they re in the military and they re part of this country s entire diversity. and they want to be a part of their own families. and they re more traditional than you realize. so then began the battle you re still battling which is with conservatives. yeah. i think the great disappointment, the great disappointment is that this was a really in some ways a conservative argument. this was a minority group seeking responsibility, commitment, pooling resources. if you re a couple and something happens to one of you, you have someone else to take care of you, not the government. there s a really powerful conservative case for this. and so many of the republican party just never grappled with it until it was too late. but kennedy, a reagan appointee, i think you see the last strains of that moderate conservatism which is, you know, we do have this new emergent population. how do we integrate them? how do we make them part?
which is, you know, we do have this new emergent population. how do we integrate them? how do we make them part? i don t want us to have a separate but equal institution of civil unions, and that was the big threat. and then bush, when he actually endorsed a federal marriage amendment, suddenly the entire gay establishment were like, okay, we re with you. it was like if bush is against it, we were for it. yes, bush i would like to say that my arguments or whatever, evans brilliant strategy really persuaded the gay community. but no, i thin george bush by endorsing the most unbelievably draconian, to actually write us out of equality in the constitution itself, unprecedented attack on an minority, galvanized everybody around this issue. do you worry that there will be a right-wing backlash of the kind that roe v. wade produced for the next decade or two?