THE FMA COLLAPSES: Even I didn't anticipate quite how humiliating the FMA debate would be for the religious right. They cannot agree on amendment language, they have managed to make the GOP look exclusionary and intolerant, and they look likely to lose by a big margin. Meanwhile, not only Lynne Cheney and John McCain have been standing up for conservative principle. Here's Richard Epstein from CATO, making the obvious case; even the Wall Street Journal has balked at the Allard-Musgrave language; and the conservative Chicago Tribune has also come out against. Maybe the Rove strategy - to use fear of homosexuals as a rallying cry for his fundamentalist base - will pay dividends. But maybe the abject failure of this measure, the splits it has opened up among Republicans, and the way in which many leading figures in the party just cannot go along with the far right's agenda, will only anger the religious right sufficiently to stay home in November. All I can say is that, from one perspective, that of the gay community, president Bush has done what no Democratic candidate has been able to do for a couple of decades: he has united the entire community around the Democrats. The effort by many of us to persuade gay voters to consider the Republicans, to give Bush a chance, has been rendered almost comically moot this fall. Bush won a quarter of gay votes in 2000. I wonder if he'll even get a tenth of them this year. He deserves fewer.

"On 48-to-50 vote, proponents fell 12 short of the needed 60 to clear a Democratic procedural hurdle and move to a vote on passage of the proposed constitutional amendment. Sixty-seven votes would be needed to approve the measure."