The two front-runners for the Democratic presidential nomination – Hillary and Barack – join the white dudes in opposing same-sex marriage.

Ironically, Republican front-runner former N.Y. Mayor Rudy Giuliani may even be better on gay rights.

People forget that not only has Rudy survived 9/11 and lingered through three marriages, but he’s done what few of us could ever do – endure living with a fussy gay couple (is that redundant?) in their Manhattan co-op.

Legally speaking, Rudy is the first person to run for president who has been a member of a domestic partnership household.

Yet, supposedly, the 2008 race is the Democrats’ to lose. And they will do their best to do just that.

Same-sex marriage probably shouldn’t be a litmus test for gay voters. There are a few other issues that are important: the war, health care, the deficit, terrorism, global warming and whether “Brothers & Sisters” returns for another season.

But the reality is that “gay marriage” has become synonymous with whether one supports complete gay equality.

So what galls us is how Hillary and Barack simply won’t say they support same-sex marriage. Marriage is “reserved” for a man and a woman, they say.

It’s unfathomable to see how these two liberal boomers could think anything other than that the law guarantees us full equality in every way. There is no exception under the Constitution that allows the federal or a state government to treat gay people (whether single or coupled) any differently than straight people.

When Hillary was studying law at Yale, she read a Supreme Court case called Bradwell v. Illinois. This 1897 case upheld a state law prohibiting women from practicing law. Myra Bradwell, like Abe Lincoln, studied law without going to law school. Lawyers cited her writings; she was a prominent legal scholar. But the Supreme Court said, regardless of her abilities, “a woman’s place is in the home.”

Just like a homosexual’s place today is “in the home.” The law allows us to live in the home, cook in it, and even have sex in it, but don’t try to get married in it or raise children equally with straights in it. And don’t even think about leaving home to serve in the military. That’s just not our “traditional” role.

It’s interesting that stereotyping hasn’t changed much in 100 years.

It’s sad to see in two people whose mentors devoted or gave their lives fighting against laws based completely upon hate-based stereotyping.

Somehow one doesn’t suspect Hillary stood up at Yale and said: “I agree, the Constitution and public policy require we treat women as subordinates. The legal profession is reserved for men. It’s always been that way. I should be home baking cookies, raising Chelsea and cleaning those nasty stains off my husband’s pants.”

If we’re tough on Hillary, it’s because we know she knows better.

Barack Obama, when he was studying law at Harvard, was no Uncle Tom. One can hardly sense that he would have stood with glee when he recited the holding of Dred Scott v. Sandford – the worst case in American legal history upholding slavery. Why? Because the court said that “those of the Negro race” were not “persons.”

In one his books, Barack describes how awful it was that his parents – an African-American man and a white woman – couldn’t even marry in some states when he was born in 1961. That’s because it wasn’t until 1969 that the Supreme Court struck down laws in many states that prohibited persons of different races from marrying.

Obama knows it made no sense in 1969 to link marriage and race, and in 2007 it’s also irrational to link marriage and sexual orientation.