François Nonnenmacher (EN) | FR

Andrew Sullivan, a gay Republican, is now at war with president Bush:

The president launched a war today against the civil rights of gay citizens and their families. And just as importantly, he launched a war to defile the most sacred document in the land. Rather than allow the contentious and difficult issue of equal marriage rights to be fought over in the states, rather than let politics and the law take their course, rather than keep the Constitution out of the culture wars, this president wants to drag the very founding document into his re-election campaign. He is proposing to remove civil rights from one group of American citizens - and do so in the Constitution itself. The message could not be plainer: these citizens do not fully belong in America. Their relationships must be stigmatized in the very Constitution itself. The document that should be uniting the country will now be used to divide it, to single out a group of people for discrimination itself, and to do so for narrow electoral purposes. Not since the horrifying legacy of Constitutional racial discrimination in this country has such a goal been even thought of, let alone pursued. Those of us who supported this president in 2000, who have backed him whole-heartedly during the war, who have endured scorn from our peers as a result, who trusted that this president was indeed a uniter rather than a divider, now know the truth.

Embedding discrimination within a constitution is another thing one wouldn't expect from a democracy.

Andrew, welcome to the latter group of "you're either with us or against us."

P.S. Lance Arthur, who cannot be suspected of any pro-Bush affinities, expresses his anger and sadness:

But when, this morning, George W. Bush said, "Marriage cannot be severed from its cultural, religious and natural roots without weakening the good influence of society," I realized with sudden and unexpected anger and sadness that the government that I pay taxes to, and which is supposed to represent me as an American citizen, and uphold my rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, thinks that I am a second-class citizen and should be denied a basic right and that the denial of that right should be written into the United States Constitution forever and ever, amen.