and void any civil protections enjoyed by gay couples currently in some states. That is, this foolish activism has positively backfired and alienated the American people. Quite the opposite of the wrongfully quoted Rosa Parks analogy. In fact, it goes to show just how degenerate "civil rights" activism has become when such a comparison is made. It simply begs the issue of how far the moral urgency of that day is long gone, relegated to the history books.

Besides, Ms. Parks was no freak. She wasn't playing at civil rights. She was putting her life on the line for it. She wasn't trying to be a provocateur. What would have stopped the police from brutalizing her? Gays get a free pass and cry foul when the American people don't take their law-breaking "marriages" seriously. Just how silly and meaningless has the civil rights movement become? It has worn out its welcome and moral prestige. No longer does it hold the high ground when law breakers seek to tease the American people by getting "married" because they don't like the law the good people of California voted into effect.

In a way, the American people have reacted to San Francisco's civil disobedience as "been there, done that." What now? There is a real civil rights fatigue in this country if by that one means the manifestation of dissent that intends to shock, alarm, and alienate "bourgeois" America. Civil rights are in their essence a bourgeois revolution. They are anti-aristocratic, anti-elitist, anti-Politburo. Yet contempt for bourgeois civilization is a Marxist creed and one that has long infected the gay body politic as it has "minority rights" since the late 1960s. For gays to be taken seriously, they must make constant efforts at assimilation, even in the face of constant rejection. Ideally, their efforts might culminate in marriage for gays or, if that is too far-fetched for the near future, civil unions that are protected by law.

Whatever the outcome over the marriage issue, one thing is certain: gays cannot continue to allow their "activists," for the reigning mentality of the Politburo, to dictate and revel in the alienation of the American people. They must show a good faith effort to want to belong, even in the face of rejection. I would say that many gays feel this way but are cowed by activists and idealists, Leftists who detest America and liberal democracy, whose voices are always shrill and drown out dissent and who are motivated by a deep hatred of what Americans understand as decent and fair. There is something puerile and malformed about much in gay political activism. It misses the high moral ground of the original civil rights movement, initiated by blacks, before it devolved into negritude, Afro-centrism, and anti-Semitic fascist tendencies.

In fact, where have gays shown their humanity to the fullest, where have they, through the media, in the eyes of "middle America" and popular culture, revealed themselves to be worthy of respect, dignity, and acceptance? In their long struggle with HIV and AIDS. In their grappling with death. Nothing like one's mortality to get you god damn serious about life. Life is not a parade or, if it is, it is to confirm one's willing place in the family, in society at large. Since gays love irony, as most urban types do, then it is safe to say that AIDS is the single most humanizing blessing gays ever experienced as a disenfranchised group. It has brought them into the family, if ever so imperfectly. No one said life is fair. Death even less so. But true sacrifice and suffering, whatever the costs, will bring the disaffected and shunned more into the light of sympathy and acceptance. At least, this is true in a Christian civilization like the United States.

For those who cry foul and say that gays have never been fully accepted to begin with and that it is unfair that the burden of acceptance falls on us—the presumed victims—I have to say: get over it. It is the job of gays to assimilate, not the job of "heteros" to accept. Ditto for all other minorities.

The gay community, as known through the media, through popular culture, by way of its activism, outworn civil disobedience, its defiance of certain mores to provoke a reaction, its adolescent tantrum of getting "married" to make a point, is the mirror image, the inversion, of the social/radical Right. Both have their utopian and revolutionary dreams for America. Doesn't one see the sappy moral priggishness of Kenneth Starr and Gary Bauer as the perfect bookend to a man wearing lipstick, intoning his vows for a marriage that has no legal standing? The decent middle is snuffed out in the debate. They are ignored. Most Americans don't favor gay marriage yet most don't favor a constitutional amendment banning it, either. There is a middle ground but neither side wants to yield to it.

Bush has taken one extreme. The gay activists and law-breakers in San Francisco are taking the other, who, along with the radical Right, have forced his hand. The in-between is drowned out in the ensuing wake and what we have is a red-hot issue that obfuscates and distorts the most important election of a generation.

It is left for my generation to sort out this debacle and during a time of war for the survival of civilization itself.