Different renegades, different media portraits.(Beat the press: the hand that rules the press ... rules the country--Judge Learned Hand)

Bush has conjured his favorite bogeymen--'activist judges' and renegade bureaucrats--to create a Constitutional crisis." That's how the Los Angeles Times editorialized when the President reacted to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's unilateral decision to start marrying homosexuals, launching a national same-sex marriage revolution. Enlightened people know there's no such bogeyman as an activist judge or renegade bureaucrat, right?

Except maybe down in Montgomery, Alabama, come to think of it. When Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court tried to launch a little social movement of his own by installing a modest monument to the Ten Commandments in the courthouse rotunda, liberal reporters and editorialists didn't hesitate to portray him as a dangerous runaway judge, an underminer of the rule of law, a threat to the entire republic.

The Washington Post called Moore a "scofflaw ... a man who feels free to ignore the Constitutionally designated system by which law is interpreted in a democratic society?" The Los Angeles Times denounced Moore's "evangelical sideshow outside the Montgomery courthouse." The New York Times editorial page insisted that "Moore lacks the most basic requirement for judicial office: respect for the rule of law."

Yet when Judge Moore's kindred spirit in San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom, decided to break the law rather than uphold it--by issuing bogus marriage licenses to same sex couples--the media tones and personal characterizations were very different. No references in the L.A. Times to Newsom's "homosexual sideshow outside San Francisco City Hall." Rather, the descriptions were of a "provocative decision" that might "advance the rights of gays and lesbians."

The Washington Post adopted a position of neutrality on Mayor Newsom quite different from its view of Justice Moore. And the Manhattanites at New York City's Times cheerily described Newsom's antics as "a welcome indication that the nation is having a long-overdue discussion about the right of gay people to marry."