For five days last week, the White House and its Capitol Hill allies did urgent battle against what they perceive, or say they perceive, as an attack on the institution of marriage. It’s a strange sort of attack, to be sure: a wonderfully pacific attack, a supportive attack, an attack without the slightest intention or capacity to cause harm, consisting, as it does, of the earnest wish of certain loving couples to join themselves to that very institution and thus to feel themselves, and be accepted as, full members of the American (and human) family.

Hendrik Hertzberg (b. 1943) American journalist, editor, speech writer, political commentator
“Distraction,” The New Yorker (19 Jun 2006)
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On a push by Republicans for a Constitutional Amendment banning same-sex marriage.