On Friday, they drove almost three hours in the early morning from Auburn to San Francisco, found a public bathroom, put on their wedding dresses for a second time, and became the 66th couple to make history that morning at the city’s elegant City Hall. One day after newly elected San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom defied California law by ordering the county clerk to accept marriage license applications from gay and lesbian couples, Toby and Jean are among the first legally married same-sex couples in the nation.

For now, anyway.

Already, two local groups have asked the state courts to void the new marriages and issue an injunction against new licenses. And as Massachusetts lawmakers debate a measure that would limit same-sex couples to civil union rights, and President George W. Bush inches closer to public support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, the issue is poised to be a volatile, potentially divisive factor this election year.

But if the reactions of Toby, 39, and Jean, 30, are any indication, the joy among the newly legally wed on Friday far outweighed any doubt or apprehension. “Oh my God, it’s so wonderful!” Toby exclaimed an hour after the civil ceremony. “I didn’t think I was going to be this excited.”

How were they going to celebrate? With their 3-year-old daughter Kalen, they’ll head to the state capitol in Sacramento, where they’re scheduled to speak Saturday at a rally in favor of same-sex marriage rights. Salon reached them by phone Friday as they were taking one of their witnesses back to work; they were at a cafe, ordering lunch and still in their wedding dresses.

Congratulations! What does it feel like to be legally married?

Toby: Thank you so much. Oh my God, it’s so wonderful! I mean, I didn’t think I was going to be this excited because we already got married back in July in our hearts, but it’s really important and it just feels so — we’re really, really married! It was a total surprise to me yesterday — we got the e-mail at 11:30 in the morning Thursday, about 20 minutes after the first couple were married. I guess we could have gotten in the car and driven there, but it took it the rest of the day to see if we could get a priest. I’m very excited. I wasn’t entirely convinced we were going to get there in time and get through the line, but yeah, we’re officially, legally married.

Jean: I’m really happy about it. It was a wonderful experience to see everyone down there.

So tell me about this morning.

Toby: We got up at 4 in the morning — we left about 5 and got to City Hall about 7:45, where friends were already holding a spot for us in line. We had friends there to be our witnesses, people who were part of our wedding. The person who performed our ceremony in July was there; she was the one who signed our marriage certificate. For us it was important to have that continuity between the religious ceremony and the civil ceremony. People were very excited in line, everybody was clapping as people came out with their licenses. The line for the licenses was really long, once you had the license you could do the ceremony right there. They were letting people do the ceremony for free. They had people legally authorized to do marriages there, but we didn’t have to wait in that line. The witnesses signed, the minister signed, and we were married.

It was a long line. We were couple No. 66 of the morning and that was at 9:45 a.m. There were at least that many couples behind us in line. They’ll do hundreds today. And the people at City Hall were wonderful. They were really nice, they were really organized, they were coming and leading you, basically coming and saying, “OK, this is where you go next.” The licenses read “first applicant,” “second applicant,” by the way.

There was one protester. One guy. And he was spouting off about, “If you cared about the children you wouldn’t do this!” And we were laughing, because he was saying this to our friends who had been chasing our daughter around for us all morning. We’re like, Believe us, we care about the children! Our daughter deserves to have parents who are married.

Jean: And there were a ton of kids there, the children of the couples who were getting married.

Now that you’re legally married, what are the legal differences that you expect in your life?

Toby: First of all, we have to be realistic and say that there are already people trying to get an injunction — I don’t know if they’ll succeed, but they could potentially overturn this on Tuesday. If it doesn’t get turned back, one of the things that’s really important to me is the opportunity with a legal marriage certificate from the state to be able to fight for our federal rights. Like next year, when we do our taxes Jean and I can file jointly, which if Jean is staying home with Kalen it makes a lot more sense to file as a married couple. To be able to go to the IRS and say, “Listen, we’re married and we get the marriage rights. We shouldn’t be taxed on health insurance benefits, and Jean should be able to get Social Security benefits, and these are really, really important to our family.” But also just to be able to say we’re really married! Just like anybody else, we’re really married. We’re in the process of filling out paperwork for a stepparent adoption, which in California we can do, but now we’re the same as other married couples. Jean is Kalen’s stepparent.

