Read this paragraph from Sunday’s New York Times lead story on a poll about gay marriage:

Attitudes on the subject seem to be inextricably linked to how people view marriage itself. For a majority of Americans — 53 percent — marriage is largely a religious matter. Seventy-one percent of those people oppose gay marriage. Similarly, 33 percent of Americans say marriage is largely a legal matter and a majority of those people — 55 percent — say they support gay marriage.

The problem begins here with the word “largely.” Because marriage in the U.S. is not “largely” religious or legal: It is — unfortunately, I think — defined equally as both. This has led us to the current paradoxical mess.

If you are someone who feels that marriage is “largely a religious matter,” then I can understand that, if your religious beliefs tell you that gays shouldn’t marry, you don’t want them marrying in your church/synagogue/mosque/house of worship.

That makes sense. But if you believe that marriage is “largely a religious matter,” shouldn’t you want the government out of the marriage business entirely? Why do you think the government should enforce your religion’s dictates? Wouldn’t you be a tiny bit worried that the government that enforces your religious beliefs today might turn around tomorrow and enforce someone else’s?

In all the overblown rhetoric about the “sacredness of marriage,” people seem to be forgetting the obvious: No American court has the right, and no court is going to be able, to dictate that any particular religious denomination must perform the service of marriage for gay couples. But just as the courts can’t tell your clergyman whom to marry, your clergyman shouldn’t be able to veto who your government can and can’t confer the legal benefits of partnership upon.

The only sensible way to balance religious freedom and civil rights here is to disentangle marriage’s spiritual and legal threads. Let every denomination define marriage according to its particular teachings and beliefs. Then invent another word to cover the legal aspects of marriage and make sure that the arrangement — its commitments and its benefits — is available to every citizen, gay or straight. That way, the religious traditionalist doesn’t have to feel that his sacred word “marriage” has been compromised by the state, while gays can have their due legal rights — and get married, too, in more liberal denominations that want to welcome them.

Of course, the religious right isn’t interested in achieving this sort of clarity. Its leaders understand just how much they stand to benefit from the continued blurring of legal and religious doctrine in the debate over gay marriage. In fact, the proponents of a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to male/female couples aim to blast a gigantic hole in the wall between church and state.

The good news is, in 30 years the whole issue will be moot, because so much of the hostility to gay marriage is concentrated at the aged end of the demographic spectrum. Today’s open-minded kids are tomorrow’s democratic majority. And even if it should pass now, today’s “sacredness of marriage” amendment is as doomed as yesteryear’s Prohibition.

Bonus link: Read Dahlia Lithwick’s hilarious Slate piece on “what’s really undermining the sanctity of marriage.”

There remains, in some quarters at least, a notion that the Bush administration — whatever you think of it ideologically — has its act together: That the Republicans running our country are seasoned, experienced, competent public servants who understand how to manipulate the levers of power, domestically and internationally, to achieve their goals. You can expect this notion to play a big part in the Bush campaign’s war-of-images with its Democratic opponents, particularly if Howard Dean wins the nomination.

But events keeps playing havoc with the idea of the Bush administration’s competence. This week’s devastating case is the Iraqi contracts-and-debt fiasco. If you haven’t followed closely, this is the sequence of events:

(1) President Bush announces that he’s calling in his favorite fixer, James Baker, to handle a new diplomatic effort to obtain some relief for Iraqi debt from the many nations Saddam Hussein had run up debts with. Among Iraq’s big creditors: Germany, France and Russia.

(2) The Pentagon publishes a rule that, on grounds of “national security,” forbids nations that failed to join the military coalition against Saddam from bidding on contracts to help rebuild Iraq. Among those the rule blocks: Germany, France and Russia.

(3) Bush’s and Baker’s new Iraq debt-relief initiative has its knees kicked in before it even starts, as Russian and other leaders scorn the U.S.’s overtures.

Much of this sorry affair is chronicled in today’s New York Times. As one official puts it in the Times: “What we did was toss away our leverage.” In the short term, it means that Bush will have a much harder time trying to ease Iraq’s debt burden; in the long term, it means that the total cost of the Iraq adventure to the deficit-strapped American people will end up far higher.

Is this foul-up evidence of a continuing internecine power struggle between the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz axis of hawks at Defense and the Powellite internationalists at State, for whom Baker is a sort of emeritus leader? Is revenge against perfidious “old Europe” — and lucrative contracts for former employers and pals of Bush and Cheney — more important than building a financial coalition to share the prodigious cost of Iraqi reconstruction? Or is the train wreck more simply a sign of an administration that can’t coordinate important policies at the most basic levels?

Whatever the answer, shouldn’t we expect our executive branch to not trip itself up in such bizarrely self-defeating ways? After all, it’s not just Iraq’s debt that Bush is messing around with. Since the U.S. has no choice but to remain strategically committed to making post-Saddam Iraq work, the U.S.’s fiscal future is equally at stake.

