Time for honesty by the left & right.(THE RIGHT PERSPECTIVE)

If the debate over "homosexual marriage" weren't so depressing and horrifying, it would be laughable. Even the wildest dreams of a raving McGovern Democrat, at the height of the sexual revolution, never conjured the spectacle of two men publicly plighting their troth.

Yet nearly 40 years after the sexual social upheaval subsided, the "marriage" of two men defines leftist ideology. And liberals say that Congress must do nothing about it because only the states may regulate marriage. The federal marriage law that defines marriage as a union of one man and one woman would trespass states' rights. Likewise, the left shrieks that other Bush proposals, such as his federal money tree for right-wing religious groups, are unconstitutional. And the left is correct.

Honest conservatives should concede that point and repent of the centralization of power in Washington and the massive federal spending increases they have abetted. In turn, that might pave the way for the honest left and honest right to settle on one important point: the enemy of every American is the leviathan on the Potomac.

That would require, however, an ideological agreement illuminating how our country arrived at this pass. That agreement would concede that the left created the pretext for the new federal powers and that every federal initiative and program the left now opposes grew out of its lust for centralized power. The left is reaping what it sowed.

It was the left, not the right, that gave us federal civil rights laws and rule by unaccountable judges. It was the left, not the right, that created the welfare bureaucracy. It was the left, not the right, that gave us two world wars, which set the stage for a protracted cold war with the Red Empire and paved the way for the interminable war in Iraq and the quest for American Empire.

For years, the American Civil Liberties Union has run thither and yon clucking about abusive federal powers. Meanwhile, it filed a series of lawsuits enhancing federal powers, particularly those of the judiciary.

Americans suffer in a Procrustean bed of financially debilitating, unconstitutional federal laws and court decisions: the Civil Rights Act, Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, and environmental and banking laws, not to mention Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Federal edicts even govern buying a home or renting a room in one.