The other shoe dropped on the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA) when five Republican Senators introduced it into the Senate, on Nov. 25. The anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment was first introduced in the House some eighteen months ago and now has 108 cosponsors.

The lead sponsors in the Senate are Wayne Allard (Colorado), Sam Brownback (Kansas), Jim Bunning (Kentucky), James Inhofe (Oklahoma), and Jeff Sessions (Alabama).

Unlike their House colleagues, at this point the Senators have not enlisted any Democratic sponsors, or for that matter, any Republicans who are not extremely conservative. This suggests tough going to reach the two-thirds majority necessary to pass a constitutional amendment.

Allard called his proposed amendment “a starting point for a more comprehensive discussion” and not necessarily the final format that an amendment might take.

“The Constitution is a masterpiece of liberty and freedom. Corrupting this precious document to score cheap political points is frankly obscene,” said Patrick Guerriero, executive director of Log Cabin Republicans. “True conservatives would never alter our Constitution for political purposes.”

Log Cabin has gone on record as saying that it could not endorse or support a politician who backs the FMA.

Gay conservative Andrew Sullivan has pointed out that the current wording of the FMA, should it pass, raises a very real legal question of whether churches that perform same-sex marriages would be violating the Constitution. The issue of separation of church and state is not an insignificant matter.

“This is a misuse of the Constitution — a document that since the Bill of Rights, has been amended sparingly and only to expand individual rights and protections,” said Elizabeth Birch, executive director of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC).

“This amendment goes much further than denying the right to marry, it would also deny tax-paying Americans things as fundamental as Social Security survivor benefits and the right to visit a loved one in the hospital.”

Many legal scholars agree with Birch that the FMA would prohibit civil unions and other recognition of same-sex unions that did not carry the title of marriage. Mitch Daniels, head of the Alliance for Marriage and the chief proponent of the FMA, says that it would not.

But other social conservatives want to make sure that it does. They are toying with language that would effectively ban all such recognition. It is a source of some turmoil among those groups on the far right.

“This amendment has very little to do with marriage as such; and everything to do with homosexuality,” said Sullivan, writing in The New Republic Online. “If the social right wanted to shore up marriage, they could propose an amendment tightening up divorce laws … but they haven’t.”

“The amendment is simply — and baldly — an attempt to ostracize a minority of Americans for good. It is an attempt to write them out of their own country.”

“Amending the Constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman would be unwise for two reasons,” George F. Will wrote in his syndicated column published in the Washington Post on November 30.

“Constitutionalizing social policy is generally a misuse of fundamental law. And it would be especially imprudent to end state responsibility for marriage law at a moment when we require evidence of the sort that can be generated by allowing the states to be laboratories of social policy.”

He joins a growing list of the nation’s most prominent conservative commentators who are opposed to the FMA. Some, notably David Brooks and William Safire, have even acknowledged positive aspects to extending civil marriage to same-sex couples.

Meanwhile in Massachusetts, former Republican governor of Massachusetts William Weld told the Boston Globe, the court’s decision “Is a thunderbolt, but a thunderbolt correctly heard...It reminds me of some of the early civil rights cases, when the Warren Court all but said, somebody has to do this.”