CTNOW: Lieberman is joining Bush in opposing gay marriages, though he doesn't want a constitutional amendment preventing it. Strike one for my man Lieberman, darnit.

Howard Dean is the only major candidate in favor of civil unions, and he only enacted them when the Vermont Supreme Court made him (thanks to Christi for the history lesson). Three minor candidates - Al Sharpton, Carol Moseley Braun and Dennis Kucinich - support not just gay civil unions but gay marriage. Here's where the Democratic candidates stand on the issue.

You probably already know where Bush stands: he's not only against gay marriage, he wants a constitutional amendment preventing it. I'd get upset about that, but it's what I expect from him. Plus, I don't think such an amendment has a remote chance of passing Congress, much less the state ratification process.

My personal belief is that gay people should have the right to marry. As it is, gays are basically treated like second-class citizens in this country. They're the last group that can legally be discriminated against. I hate to agree with Al Sharpton, but he's right for once in his life:

But Sharpton said simply granting civil unions is a form of discrimination against gays, "like saying we'll give blacks or whites or Latinos the rights to shack up, but not marry."

That sort of discrimination can't last forever. Opinions are changing with each year as more gays come out and more people come to support their gay friends and relatives.

I do think it's going to be a longer road than some people think. Based on the paucity of candidates supporting gay marriage, my guess is that unpublished polls and focus groups are not showing widespread support for the issue. There isn't a single major candidate for the 2004 election who will be a strong, effective advocate for gays, and that includes Howard Dean. If Dean wins his party's nomination, he'll have to soft-pedal the issue when he squares off with Bush. Dean faced resistance even in Vermont, and the red states are not Vermont.

ANDREW SULLIVAN: Gay marriage debate has parallels to interracial marriage debate of the 1960s.

JONAH GOLDBERG: Don't believe that gay marriage is just the first step in a series of
radical changes. The post is off-the-cuff, but it makes a point. He points to feminism and how people thought that it would change everything into an alien landscape. Yet once women won some key battles, the ground shifted, the moderates moved on to other things, and many of the remaining leaders were radicals that couldn't get mainstream support for their far-out ideas. In other words, conservatives shouldn't get too worried about change always leading to a slippery slope. It's a good reminder for both sides of the political fence.

There is a radical gay element that Clayton Cramer frets over, but they're the fringe, not the center, of the gay population. Every group has an extreme wing, and it's silly to worry about a group because of its marginal elements. Marriage will pull more gays into the mainstream and away from the fringes, shifting the political battlegrounds, just as Jonah Goldberg describes.

UPDATE: Michael Totten addresses the "slippery slope" of gay marriage to polyamory, and finds it unlikely and uncompelling.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Idiot Senator Rick Santorum says that marriage should only be for the purpose of having children. Right. Let's ban marriage for people who are infertile or who have had vasectomies or tubal ligations.

CABINET MAGAZINE: The British planned massive ice ships and ice aircraft carriers during World War II. The ships were to be made - not from steel - from ice, and not from ordinary ice, but from Pykrete, the creation of eccentric inventor Geoffrey Pyke.

Pykrete is a super-ice, strengthened tremendously by mixing in wood pulp as it freezes. By freezing a slurry of 14 percent wood pulp, the mechanical strength of ice rockets up to a fairly consistent 70 kg/sq cm. A 7.69 mm
rifle bullet, when fired into pure ice, will penetrate to a depth of about 36 cm. Fired into pykrete, it will penetrate less than half as far - about the same distance as a bullet fired into brickwork. Yet you can mold pykrete into blocks from the simplest materials and then plane it, just like wood. And it has tremendous crush resistance: a one-inch column of the stuff will support an automobile. Moreover, it takes much longer to melt than pure ice. But as strong and eco-friendly as it is, pykrete remains forgotten today save among glaciologists, who express bafflement over why no one has made use of it. "I don't really know why it has languished in obscurity," admits Professor Erland Schulson, director of the Ice Research Laboratory at Dartmouth College.

Found via Jason Kottke's web site.

NEWSNET5: Parents: White Teacher Should Not Teach Black History.

NewsChannel5 reported that a scheduling conflict could cause the district to reassign the black teacher who has taught the course for seven years.

Using a white teacher at Oberlin High School would send the wrong message to black students, said A.G. Miller, an associate professor of American and African religious history at Oberlin College.

SHAKER.ORG: Study finds that attitudes, not racism, determine students grades. Black Students at affluent Shaker Heights High School had radically different grades and test scores than white students, despite having similar backgrounds and attending the same high school. Concerned parents paid a UC Davis anthropologist, John Ogbu, to study the situation.

His conclusion: black students and their parents didn't put as much emphasis on studies as white students in their parents. That difference was reflected in the number of hours spent studying, and in their general attitude towards school.

High-achieving African American students also complain about being ridiculed by fellow black students who tease them if they expend a lot of effort to earn good grades.

Prodded by her parents, Aida Harris always worked hard in school, earning top grades and taking the toughest classes. But by the time she got to middle school, she found that her gung-ho attitude alienated her from many of her black friends.

"People constantly told me that I'm acting white, that I'm an Oreo," she said. "I was constantly shunned by my black classmates."

The harassment grew so intense that her grades dropped from A's and B's to C's and D's. She said that she became preoccupied with her racial identity and let her grades slip in hopes of getting back in the good graces of her friends.

At one point, she told her parents that she wanted to leave public school altogether. "It was traumatic, absolutely traumatic," said her father, Reuben Harris Jr., an insurance agent and a founding member of a parents' group focused on raising black student achievement. "She was feeling ostracized and separated from her own people."

Many parents were furious with Ogbu's conclusions and accused him of being racist, in spite of the fact that Ogbu himself is black. Some of those parents were convinced that the different results were the result of racism of the school's white administrators.

This study raises some old questions. For instance, why do immigrant Asian students tend to do better than native black students, despite being less familiar with the language and culture? Other studies have found that immigrant blacks often do better than native blacks, despite the same challenges, so it's obvious that the problem isn't genetic, but cultural.

CYNTHIA TUCKER: "Racism" claim lets kids down.