I was very surprised that San Francisco did it before Massachusetts. I have family in Massachusetts and we were seriously considering going there … As far as we’re concerned we got married in July, but we need the civil rights, and so, the sooner the better! The sooner the better.

Do you think this will be a deciding issue in the 2004 election? There are some people who think it’s more pragmatic to wait on the issue of same-sex marriage rights until after the vote.

Toby: I’m not a politician, but the bottom line is that we deserve to get married. I know that I’ll vote for somebody who’s going to uphold those rights. So yeah, I think we should make it an issue, because it is an issue. You can’t make it not be an issue. And Bush is making a fool of himself. He could have left well enough alone and he probably would have done better. I mean, he’s backing a constitutional amendment that the majority of Americans don’t want, and that’s fine! He’s digging himself a hole and I’ll be happy to have him dig himself a hole.

But I don’t know, somebody who gets paid millions of dollars to do polls could probably answer that better than I could.

Jean: This kind of surprise thing the mayor did was kind of radical politics, but it was gutsy. I liked it. As far as whether or not it will hurt our politics in the future, I don’t know. I don’t think so.

Toby: I’m so happy he did what he did for us, but Gavin Newsom is not going to be elected president. But I don’t think that by the mayor of San Francisco doing what he did and Jean and I getting married today, that that’s going to hurt [John] Kerry’s chances.

Jean: I think it’s actually the opposite. This will mobilize the young voters who never vote, who are overwhelmingly pro for the marriage rights.

Toby: This is something whose time has come!

What would it feel like to be “unmarried” now, if any of the potential injunctions go through?

Toby: I would be just as frustrated as I’ve been all along. I don’t know if it would feel worse — I certainly hope not! — but I’m trying to be realistic about it. We expect there to be a battle, but my intent is to get on the Web today or tomorrow and change Jean’s status on my healthcare form from domestic partner to spouse and see what happens. My intent is to move forward and say we are married. We have a marriage certificate, and I have a right put “married” on official forms.

One recent Sunday, newlyweds Jean and Toby Adams walked to the altar and held hands. The women had been married two weeks before, but not many in the congregation knew that yet. This was Jean’s first time in Toby’s church, and because she had grown up in a similar congregation in small-town California she was cold with sweat on her way to the altar. The 10 or 12 steps to the front of the church seemed long to her, but when they arrived and turned to face the congregation, Toby was clear voiced and calm. “I would like to give thanks for our marriage,” said Toby, and stopped. There was a pause as the senior warden hurried over to them, turned to the congregation, and took Jean’s free hand. “Let us give thanks for how open our church is,” he said. Only one couple left the church as a result.

Since its founding in 1887, this was the first time St. Luke’s had ever had a same-sex marriage proclaimed within its walls, and no one knew how the parish would react. This is not a church used to change; when they received their first female priest, this year, they decided to call her Father Marcia because they didn’t know what else to call a woman priest. Still, the recent votes by the national Episcopal convention to approve the first openly gay bishop and to allow the blessing of same-sex marriages mean that St. Luke’s is now faced with a challenge far more controversial than what to call female priests. While most of the congregants like Toby and Jean, some worry about the legal and religious changes the two might come to represent. “Up until now there’s been kind of a don’t ask, don’t tell policy,” says Toby, “and with the ruling that’s changed.”

Though Jean and Toby Adams didn’t move to Auburn with their 3-year-old daughter Kalen to make a political statement, in the year they’ve lived here their very presence has done it for them. They weren’t married legally — there are no states that officially recognize same-sex marriage — but in their daily lives they still live quietly and openly as wife and wife: at church, in the neighborhood they live in, at the preschool attended by their little girl. In many ways the Adamses are the all-American family — Toby, 37, a software project manager, and Jean, 30, a remedial writing teacher for adults — and if one of them were a man, their neighbors would probably regard them as model parents. Instead, people who’ve lived in the town all their lives are planning to move now that a same-sex couple lives down the block; others cheer the women on. As for the majority, they just don’t know what to make of the Adamses yet — but as time goes on, they’re going to have to decide.

