Crap. Two sobering reports today: a Washington Post poll to be published in tomorrow's paper shows more people turning against gay civil unions, and a new round of press reports today that, "An all-out legal war is being declared by religious conservatives to enact a constitutional ban on same-sex marriages."

Great. So much for my nascent optimism of a few hours ago. First let's talk about the poll, since whatever happens there will determine the strength of the constitutional amendment. It's not like those jellyfish are going to be voting their conscience.

The poll indicates support for gay marriage/civil unions continues to drop, after years of trending up. We had finally reached a 49-49 tie for civil unions in May, and after the big gay summer, it's down to 37-58. We already heard about it taking a big hit after the Supreme Court decision. The slide is not over yet. Another 3 points down in the past two weeks.

Sad. But reality. Consider the backlash, people. (And so much for my

I'm quite sure the TV coverage is helping us, especially in the long run, but the public is clearly in shock about the reality of gay marriage. Between the Canadian move, the Supreme decision legalizing homosexuality, the impending MA decision and the constant coverage that gay marriage is upon us, they're suddenly scared shitless. The terror stage had to happen, and it might not be pleasant to live with, but it's a necessary phase. I do not think it's the appropriate phase for the last big push to the alter, but that's in the courts' hands, isn't it.

Full poll results, with comparison to earlier results here.

But it gets worse. The WP story actually leads with a different angle:

A strong majority of the public disapproves of the Episcopal Church's decision to recognize the blessing of same-sex unions, and a larger share of churchgoing Americans would object if their own faith adopted a similar practice, according to a new Washington Post poll.

So broad and deep is this opposition that half of all Americans who regularly attend worship services say they would leave their current church if their minister blessed gay couples -- even if their denomination officially approved those ceremonies.

... "Americans are saying, 'We're willing to move pretty far on this issue, we're much more tolerant than we used to be, but don't mix it up with religion and God,' " said Boston College political scientist Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life.

Good lord. Meanwhile, the "Christians" see their moment and are pouncing. From today's San Francisco Chronicle:

Religious conservatives pledge an all-out drive to enshrine a ban on same-sex marriage in the U.S. Constitution, calling it the last line of defense against an inevitable court-led destruction of a fundamental social institution.

Their Federal Marriage Amendment, after dying with no action in the last Congress, has been reintroduced, this time with 75 House co-sponsors. Senate hearings are scheduled for September, and the proposed amendment has the blessing of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.

Gay groups and opponents of the anti-gay-marriage amendment in Congress say they take it seriously and, privately, express considerable alarm.

"I think you've got this panic on both sides," said an activist who talks to religious conservatives and gay rights groups. "The groups concerned about the gay agenda need to come up with a line in the sand that works, and gay marriage might. The gay groups don't mind politicians being against gay marriage, as long as it's not written into the Constitution. They figure they can come back in 10 years when things have calmed down and revisit it."

That's what I'm afraid of: another Don't Ask, Don't Tell. The situation was shitty before, but it wasn't written into law/constitution (that time law, this time, the constitution). But we pushed them too far too soon without laying the social groundwork first, and now there's a law against gays in the military, and we're going to have to wait until support is so strong for us that half of each house and the pres are ready to stick their necks out and pass a bill to let us in. That's much worse than where we started.

A constitutional amendment will be much harder to pass, with 2/3 of each house and 3/4 of the state legislatures. (Some analysis of its chances here from DailyKos, though I think he's being optimistic.) But if they do, boy are we in trouble. It could be decades before we can reach the same numbers to repeal it. We are going to have to get our act together so fast on this one. And we sure need all the breeders out there willing to support us. One thing is for sure: There will never be enough homos like me to stop this, no matter how many toaster ovens we hand out.

Here's the one glimmer of hope I saw in the Post story:

When news breaks on the MA decision, I'll have full coverage here. Bookmark it now.

There's this Salon blog called The Julie/Julia Project, which sounded maybe interesting, until I discovered it was about cooking Julia Child recipes. No thanks. But before you stop reading too, check out this excerpt from today's entry:

