I'm with you on this. I have yet to really dig deeper, but is the right's argument on this fundamentally and unashamedly religious in nature? I just don't see what the danger is in defining marriage as a specific civil contract between two consenting adults... I really don't get what the objection to that sort of covenant is, and I think you hit the nail on the head when you gesture towards fear and bigotry as the primary factors at work here. I'd love to hear a better conservative argument, because maybe we're just setting up convenient straw-men in the mean time, but until then, I'm baffled... But as far as I'm concerned this really puts the nail in the coffin of that old canard about Bush being a uniter. This is out and out war in which the goal is to simply divide the country, and the conservatives are gambling (correctly, unfortunately) that their half is slightly bigger. No matter that they are on shaky constitutional and moral ground. Tyranny of the majority. Reason #17,892 to consider becoming an expat... ugh.