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Daniels's savvy was also evident in his launching of the FMA. He had made the case for his amendment to leading social conservatives, but he hadn't tried to enlist them as his main allies, because of their polarizing language and stance. ("The traditional social-conservative movement harkens back to an era of white Protestant cultural hegemony," he told me.) And because he knew that gay-rights activists would cast marriage as a civil right and evoke the African-American struggle, he had devised a strategy to pre-empt this line of argument: he chose African-Americans, including the Boston minister Ray Hammond and the civil-rights veteran Walter Fauntroy, to be his spokesmen.

But for all the obvious political virtues of the Daniels approach, it has one major flaw: conservative activists hate it. Many of them—including Daniels's comrades from his Massachusetts Family Institute days—have called him to express their ire. One told Daniels that his coalition resembled the bar scene in Star Wars. (Daniels replied, "When the right-wingers get together, that's the bar scene in Star Wars. Those are the alien forms.") Members of the Family Research Council and other groups on the religious right have chastised congressional sponsors of the FMA. Because of these groups' belief that homosexuality is a sin, they are unwilling to make any accommodations—and they are angry at Daniels for trying to do so. They are preparing for a showdown, which will take place in the coming months. The leaders of nearly every major conservative activist group—James Dobson, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, and the former drug czar William J. Bennett among them—have banded together to create an anti-gay-marriage front: the Arlington Group. They have written their own constitutional amendment, which would ban both gay marriage and civil unions. Given this group's political heft, congressional backers of the FMA may shift their support.

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In 1999 Daniels moved to Washington to found the Alliance for Marriage. The group enlisted conservative legal scholars to write the Federal Marriage Amendment. When Daniels presented the document, in 2001, it struck many conservatives as a waste of time. They thought they had already won the battle: in 1996 President Bill Clinton had signed the Defense of Marriage Act, forbidding federal recognition of same-sex unions; thirty-seven state legislatures had issued their own bans.

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