I am going to float a proposal here.  Would it reduce the petty crime rate in New York City – hell, maybe even the rape, murder and pillage rates – to pass an ordinance forcing grocery stores to widen all their aisles by ten or twelve inches?  Maybe, maybe not.  All I know is, I was at Garden of Eden near Union Square last night at seven thirty buying a duck and canned chestnuts, and Garden of Eden is a great store, better stocked and cheaper than Zeytuna, a hell of a lot easier to get to than Fairway or Whole Foods, with a pleasant, helpful staff, plus they had my duck AND my chestnuts, a small miracle, I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to find the place, but damned if after twenty minutes sidling hither & non that fucking bitch with the yoga mat strapped to her back (and don’t even get me started on women who walk around with yoga mats) who stood lollygagging about in the middle of the fucking aisle staring at plums or something, wasn’t inspiring gleeful visions of disembowelment.  Forget about using a cart; you can barely get one of those handheld baskets around, once you have a baguette and a five-pound duck in it.  The cans of chestnuts I was buying for the Puree de Marrons cost $7.50 each and I had to buy four of them, so between that and the $15 duck I was completely broke when I walked out of the store, but at least I had negotiated the eight-inch wide aisles designed, I guess, for the six-inch-wide asses of the models who live and work in the neighborhood, without knocking down a display of Pirates Booty or something.

Not bad. And not your mother's fucking Julia Child.

The sad part of this story is that it was sitting right there near the top of the list of Salon blogs the two months I've been blogging here, and it took the dowdy old NY Times to show me what was sitting there right in front of me. How uncool is that?

The Times published a lengthy piece (3 web pages) in today's Dining & Wine section, and that story is interesting, too. Here's the opening, followed by one of its excerpts from the blog:

JULIE POWELL is in the homestretch. She has 13 days and 22 recipes to go to complete what possibly only Julia Child has done. If she meets her Aug. 26 deadline, Ms. Powell will have cooked all 524 recipes in the 1961 classic, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking."

Ms. Powell began climbing this culinary Mount Everest last summer, on Aug. 26, and has kept an amusing, irreverent and increasingly popular daily Web log of her progress on Salon, called the Julie/Julia Project (blogs.salon.com/0001399).

The story has a comical twist too, thanks to the Times' inability to utter the word fuck, which is like trying to quote Southpark without swearing. So they substitute the word cookie for fuck in each quote (seriously), and the results are naturally ludicrous:

"This Monday [cookie] is just [cookie] killing me." . . . Last week, when subway delays put her behind schedule, she wrote, outrageously, "I would like to interrupt this program for a long overdue firebombing of the New York subway system, but of course I can't because then I'd go to jail and I couldn't finish the Project. But holy [cookie cookie]."

My favorite quote directly from Julie:

"If I get this done, somehow it will all be O.K. It's better than being a secretary."

The one annoyance with the piece is that it doesn't say what's next when Julie finishes the project, aside from rest, a gym membership to work off all the butter, and a trip to see the Julia Child exhibit at the Smithsonian. But I've posed the question in her blog comments, so maybe she'll let us know.

Read fast. Just 13 days to go.

A straight friend just sent me an email exchange he had today with his retirement-age dad about gay marriage. I assumed it would be dull as ditchwater--and his dad opened up pissing me off--but it wound up exciting me. Take a peek at his dad's argument:

You are probably right, but marriage does have an historical meaning and there is no reason to pervert it to accomplish certain ends. . . [One quick intrusion: Don't you just love messages that start "You are probably right, but . . ." My mom loves that stunt. it translates to: "You are dead wrong, but I'll start by pretending to agree to try to sound reasonable."]

There is no reason we could not change the laws to accommodate gay persons and to recognize their rights. Property ownership, taxation, estate laws, group medical and any other area where the gay person is placed in a disadvantageous position can be changed. There could be a law allowing the formalization of a gay couples relationship thus creating a contract that is acknowledged by government and which would allow benefits equivalent to marriage.

Ugh. I hate that. But I'll take it. For now. What strikes me is that I've been hearing about this arch-conservative dad for ten years now and met him twice to hear him with my own ears, and his concession goes miles beyond anything I would have expected from him. Or that he would have expected from himself I'm sure, three years or even three months ago.

These exchanges are going on all across America right now, and it seems Our Big Gay Summer in the media is already having a big effect. Homos have been visible for a few decades now, but unless you were unfortunate enough for one to pop up in your their family, most older people were able to keep them at a safe distance. It wasn't their friends coming out, and they certainly were not watching The Real World.

But we've suddenly grown more ubiquitous this summer, and gay marriage has suddenly appeared on the bargaining table as a very real possibility. And an imminent one. Amazing how that has shifted negotiating positions. People who would not have dreamed of civil unions six months ago are suddenly falling all over themselves offering civil-unions-plus. Anything to get gay marriage off the table.

