In perhaps the largest protest yet of President Bush’s support for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, thousands of queer couples from across the country flocked to San Francisco’s City Hall over the weekend to seek marriage licenses. On Friday, San Francisco Mayor Gavin C. Newsom instructed city and county officials to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, thereby giving thousands of couples an additional reason to celebrate Valentine’s Day.

Thanks to hundreds of city officials and police officers working throughout the holiday weekend without pay, over 2,400 same-sex couples have legally entered marriages with their partners since Newsom’s decree. However, despite the jovial mood on the streets of San Francisco, there is concern that San Francisco city officials are violating the terms of California state law that restricts marriage to a union between a woman and a man. City officials acknowledge that they may be forced to cease marrying same-sex couples at any moment when the state steps in, but until then, they are marrying as many couples as possible in the name of love and equal rights.

Although Robert Tyler, a lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund said that San Francisco was making ”a mockery“ of what he called ”democracy,“ the significant number of people who have participated in San Francisco’s defiance of this law suggests that the problem might not be city officials and same-sex couples but rather democracy’s failure to practice what it preaches.

Protest of this magnitude proves that Bush & co. won’t have an easy time outlawing same-sex marriages as queer communities grow more determined to hold democracy accountable to all of its citizens. Given that these communities pay taxes and even register for the draft in accordance with the law, the ”because the law says so“ rationale for denying them the right to marry is laughable. The law of the land, after all, isn’t supposed to create two classes of citizens, but as of now, that is what the law seems to do. If California officials have any sense, they’ll recognize this — along with the marriages of thousands of same-sex couples.

Laura Nathan-Garner