ABSTRACT
The political storm over marriage is now intensifying as gay couples wed in San Francisco and President Bush vows to stop them with a constitutional amendment. Gay marriage threatens to wreak havoc as a 'wedge issue' in the November 2004 elections, but it is not entirely clear which party's prospects will be promoted, and which damaged, through marriage politics this year. Statistics confirm what entertainment culture spectacularizes, marriage is less stable and central to the organization of American life than ever. Hard-line religious and moral conservatives have been working to rigidify the boundaries of 'traditional' marriage and to shore up its privileged status. The religious and moral right appears to be winning out in the wake of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's 2003 decision that the state must extend civil marriage to same-sex couples. Moral conservatives have so far taken the lead in the struggle to frame the meaning of the 'marriage crisis'.
