my sister sent in this nifty op-ed piece about gay penguins. yes, gay penguins. though anyone who's watched two male dogs at play knows that same-sex sexual contact is hardly unnatural... samhain & subiaco hump start a-humpin' every time they see each other. anyway, kuntzman makes a great point here:

(As an aside, isn't S.F. mayor Gavin Newsom a genius? By allowing gays to marry, not only is he sending a powerful civil rights message, but every one of those gay couples had to buy a marriage license. At $83 a pop, Newsom has added almost $400,000 to the strapped civic treasury...)

i hadn't thought of that: there's a lot of money to be made in letting gays marry, money that the states need desperately.

anyway, el presidente has officially come out with a proposal for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage (oops, i mean to codify marriage as a man-woman thing). when this story came out yesterday, i was originally going to post it without comment except to quote nancy pelosi, who basically said that we've never before amended the constitution specifically to discriminate against a group of people.

really, what more needs to be said? nothing, but there's lots more that could be said, & andrew sullivan is saying it all. sullivan is a well-known conservative blogger-pundit & frequent bush apologist, but not this time... he's devoted page after page to his outrage at bush over the gay marriage issue, to the point that he's alienating some of his core audience. he makes lots of good observations, including the fact that bush never even mentions words like "gay", "homosexual", or "civil union".

sullivan is of the liberal-bloggers' favorite pincushions, but he's definitely on the right track on this issue, & he's printing lots of letters he's received, mostly from other conservatives who are also disgusted by bush's blazen display of bigotry and hypocrisy. it's a good read.