When Massachusetts and San Francisco started allowing gay and lesbian couples to wed, it set off a firestorm of controversy for social conservatives and the religious right. Sen. Rick Santorum compared gay marraige to incest, polygamy and terrorism. Pat Robertson claimed that such practices would result in nothing less but the destruction of America. And the president? He blamed it all on “activist judges” and immediately started championing a Constitutional Amendment to ban gay marriage.

At some point today that very same amendment is expected to be killed in a Senate procedural vote. Despite the public bleatings of the amendment’s supporters, it became apparent that the American public didn’t much care. And senators from both sides of the aisle are rightly worried that amending the Constitution for such an issue is perhaps not such a good idea. As this post is being written (Tuesday night), no one is even sure if the amendment will even get a simple majority, to say nothing of the two-thirds vote needed for it to go forward.

Maybe the social conservatives should have paid attention to Lynne Cheney. If there’s anyone you would expect to be a cheerleader for such a high-profile administration push, it would be the Vice President’s wife. But that’s not the case this time; Mrs. Cheney has publicly opined that, instead of being written into the Constitution, the final say on gay marriage should lie with the states. If this sounds familiar, it’s because Vice President Dick Cheney said something similar during the 2000 campaign. And, strangely enough, so did George W. Bush. Inconsistent? You bet—I would use the term “flip flop” in this case, but I hear Fox News has already trademarked it for their “fair and balanced” coverage of John Kerry.

Even though supporters of the amendment have known for months that they wouldn’t have enough support to push it forward, they were still determined to bring the matter to a vote. And the reasoning had more to do with politics than high-minded morality; the amendment’s supporters hoped that “no” votes by Kerry and John Edwards would entangle them in a controversial social issue and cast a shadow on the looming Democratic convention. But with support for the amendment falling apart even among Republicans, neither Democratic candidate is expected to attend the vote.

The social conservatives promise that the amendment will be reconsidered in the future. But it will be a difficult sell, since such an amendment would in effect legislate gays as second-class citizens, stripped of the rights that are supposed to be guaranteed to all Americans. Even though a majority of Americans are opposed to gay marriage, many realize that there are much more important issues to deal with.

But until the issue comes up again, we bid a fond farewell to the gay marriage amendment. Respect to the senators—Democrats and Republicans alike—who did the right thing by killing it quickly.

(Cartoon from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Mike Luckovich.)