So now Al Gore is endorsing Howard Dean. The primaries don’t start for weeks, but the Dean bandwagon certainly has impressive momentum. Nine, even six months ago, the conventional wisdom viewed Dean as a long-shot outsider. Today, he’s the man to beat.

Any time a candidate pulls off this sort of feat, it usually means there’s more going on than the media can figure out. So far, the standard skeptical line on Dean is that his campaign appeals primarily to white-collar workers, yuppies, geeks and starry-eyed college students. But if his support were really that narrow, it’s hard to imagine him even getting as far as he has.

I think the Dean campaign’s innovations have significantly outstripped the media’s ability to interpret them. Something is happening, and you don’t know what it is… (Chris Nolan has some choice comments on the same topic.) If six months ago, the experts thought Dean didn’t have a shot at the nomination, maybe we shouldn’t unquestioningly swallow today’s expert line — that, if nominated, Dean will go down to McGovern- and Dukakis-style defeat.

Sure, it might happen. There’s a year’s worth of history to unfold between now and November 2004. And Bush has an unprecedented mountain of money to spend.

But — despite the propaganda that Dean is the candidate Karl Rove would most like to run against — it’s not as if Bush can walk easy. After all, the red state/blue state electoral breakdown from the 2000 election was a dead heat. You can cede the Republicans the South and still win if you capture just one more state than Gore did.

As someone who came of age in the 1970s in the aftermath of Watergate, I tend toward political pessimism: The bad guys are always worse than you think they could possibly be, and the good guys’ victories rarely stick. But, like a surprisingly large number of other Americans, I’m sensing a little room for hope. It’s too early for me to choose a candidate, but Dean has won my attention. His rhetoric is impressive, his openness to change is attractive.

To those who say he’s doomed the way Adlai Stevenson was doomed, I’d say — maybe. But maybe the world has changed in the 50 years that have passed since Ike trounced his “egghead” opponent. And, though Stevenson lost twice in 1952 and 1956, don’t forget who America elected in 1960.

JFK broke that losing streak for the Democrats. I still haven’t heard a conclusive argument why Dean doesn’t have a shot at lifting the Dukakis curse.

Lord knows what really happened at that battle in Samarra — or whether we will ever find out — but Juan Cole and Josh Marshall are asking the right questions.

54 Saddam loyalists dead? Or American soldiers firing on Iraqi civilians? It would be so much more reassuring to believe our side’s version of the story. If only our side had a better track record of telling the truth. But we’re too busy making up stories about our president’s bravery.

Rick Heller takes me to task for my post on Bush’s Baghdad trip. Apparently I showed “lack of graciousness” in my complaint that the whole thing was a costly photo-op. We should be glad, Heller says, that Bush took the risk: “For a leader to share some of the risk in which he has placed his troops is not only a morale boost for the troops, but also sobering for the leader. Furthermore, despite the virtual resources available, there is still no substitute for physical presence in order to gain a deeper understanding of a conflict.”

I don’t know whether Heller is just naive or is somehow so committed to the notion of being a “centrist” (as his blogroll labels suggest) that he has bent over backwards at this rare opportunity to praise an action by Bush. But c’mon! Can anyone believe that a two-hour touchdown is an effort to “gain a deeper understanding” of the conflict? It’s barely time to get through a holiday meal. Surely a leader interested in “deeper understanding of the conflict” would want to talk to more than just a handpicked cadre of U.S. soldiers. I understand that for security reasons Bush can’t pull a Henry V, don a disguise, and wander the streets of Baghdad talking to the common folk. But don’t tell me that a photo-op is a fact-finding mission!

As the post I linked to below suggested, the impact of the trip on morale is debatable. The one indisputable outcome of the visit was the opportunity to shoot the President offering a turkey to the troops.

If that footage doesn’t show up in Bush’s campaign advertisements before November, 2004, I will gladly apologize to Heller for my lack of graciousness. If it does, as I’m quite sure it will — unless the Iraq adventure turns into such a continuing debacle that the Bush campaign decides to run away from it entirely — then I will continue to feel justified in my cynical view.

President Bush’s surprise Thanksgiving trip to Baghdad was certainly a good thing to do. On the other hand, it seems pretty clear that the whole thing was the political equivalent of what happens in Hollywood when the cast and crew are reassembled to reshoot a scene that the director realizes he botched. In this case, Karl Rove’s “Mission Accomplished” footage from May, with its flyer-garb bravado, has now become an albatross around Bush’s neck. The Bush campaign needed new political-commercial fodder. New location; same cast. Roll cameras. Only Bush gets to charge all production costs to the American people.

Patrick Neilsen Hayden’s report, quoting Kevin Maroney quoting a former Air Force officer, provides another perspective on the quickie visit: “First, let me say these little photo opportunities do nothing in raising the morale level. The people who Bush dined with were most assuredly hand selected.” Read more.