Stations of the Crass: Maureen Dowd, linking Bush's break from "compassionate conservatism" regarding gay marriage with Mel Gibson's film The Passion (instead of leaving theater-goers "suffused with charity toward your fellow man" it's likely to send you home "wanting to kick somebody's teeth in"), she writes: "If the president is truly concerned about preserving the sanctity of marriage, as one of my readers suggested, why not make divorce illegal and stone adulterers? Our soldiers are being killed in Iraq; Osama's still on the loose; jobs are being exported all over the world; the deficit has reached biblical proportions. And our president is worrying about Mars and marriage?"

Couldn't've said it better myself:

Once a group is viewed as fully human, it grows harder to accord it some rights and deny it others. In the early 20th century, the laws banning miscegenation were justified as protecting whites against "inferior" blacks. By mid-century, in much of the nation, blacks were no longer inferior, and the case for miscegenation had dwindled to a defense of marriage as such. But if whites and blacks were no longer really different, what was it that marriage needed to be defended against?

Also: As Josh Marshall points out, the photo that accompanies this MSNBC story sums up what the freedom to marry is all about.