And when forced to finally confront the issue, I hear a lot of people coming to a middle ground out of a basic sense of fairness. They never had to give gay marriage a real hearing before, certainly not dig down to come up with arguments against it or defend them. Gay marriage was a radical idea for a future century and they just dismissed it out of hand with the wave of a hand, and maybe a one-liner like, "marriage is between a man and a woman." Of course they're still saying that, but now a lot of people are forcing them to defend it. Or at the least they're watching their elder statesment forced to defend it.

Suddenly they're forced to ask themselves: Well, should these people be denied hospital visitation or healthcare or death benefits or whatever? OK, they probably deserve all that stuff, just don't let them call it marriage. "My position is that we should grant them all the rights that married couples have just don't call it marriage," my friend's dad wrote in the third message in their exchange.

That's a radical change for these people, especially the old-timers. I hate getting stripped of the title like some second-class citizen, but I've waited a long time for that title and I can wait awhile longer. I wasn't expecting to get it this soon anyway, not from them.

It's going to get a lot uglier and a lot more polarized if and when the MA and/or NJ courts legalize gay marriage this summer, but at the end of it all, I think we'll find the a huge shift in the number of people accepting civil unions. I think we'll end this phase with that at a minimum. And once we have that a few years, it will be a fait accompli. How stupid to have gay marriages but not officially call them that. It will happen. We're well on the road now.

---

And I want to say a big thank you to my friend and all the other straight people out there engaging their fathers and their mothers and anyone else in their circle of friends and family on this. It's by forcing people to consider the fairness issue, not letting them off with a dismissive wave of the hand, that we're going to defeat this immoral ban.

This morning's Des Moines Register (the bible of politics in the first key state), runs a lengthy feature on Dick Gephardt's fade.

This is most notable because Gephardt won the crucial Iowa caucus in 1988 and was expected to take it again. He comes from neighboring Missouri, has a powerful organization there, and the real race was expected to come down to second place.

Iowa is crucial to everyone (probably more important than even New Hampshire, now), but must-win for Gephardt. If he can't win in his own back yard, he'll look completely unviable. And he never polls/runs great in NH, so that will leave him 0 for 2. And if he lost his last run with the big boost from Iowa, what's he going to do without it. If he doesn't win here, the press will write him off, the money he's already struggling to raise will cease, and he'll be dead in the water.

So it had to be terrifying to him that a New Englander (Dean) pulled ahead in the Des Moines Register poll of Iowans a week ago. Now the paper takes an in-depth look at why Gephardt is failing to rouse his public.

The reporting could have been more thorough, but it does provide some on-the-ground analysis of what's going on in the most important state, from the most reliable source on that subject:

Doubts prevail in Iowa on Gephardt victory

Iowa Democrats, like their peers around the country, seem drawn this summer to fresh faces in their hope of finding a candidate who can defeat President Bush. That's bad news for Rep. Dick Gephardt.

The Missouri congressman who ran for president 16 years ago lacks the newcomer mantle of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, and several Democratic supporters interviewed doubt he can return their party to the White House.

"I just don't know what he's done since he ran last time to convince me he has that extra kind of thing that might propel him to be president," said Windsor Heights Democrat Gloria Lintner, a retired human resources manager who said she favors Dean. "He's a good man, just maybe not in fighting trim."

...

Last week, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a story citing several Iowa Democrats, whom the Gephardt campaign claimed as supporters, who never agreed to support the congressman or never were contacted by campaign representatives.

Council Bluffs Democrat Steve Gorman attended a Gephardt campaign event this year, but he said he told campaign staff then he would remain uncommitted. Gorman said he was surprised when he saw an item in the Council Bluffs Nonpareil newspaper in June that included his name on a list of Gephardt supporters provided by the campaign.

"I like Dick Gephardt, to be honest with you, but it's time we get a new voice in there," said Gorman, a member of the Pottawattamie County Democrats central committee and co-owner of a Council Bluffs mortgage company.

It will be interesting to see if this story and last week's poll accelerate Gephardt's decline in Iowa. When the major paper in the state starts to signal your obituary, a lot of volunteers, donors and party activists might start looking for a new home.

Bookmark now. The Massachusetts Supreme Court will announce its decision on gay marriage any time now. As soon as it does, I've got a page of full coverage set up, and will immediately start compiling information from around the web, as soon as it posts. Plus my own personal reactions, of course.

Head to this page-- The Massachusetts Decision--as soon as news breaks.

(And by all means email me ASAP when it happens, in case I'm still asleep or not checking the news.)

In the meantime, my ongoing Gay Marriage page will guide you to news coverage, HRC and GLAAD links, my blog essays on the subject, Chip & Reichen, etc.