Like other small towns across the nation with low housing prices and good schools, Auburn is an attractive place to raise a family. It has the look and feel of an Old West town, but it’s also close enough to Sacramento and San Francisco to have a few cosmopolitan flourishes. And as same-sex couples increasingly demand — and win — rights similar to or the same as those taken for granted by heterosexual couples, more of them are seeking the quality of life offered by the heartland. The mixed response that Toby and Jean Adams are finding is, perhaps, emblematic. For other small, conservative towns across the country, Auburn is either a beacon of hope or a warning siren.

There are a number of places in the United States today where a gay couple pushing a stroller is considered unremarkable, and if you live in such a place long enough it’s easy to believe the United States will soon follow Canada’s lead in legalizing same-sex marriage. Hawaii, Vermont and California all grant some legal rights to domestic partners, and this fall the Massachusetts Supreme Court is poised to hand down what many believe will be a decision to legalize same-sex marriage rights across the state. But as the number of states recognizing same-sex unions grows, so has the backlash, and now a coalition of right-wing Christian groups has vowed to end the struggle once and for all — through a constitutional ban.

Sponsored by 70 House Republicans and backed by the ultra-conservative Family Research Council and 24 other Christian groups, the Federal Marriage Amendment would legally define marriage in the United States as consisting “only of the union of a woman and a man.” If passed, it would nullify every current state law granting same-sex rights — and prevent states from passing new ones. And while Bush has not yet come out in favor of the amendment, he did throw a bone to the churches who began promoting it on Oct. 12 — one day after National Coming Out Day — by officially proclaiming last week to be “Marriage Protection Week” nationwide. Though same-sex marriage may not be the defining issue in the 2004 presidential race, some experts believe it will be a key issue in small towns and conservative states nationwide.

Auburn may be only a three-hour drive from San Francisco, but in many ways it is closer to the heartland towns of the Midwest. This is a deeply Christian town — there are five churches within walking distance of the Adamses’ home alone — and the ratio of homes to pickup trucks to American flags on their block is 20 to 18 to 7. Auburn is so all-American that it has occasionally become the Hollywood stereotype: For the small-town scenes in “Phenomenon,” the 1996 movie about overcoming intolerance, Auburn was the backdrop. Now that the population is growing with refugees from the big cities, many native residents resent the less traditional ideas they bring with them.

It was into this climate of flux and conflict that Jean and Toby arrived a year ago, and they didn’t know what to expect. Toby was hopeful that by being there in a “not too pushy, not too political way,” people would come to like and accept them for who they are, and so far, she’s seen no overt reason to think the neighborhood doesn’t. Nonetheless, Jean still has doubts about an incident that occurred soon after they arrived: In two weeks, she had four flats. “Right after I got out here, I had to replace two of the tires on my truck,” she says. “At first I thought someone had stuck nails in them on purpose.” These days, Toby and Jean try not to be any more obvious about their relationship than any other couple on the block, though Toby occasionally gets frustrated by the implicit decision they’ve made to not get in people’s faces with their relationship. “We moved here so we could just mow the lawn and then sip some lemonade like the rest of small-town America, but one morning some Jehovah’s Witnesses showed up at our door with a pamphlet about ‘building stronger marriages,’” she says. “And as they walked away, I told them that if they wanted to help our marriage, they should vote for same-sex marriage rights, but when I tried to follow them to make sure they’d heard me, Jean shushed me and said she didn’t want to get political, she just wanted to get to the farmers’ market.” While no longer openly suspicious, Jean remains more shy and guarded than Toby, for good reason: She has seen this kind of town from the other side.

The last time Jean lived in a small town, she was still in the closet, and this has made her wary of Auburn. As a little girl, Jean was raised in the town of Boulder Creek, Calif., population 7,000. There she was brought up to be a Christian like her parents and as feminine as possible. “Growing up in a small town, I was really judgmental about myself,” she says. “When I was a kid, I was a tomboy, but when puberty set in … I just sort of dressed and acted the way I thought people wanted me to dress and act — stereotypical girly-girl. I had long, dyed-blond hair. I wore a lot of makeup.” Raised by a stepfather who was deeply homophobic and a mother who tolerated his views, “I internalized homophobia to the max.” It wasn’t until she was engaged to a man — her high school sweetheart — that she began admitting to herself that she’d had same-sex feelings and attractions since she was 12. “It took me six months after that to work up the courage to go to a bisexual support group,” she said. The group, half an hour’s drive from San Jose, is where she met Toby. Soon after joining the group, Jean cut off the engagement, along with all her hair, and came out to her family as a bisexual. She became a pagan and an activist, trying to help parents whose children had recently come out understand what it meant. Her self-described “dyke” appearance evolved gradually, but today she is protective of her look. “Even if I stand out in Auburn,” she says, “I can’t go back to the Stepford look. That’s not who I am anymore.”

