What A Dick. What A Lynne.

Our rightwing friends have been shouting at me through their cable news megaphones all day, telling me that John Kerry's reference to Mary Cheney was part of a sleazy campaign agenda, a cynical ploy to crudely exploit a sensitive issue for political gain.

Part of a campaign agenda? Exploitative? Cynical?

Let me tell you about cynical and exploitative. Cynical is proposing an amendment to the constitution to ban gay marriage, in full knowledge that it cannot pass, dividing the nation with a vulgar and meretricious appeal to prejudice for nothing more than partisan political gain. Exploitative is pursuing Rove's grand scheme to inflame that part of your base that considers homosexuality an abomination, and, unlike John Kerry, considers homosexuals children of a lesser god.

I want to be clear on the difference between an amendment to the Constitution and legislation, such as the Defense of Marriage Act. Legislation evinces the will of the majority, the exercise of the political will of the people at a given moment in time, as inconstant and ill-advised as such will may be. But an amendment to the constitution elevates issue to principle, and renders it beyond the ambit of the rabble, the majority be damned. Thus is your right to freedom of speech imbued with constitutional inviolability, even if every son of a bitch in the country disagrees with what you have to say, as long as five of nine old bastards in black robes can still glean the plain import of the 45 words of the First Amendment.

But what is an amendment that, rather than gaurantying a right to all (and most significantly, to the minority), enisles a minority and refuses it a right granted to all others? Man, that's as profound a stigma as the polity can attach to a minority. The proposal to amend the constitution to ban gay marriage said, in effect, "the union of two of the same gender is such an affront to decency that it is forbade, even if every living soul in a state desires passionately to grant such union the imprimatur of that state." This is no mere pruning of the "full faith and credit" clause, such as that effected by the lamentable Defense of Marriage Act. This pernicious amendment proposed by our President and his party would accord the stigmatization of homosexuals the same dignity as the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage. This amendment would smuggle into the noblest document yet conceived by man a low and invidious "right" that cheapens the constitutional rights consecrated by blood at Gettysburg, Normandy, Khe Sanh and Baghdad. I would sooner put Saddam's lapidary likeness on Mount Rushmore than so defile the Constitution.

Lynne found John Kerry's remarks about her daughter, in which Kerry counted lesbians among "all god's children", to be "cheap and tawdry." You want cheap and tawdry? Cheap and tawdry is our President treating the Constitution of the United States as toilet paper, a cheap prop in his farcical campaign, and wiping his Texan ass with the sanctified parchment - our Constitution - just so he can scare up a few more votes from the haters.

That's cynical and exploitative. That's cheap and tawdry.