Circle-squaring by Daschle.(Senator Thomas Daschle; support for Defense of Marriage Act)

NEW YORK, JULY 16

SENATOR Daschle's face would show the strain, except that his face has no strains left to show, looking as he does as the condemned prisoner on the last day of his reprieve. The special torment this time around is the work of Republican John Thune, a former member of Congress whose challenge to the Senate Democratic leader rests in part on the matter of a Constitutional amendment.

The measure to prohibit same-sex marriage was defeated on July 14, but nobody thinks it is permanently asleep and there are forces raring to bring it to life again--after the next election.

Now consider Senator Daschle's plight. Most of the leaders in his party who oppose the amendment do so on the grounds that it impairs gay rights. They aren't saying exactly that, but the essence of what moves them is what they'd call one more step in gay liberation. If non-gays can marry, so should gays be permitted to "marry."

But that by no means is the position being taken by Senator Daschle in his nervous fight to survive. He says the amendment is "unnecessary." Why? Because South Dakota law prohibits same-sex marriage, and the federal Defense of Marriage Act means South Dakota does not have to recognize same-sex marriages from other states.

If it were actually so, the movement to amend the Constitution would indeed be unnecessary. But it isn't so because there are judicial activists in the land who tend to edge the argument about marriage over not into what state legislatures have done, but into the great sunlight of rights that inhere in us at birth, endowments of nature/philosophy/the Bill of Rights/ the Areopagitica, whatever.

That is the line the judicial activists will take. The political question arose from the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It decided that the State Constitution grants organic rights which can't be taken away from residents of Massachusetts, among them to marry anybody you like, beginning with those of the same sex.