For Toby, the route to bisexuality was less circuitous. “I never had a coming-out process,” she says, “because I was never in. I had my first crushes on a girl and a boy when I was 10, and most of my life I didn’t have a word for it.” She acknowledges that in Auburn, she gets fewer stares than Jean. Generally speaking, with her dark blond hair usually pulled back in a ponytail and her practical khakis and stain-resistant T-shirts, she looks exactly like the suburban mom she is. Raised by a liberal, atheist family in East Coast cities, her larger revelation was a faith in God. “‘Godspell’ and ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ are how I got religion,” she says. She started going to church in college, decided she liked the Episcopal Church because it was “more stained glass and incense with less of the bullshit” of Catholicism, and has been going ever since.

For five years they lived separately in the suburbs of Silicon Valley, not far from San Jose. In 1999, Toby decided to have a baby with the help of a close friend who agreed to act as her sperm donor. Toby and Jean, who had had an on-again, off-again relationship, were just friends at the time. But in the fourth month of Toby’s pregnancy, something changed: “I got food poisoning while I was pregnant, and she [Jean] took me to the hospital, and I knew that things that hurt that bad hurt less when she was holding my hand … I told Jean, ‘Listen, I don’t know if this will work out forever as I hope it will, but I want you to be my Lamaze partner, I want you to be there for the birth.’” In September 2000, Kalen was born. The women moved in together the next year. But although Toby considers Jean to be Kalen’s “dad,” legally Jean has no rights as Kalen’s parent.

“People tend to think legalizing same-sex marriage is an abstract issue, but it’s not,” says Toby. “If we were allowed to legally get married, it would put a whole different spin on everything — on finances, on parenting, on how she’s treated as the dad. When you’re married as a heterosexual couple, a lot of things just click into place, but we just finished the wedding and now we have to spend thousands of dollars to draw up contracts to get what we would normally get. For example, I have to pay taxes on her health insurance benefits as though it were income. The guy who sits next to me, his wife gets health insurance, he doesn’t pay taxes on it.” Even more important, the sperm donor is still considered Kalen’s father at the moment, although California law allows Jean to adopt Kalen under ‘stepparent adoption.’ And though one of Gray Davis’ last acts as governor of California was to sign into law a bill granting many more rights to same-sex couples, it won’t take effect until 2005. In the meantime, if something happens to Toby before the adoption goes through, “it’s a crapshoot in the family courts,” she says.

Paradoxically, the biggest obstacle to legalizing same-sex marriage, say Toby and Jean, is put up by advocates who frame it as a gay-rights issue — because that turns it into a fight between the Christian right and gay-rights promoters, rather than an issue of sexual equality. “It’s not a gay issue,” Toby insists. “We’re not gay! We’re bisexual.” She explains the legal-marriage difference through a puzzle of four couples. “Let’s say my friends Bryan and Kathleen are bisexual, my friends Thomas and Mary are bisexual, my friends Chris and Ted are bisexual, we’re bisexual.” she says. “Chris and Ted get married, they get no rights, Jean and I get married, we get no rights. Thomas and Mary get married, they get all the rights; Bryan and Kathleen get married, they get all the rights. But we’re all queer, we’re all equally as queer! It’s a plain and simple issue of human rights.”

Legal rights aside, soon after moving to Auburn in 2002, Toby asked Jean to marry her — and slipped an engagement ring on her finger when she said yes.

