WASHINGTON, July 26 (UPI) -- The U.S. debate over same-sex marriage has become a money-massing movement on both sides similar to the abortion debate, the Washington Post said Monday.
"New careers on both sides will grow out of this, the polarization will continue and grow, and the room for compromise will diminish," said Michael Cromartie, director of the Evangelical Studies Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington think tank.
The two sides are also increasingly polarized with the Republican and Democratic parties, the newspaper said. What began as nominally bipartisan alliances are now more closely aligned with the campaigns of President Bush and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and their networks of consultants and donors.
Steven Fisher, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, said it has 13 full-time lobbyists working on the same-sex marriage issue. It also has generated 1.5 million e-mails, faxes and phone calls to Capitol Hill this year, he said, and has spent since March about $1 million on advertising and another $1 million on lobbying against the proposed constitutional amendment.
