No one cared to find a rift between the Stonewall Democrats and what’s left of the moderate Democrats in Boston, but CBS this morning had a debate between Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign on Dick Cheney’s town-meeting chat the other day in Iowa. Perkins seemed to know what CBS was up to, because he wouldn’t say anything stronger than he was “disappointed” with Cheney and said it wasn’t going to affect the party’s stand.

Predictably, the HRC guy tried to play the game that somehow the conservatives have reached a new extreme by trying to put a ban on so-called gay marriage in the Constitution. Funny, I thought so-called gay marriage was the new extreme. I thought Anthony Kennedy was the one trying to put the “right to respect” for homosexuality into the Constitution in Lawrence v. Texas.