That’s when the trouble with the Episcopal Church began. As an Episcopalian, Toby wanted a religious ceremony to mark the occasion, but while some Episcopal churches are currently providing ceremonies to bless same-sex unions, St. Luke’s is not one of them. Nor would the Episcopal priest recommended by a friend proceed in the end, bailing on them three weeks before the wedding over the pronoun changes — too many wives — in the vows. Finally, an ordained friend of a friend agreed to perform the service. On a sunny afternoon in July, on a Santa Cruz bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, they said their vows under the shade of redwoods. Kalen, then 2-and-a-half, was the flower girl and threw rose petals happily into the wind. The service the officiant performed was mainly Episcopalian, but the brides also wore matching patterned belts of a pagan ritual, and instead of veils, both had wreaths of blue and white flowers in their hair. In photographs, they are beaming at each other, Toby in a white dress, Jean in a dress of midnight blue. And although the celebrant who officiated signed a domestic partnership certificate rather than a marriage license, in their hearts Toby and Jean — who now share Toby’s last name — consider themselves married for life.

The street Toby and Jean live on is lined with split-level houses painted in tasteful colors, beige or yellow or gray, each with a postage-stamp yard. Every house is a variation on a theme: if not a pickup truck in the driveway, then an SUV; if not a tricycle, then a basketball hoop. The lawns are sprinkler-fed green and neatly trimmed; the flower borders teem with zinnias, crepe myrtle, roses. People take pride in their yards, and in orderliness. Almost every other house flies an American flag, though Toby and Jean do not. Next to their house, at the crossroads of two streets, stands a sign: “Warning: Neighborhood watch. We will report all suspicious activities and people to the police.” Although usually less politically showy, today Toby is feeling defiant. “I’ve been meaning to get a bisexual flag,” she says, “but I just haven’t found the right one.”

In fact, there is little visible about Toby and Jean’s house to set it apart. If you ignore the rainbow flag and pro-Green bumper stickers on the pickup truck in the driveway, this could be the house of any neighborhood family with a 3-year-old. In the living room, crayoned butterflies are taped to the wall at preschool height; on the dining room table a lone Cheerio lies marooned 4 feet from the high chair from whence it came. This particular Sunday afternoon, Jean is in the kitchen stirring tomato sauce as Kalen runs into her leg, yelling. “Look, Boo, look!” she says, holding up a drawing. “That’s great, Kalen. Go show Mommy.” “Mommy, Mommy!” Kalen runs off yelling to the home office at the other end of the house. “Boo is her name for me,” explains Jean, looking up from the stove. “When she was really little she would kind of coo at me, and I’d say, ‘Look, Toby, she called me ‘Boo’! So that’s who I am. I’m the dad.”

But thus far, people in Auburn are not quite ready for a woman to be a dad, no matter what name you give her.

Doug and Debra Kyles live a few houses down the street, with three young kids of their own. They’ve gotten to know Toby and Jean, and sometimes Debra baby-sits for Kalen. Clearly she has real affection for the little girl, but when asked, she expresses frank concern for Kalen’s future as the daughter of a same-sex couple. “They’re nice people,” she says, “and if they needed me for anything, I’d be there. But I do have an opinion when it comes to having a child in that environment. I don’t think it’s right. I think a child needs both male and female role models, to balance the child out. Bottom line, I just don’t agree with homosexuals raising children.”

Her husband, Doug, a middle-aged welding contractor who has lived in Auburn all his life, goes further. “I don’t care if they’re really nice,” he says. “If I had it my way I’d oust them. I just don’t like them around here. You think I want my kids looking at that? And thinking hey, that’s OK? There’s a lot of rednecks around here and they’re not going to tolerate it, trust me.” The Kyles are planning to move as a result of Toby and Jean’s presence. As of yet, though, there’s no For Sale sign in front of their house.

The preschool Kalen attends shares space with the county fairgrounds, and though it is within walking distance from Toby and Jean’s house, Toby is running late the Monday of the orientation for new parents and decides to drive. She wears a T-shirt and shorts to the meeting, her hair pulled back in a short ponytail, and as she pulls onto the dirt driveway and rolls down the window to talk to two parents on their way into the building, she looks every bit like a slightly harried soccer mom. “Do you know which room we’re supposed to meet in?” she asks. The woman answers, then squints. “Hey, you were at St. Luke’s a few weeks ago and stood up to give thanks, right?” Toby says yes. “Ah,” says the woman, and pauses. “Well, see you inside.”

