The USA, Former Human Rights Leader
Now, we're the backward, third-world nation, denying rights to our citizens, while other leaders speak out for them. Deb Price has a column in the Detroit News about all the nations "pointing the way to racial equality":

Our country's fitful, centuries-long struggle to create a nation in which all citizens truly are equal has been our greatest gift to the world. And, luckily, when the United States has stumbled badly -- as it long did on the road to racial equality, as it does today in its treatment of those of us who're gay -- there have always been other countries able to point us, by their example, toward the fairness that we taught them to strive for.

So what does leadership, 21st-century-style, sound like? To my ears, not like President George W. Bush telling Congress that writing anti-gay prejudice into the U.S. Constitution would somehow be good for marriage, would somehow "defend the sanctity of marriage."

Rather, real leadership sounds like Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin speaking to their parliaments about the importance of equal marriage rights for all couples.

Here's Zapatero, as quoted this month by Reuters: "We cannot deny a right to our compatriots when the exercise of that right does not harm anyone else."

And here's Martin urging his national government to follow the lead of seven of Canada's 10 provinces: "I rise in support of ... the Civil Marriage Act. I rise in support of a Canada in which liberties are safeguarded, rights are protected and the people of this land are treated as equal under the law."

Already, under Zapatero's leadership, one house of the Spanish parliament has voted to open marriage to same-sex couples. And final passage is expected in time for the weddings to begin early this fall. Two-thirds of Spaniards welcome the advance, according to polling by the government's Centre for Sociological Investigations.

Zapatero took office last year vowing to rid his predominantly Catholic homeland of the stifling oppressiveness that has held it back. He has refused to wilt under a blowtorch of criticism from the Vatican for his embrace of gay rights.

"I will never understand," he told his parliament, "those who proclaim love as the foundation of life while denying so radically protection, understanding and affection to our neighbors, our friends, our relatives, our colleagues.

"What kind of love is this that excludes those who experience their sexuality in a different way?"

Canadian Prime Minister Martin didn't talk of love. Yet his February address, reprinted by the Canadian news agency CanWest, eloquently wove together all the reasons his nation has nothing to lose but much to gain by standing up for its gay people: "When we as a nation protect minority rights, we are protecting our multicultural nature....We are saying, proudly and unflinchingly, that defending rights -- not just those that happen to apply to us, not just (those) that everyone approves of -- is at the very soul of what it means to be a Canadian."

The guy sounds almost Jeffersonian. Bush, on the other hand, sounds more like a mouthpiece for Jerry Fallwell and the rest of the religious nuts. I'm sorry, can somebody please tell me how gay couples getting married are going to get dull suburban married couples swinging and doing meth -- any more than they already are?