From the Washington Times:

Dean’s outburst
Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean claims to be reaching out to red-state voters, but yesterday, he suggested that opponents of homosexual “marriage” are bigots.
Mr. Dean was responding to news that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican, plans to bring to a vote a proposed constitutional amendment that would ban homosexual “marriage.”
“At a time when the Republican Party is in trouble with their conservative base, Bill Frist is taking a page straight out of the Karl Rove playbook to distract from the Republican Party’s failed leadership and misplaced priorities by scapegoating LGBT families for political gain, using marriage as a wedge issue,” said Mr. Dean, using the abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.
“It is not only morally wrong, it is shameful and reprehensible,” Mr. Dean said.

Me: I can tolerate these arguments from a lot of quarters because I think it’s largely true that the GOP is picking up the gay marriage card as a cynical ploy during an election cycle. If you think gay marriage is the threat to Western Civilization many Republicans claim, why wait to talk about it at election time? If gay marriage isn’t a big enough deal to actually do something about it before election season rolls around, why campaign against it at all?

But I have a real hard time taking Howard Dean seriously on this subject. He says the Democrats oppose gay marriage when it’s convenient and he says they support it when his base attacks him. In 2004 he himself opposed gay marriage while at the same time he’s always given every indication he would be delighted if the Supreme Court unilaterally and undemocratically imposed it on the entire country. Whatever his true beliefs are, it’s pretty clear to me that the thing he’s most outraged about is that Republicans have been more successful at “shameful and reprehensible” politics than he’s trying to be.