Past the school sign painted in rainbow colors there is a noisy, hot room crowded with parents and their waist-high children. The parents here for the meeting are mostly women, mostly in dresses and makeup. The women have all taken care with their hair, and they are all traditionally feminine looking, and white. When Jean arrives, she stands out: no makeup, boy-cut blond hair, black jeans and an oversize, navy collared shirt. “This is my wife,” Toby tells one woman nearby.

The meeting is long and boring. The wives are friendly to Toby and Jean. But when one of them is asked later what she thinks of the couple, she gets defensive: “Oh, them? Oh, you want to know what we think, up here in the middle of nowhere?” After softening, she acknowledges that they don’t blend in. “Well, up here you just don’t see it that much, so it tends to really stand out, though I really don’t care. What the parents do is their own choice, as long as the kid is raised OK. But I lived in the Bay Area for a while, so maybe I’m more accepting than some.”

As far as Kalen’s teacher, Natalie Piercy, knows, all the preschool parents are very accepting of the Adams family. “People really love Kalen,” she says. “But recently there’ve been a lot of new hires and they’re always kind of surprised by Toby and Jean. They’re shy to the idea, and then they see how it is and it’s OK. Personally, I don’t see any problem, with their situation or with Kalen’s situation, but to be honest I do wonder how it will affect her in elementary school. Kids can be mean.”

Born and raised in Auburn, Piercy, 23, says there’s an ambivalence here about same-sex marriage — one that she still struggles with herself. “My parents are really conservative and they’ve had a huge impact on my views,” she says. Growing up, “the closest I came to knowing a gay person was watching “The Real World” — which I think has had a huge impact on my generation as far as that’s concerned. They introduced gay couples to the world.” Today in Auburn, she says, “people like Toby and Jean, but when you ask them if they support gay marriages, they say no. That is in me too a little bit, and I don’t really know how to address or confront that.”

Three weeks after announcing their marriage in St. Luke’s, Jean and Toby are back at church again — and this time it is Toby who is nervous. In news that made headlines across the country, the Episcopal national convention recently decided to approve an openly gay bishop and voted to recognize that some dioceses hold blessing ceremonies for same-sex couples. Those votes have split the St. Luke’s congregation. “This is a challenging time for a lot of really solid churchgoing Christians,” says Father Marcia, “and I’m aware of that on a very definite level.” At St. Luke’s, some parishioners are angry that their bishop voted to approve the ruling, and though Father Marcia agrees with the bishop’s decisions, she has called a meeting of the congregation after the Sunday service to talk about it. One of the issues to be discussed is Toby. Currently, St. Luke’s parish does not have a sacrament blessing same-sex marriage — and although Toby accepts and does not expect that to change with the recent ruling, many in the parish don’t know that. A change would be disastrous, says church member Annie Holmes, one of the few Democrats in the parish. “If the new pastor wants to institute some kind of sacrament,” she says, “that will really drive people into the arms of a more conservative church.” Financially, St. Luke’s can’t afford to lose a single member.

The meeting is held after service in the ugly, grayish community room. Father Marcia’s white collar peeks out from under her flowered dress as she sweeps past the rickety folding chairs and round tables filled with people. Bill Gausewitz, the senior warden and meeting officiant, stands. “I want to explain what the rulings actually were,” he says. “They confirmed an openly homosexual bishop. They authorized local dioceses to establish rites of blessing gay marriages, and recognized that parishes are dealing with this in their own ways.” He clears his throat. “I want St. Luke’s to be open and welcoming to anyone who wants to come here … Some people say they don’t want to keep going to this church if the convention is going to … I say that the convention doesn’t change anything for our diocese.” A few people glance surreptitiously at Toby, who looks only at the warden.

“Besides, there was a time when Father Marcia wouldn’t be here,” Gausewitz says. “Somehow that’s worked.” The room erupts in laughter and the tension eases — for all except one older woman, who is visibly shaking with anger as she stands up. “There’s no comparison,” she says, “between the ordaining of a moral woman and a twice-divorced man who’s been living with another man. We’ve got to protest. I remember Germany in the ’30s and nobody protested and you know what we got from that.”

