Just as the New York Times firmly centered its coverage of so-called "gay marriage" decisions from state courts on the gay left's horror, The Washington Post report from Amy Goldstein also presented the issue first and foremost as a question of how "gay rights advocates" felt:
The highest courts of New York and Georgia ruled yesterday that same-sex couples are not entitled to marry, delivering a twin blow to gay rights advocates that leaves Massachusetts as the only state in which such unions are legal.
As usual, the story is illustrated by a photo of gay activists, as it almost always is. Gay media theorists used to protest that their problem was "invisibility," but now, it's the social conservative activists that almost never get their picture in the paper when the story is gay "civil rights." Perhaps the most classic Goldstein paragraph is the one where she describes the great ideological battle on this issue, between conservatives and liberals -- oops, make that advocates of "civil rights."
The issue has emerged as one of the country's strongest ideological collisions, with gay rights activists fighting for marriage as a new civil right, and many conservatives, including President Bush, clinging aggressively to marriage's traditional meaning.
Oh, the L-word does surface once, in reference to the state of New York, but not to those civil rights workers:
Coming hours apart in one of the country's most liberal states and one of its most conservative, the two rejections of same-sex marriage demonstrate the intense hold the issue has taken across the nation's legal and political landscape -- and the difficulty proponents face in altering the status quo.
That's a polite way of saying that "gay rights advocates" are outnumbered, and that currently, if America remains a democracy instead of a country ruled by unelected judges, so-called "gay marriage" is prone to lose. Goldstein also noted the court was perceived as tilting left:
In such a charged climate, advocates on both sides had been awaiting the New York opinion with particular anticipation, coming as it did from a relatively left-leaning court in a state with a large concentration of gay residents.
There were no conservative labels for social conservative groups -- because they were not allotted a place in the story. New York Gov. George Pataki and his potential GOP successor John Faso were the political voices quoted in opposition to the gay agenda.
