Against All Odds

And McCormick, from the trenches, believes everything will actually work out. "I look at somebody like Pete Knight," she says, "and I think, 'I am going to outlive him.' Time is on my side. I really see my community growing stronger and larger. I do think tolerance is growing."

Yet in the winner-take-all debate over same-sex marriage, tolerance may not be the final destination. Because there's an irony to all of this. The feeling of disconnection that has kept people from lobbying their legislators about same-sex marriage -- the same feeling of disconnection, paradoxically, that spurs the members of the Christian right into action -- is mutually returned by the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose members, a key staffer says, really can't think of a reason why they should move the bills forward. If the committee can kill the bills in this, an election year, without jeopardizing anyone at the ballot box, then that's what will happen, the staffer says.

After all, that's the way things are done in Sacramento. Despite the passion on all sides -- McCormick, Knight, Sheldon, the Task Force, and all the other people who've thrown themselves into this -- the reality is that sometimes, politicians just leave the room.

Why? Because they can. Ain't nobody keeping them on a tight enough leash.

Letters are the currency of lobbying when actual currency isn't changing hands -- pen to paper proves that people are taking note.

Around the Capitol, Lou Sheldon's involvement in the campaign to ban same-sex marriage is something of a controversy.

Imagine the fundamentalist right forking these bills off to one neophyte lobbyist and you begin to get a sense of how the left has completely dropped the ball on the same-sex marriage bills.