One gray-haired woman in a gray dress seated across from her, obviously a friend, cuts her off. “No, things change and we learn,” she says quietly and serenely. “This too will become normal,” she says. “Just like everything else.”

There is silence, and finally an older man breaks it. “Whether or not I agree with what [the national convention] did,” he said, “the main thing I’m concerned about is our parish. If we can hold together, that’s what I want.”

There is a chorus of voices around the room: “That’s what I want.” “I want that too.” Some people are teary as the murmurs of agreement go on.

Finally, Toby speaks. “A few weeks ago I thought I wasn’t accepted here. I thought, ‘Take this cup away from me.’ But if I leave, where will I go? So I’m going to stay, and I hope people who feel completely differently will also stay.”

And in closing the prayer circle, the same woman who had stood up shaking in anger held Toby’s hand. “We’re a close parish. We’ll get through this somehow,” she said.

Overall, Annie Holmes was proud of how tolerant her fellow church members were. “There are a lot of people who really feel that same-sex unions are immoral,” she says, “but I think people are really trying not to criticize them. We all know Toby, Toby is very devout and we all like her. That makes a difference! You can rail against people in the abstract, but when you know them it’s a little harder.”

Twenty minutes later, Toby, Jean and Kalen have their family photo taken for the church directory. They are parked next to the woman who railed against Nazis and held Toby’s hand, though they do not know it. “Hi,” they say to her as they wrestle Kalen into the car. Before leaving, I stop the older woman. “What do I think about gay marriage?” she asks. “I don’t agree with it, but we’re a strong parish. We’ll get through this somehow.” Though I don’t realize it at the time, she thinks I’m stalking her by asking this. Four days later, she has a minor heart attack — and blames it on the stress of talking to a stranger about such a volatile subject. Such are the tensions that come with this issue in Auburn.

It is not overly dramatic to believe that, in moving to a small town in the American heartland, Toby and Jean Adams have committed a revolutionary act. Nor is it wrong to say that many Auburn residents — their neighbors, or the members or St. Luke’s church — are revolutionaries too, in their own way. Despite the everyday tensions and uncertainties, they are living together in a way that few would have thought possible even a decade ago.

Not far from Auburn, in the little town of Cool, Calif., real estate agent Brent Stone says acceptance is growing. Although Cool is smaller than Auburn, Stone and his male partner of 13 years say they’ve had no problems being accepted in the three years they’ve lived there. They have two adopted children of mixed race — one in first grade, the other in the fourth — and “they are almost treated like celebrities here,” says Stone. Whether or not he speaks with a tinge of hyperbole, as might be expected of a real estate agent, Stone actively encourages same-sex couples to move to the area — and, apparently, they are.

And yet the awkwardness and tension are real, and in the current climate, Toby and Jean are not sure they’re going to stay. Recently, says Toby, “I found myself having to have my first conversation with Kalen about how people might not be OK with her family, and that’s a lot to lay on a 3-year-old. But I don’t want Kalen to ever think something is wrong with her, and clearly the time is coming soon when someone will say something to her.”

For every Doug Kyles in Auburn there is a Father Marcia, but for the majority of individuals, the fault lines run straight through the heart: While they like and accept Toby and Jean, they still think same-sex marriage is wrong. They are at a crossroads — in one direction an amendment outlawing same-sex marriage, in the other, the legalization of it. They may oppose it in abstract principle, but when they meet Toby and Jean and Kalen, there’s a native impulse to see that they’re just nice people. The same ambivalence plays out in small towns and cities elsewhere in the American heartland.

According to Scott Keeter, author of “The Diminishing Divide: Religion’s Changing Role in American Politics,” an amendment banning same-sex marriage is unlikely to pass, given the lack of national support and the more immediate concerns in Congress over the Iraq war. Nonetheless, he says, “there will be plenty of people who try to make this a wedge issue in the 2004 presidential election. And among conservative white Protestants, Bush enjoys almost unanimous support, so he has a fine line to walk” if he wants to also gain the moderate votes he needs to win. In contrast, Howard Dean has promised that if elected president he will do for the nation what he did for Vermont as governor: legalize civil unions. With a recent Gallup Poll showing the nation split almost in half in favor of allowing gay unions at all, the issue has the potential to force a decision from heartland voters who are not yet ready for for either an amendment or legalization.

