Heavy Rotation - Sometimes Republican leaders on the Hill act like the DJs at a Top 40 radio station. You keep hearing them play the same tune over and over again.

So it goes with the constant hearings on the menance of same-sex marriages. The NYTimes reports that Tuesday's repeat performance in the Senate Judiciary Committee featured a couple of sour notes for backers of a ban. For one, Democrats "who had until Tuesday largely avoided a series of Republican hearings on gay marriage, turned out in force, sparring with the [Gov. Mitt Romney] and interrupting him at every turn."

The new Democratic strategy is to highlight the waffling that some moderate Republicans have done on the issue. On this point, besides Romney the Times highlights Oregon Senator Gordon Smith, mentioned recently in Bhaus, as a sometimes-supporter of gay rights who opposes gay marriage and who would vote for an amendment banning it but only if the amendment also allows states to offer civil unions or other legal rights. (Follow all that?)

This begs the long-standing question of whether the language of the current FMA outlaws even legislatively-enacted state civil unions. (No, that little "legal drafting" problem hasn't gone away, even if neither the media nor Bhaus has discussed it lately.)

How far an amendment should go remains a divisive issue that fractures the two parties into three camps: (1) bigot brigadiers who want to abolish everything including civil unions, (2) the lukewarm CUs-are-OK-I-guess crowd, and (3) the pro-gay-marriage-someday liberals. Such across-the-board dissension proves that the GOP is almost as vulnerable on gay marriage as the Dems, and FMA opponents are finally wising up to this fact. Reminding many members of both parties how much they just want the issue to go away may be the best strategy yet to forestall passage of any FMA this year.