“‘I believe marriage is between a man and a woman, and I think we ought to codify that one way or another,’ Bush told reporters at a White House news conference. ‘And we’ve got lawyers looking at the best way to do that.'” CNN

BushCo must think the impact in terms of delivering fundamentalist votes to him in ’04 will outweigh the loss of votes from the 10% of the American population who he is telling don’t have the right to marry the person of their choice. And however many others, not gay themselves, who happen to agree that they should have that right. But then again, those are by and large votes he lost already a long time ago, so maybe there’s nothing lost in their opinion. But, as Nick Gillespie reminds us at Hit & Run,

As liberals gear up to bash Bush for his reactionary thinking on this point, they ought to remember the actions of the only twice-elected Democrat president since FDR. When Bill Clinton signed The Defense of Marriage Act in September 1996–an act specifically intended to foreclose state recognition of same-sex marriages–he noted that he had “long opposed governmental recognition of same-gender marriages.”