As more and more couples move into small towns, slowly, haltingly, they are gaining acceptance. Like other social movements, time helps. And 10 years from now, maybe Kalen won’t have to explain her dad. “It’s wonderful living in California with all the extra rights of domestic partnership. It’s just as wonderful as sending black kids to their own school during segregation — separate but equal, isn’t it great they get to go to school at all?” says Toby, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Everybody knew that wasn’t right and eventually they had to change it. And they’re going to have to change this too.”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

We want to make you a part of this series. What is the state of your union? Did you find the one and never look back, or has finding lasting love been a marathon of trial and error? Did you have a fairy-tale wedding only to watch things crumble once the reception was over, or have you glided along in marital bliss since Day One? We want to hear your stories of joy, romance, heartbreak and pain. After all, partnership, as we all know, is a complex concoction of all of those things. (Please remember: Any writing submitted becomes the property of Salon if we publish it. We reserve the right to edit submissions and cannot reply to every writer. Interested contributors should send their stories to marriage@salon.com.)

If Fox’s intention was to break a large, undercooked ostrich egg on its corporate face while pouring streams of golden ducats into Franken’s pockets, it carried out its plan to perfection. As everyone who pays attention to such matters knows by now, a judge laughed its trademark-infringement lawsuit (Fox claimed it trademarked the phrase “fair and balanced”) out of court — even adding insult to injury by warning the right-wing media behemoth that its ownership of the phrase it claimed to have spent $61 million developing was extremely dubious. And sales of Franken’s book soared sky-high on the publicity, hitting #1 on Amazon’s list Thursday.

All of which must have been bitter wormwood for the popular Fox talk-show host Bill O’Reilly, who many speculated was the moving force behind the now-dropped lawsuit after his notorious May 31 exchange with Franken at the Los Angeles Book Expo. Under Franken’s tender ministrations, O’Reilly was reduced to sputtering “shut up!” and demanding that the gadfly comedian and writer remove O’Reilly’s “splotchy” face off the cover of Franken’s upcoming book.

For the man the Fox complaint called “shrill and unstable” and (somewhat unnecessarily, considering that charge) “not a well-respected voice in American politics,” it was all in a day’s work. Franken, who created the famously insipid Stuart Smalley character during his 15-year tenure at “Saturday Night Live” and has written four books, says driving conservatives off the deep end is easy. “O’Reilly keeps saying I’m a smear artist,” he says, “but all I do is just say what they said…It’s jujitsu. You just use what they do against them. And when you do that, they get mad.”

His most recent prank even got the attention of John Ashcroft. Writing on the letterhead of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, where he was a fellow, Franken sent notes to 27 senior Bush administration officials, including the U.S. Attorney General himself, asking each to “share a moment when you were tempted to have sex but were able to overcome your urges.” The stories would be used, he told them, in a book about public school abstinence programs called “Savin’ It!”

On Tuesday, Salon talked to Franken about his reaction to the judge’s ruling. Speaking by cell phone from a New York airport, Franken talked about being “a cute, cuddly kind of deranged” and the need for liberal talk radio, before sending the interviewer through the luggage X-ray machine.

What was your first reaction upon hearing about the suit? Were you surprised?

I was surprised because they had first threatened to sue about two weeks after the Book Expo dust-up with what’s his name, and then they didn’t do anything, and the News Corp. [which owns Fox] owns Harper Collins, so they know how books work. So they waited until they knew we were printing books. That surprised me, because on the one hand that seems like a smart thing to do, because that punishes us and in a way they prevail, but it hurts their case, because that’s just sitting on your hands. Especially if you’re trying to get a preliminary injunction, you can’t do that.

So I was surprised, but I was also very pleased. I was in Italy, and I’d brought the book “The Tipping Point” to maybe give me a new perspective on how to promote my book. But I put off reading it for about five or six days because I didn’t want to think about my book for at least five or six days. So then I took “The Tipping Point” to bed and started reading it and it’s a great book and about halfway through I start to fall asleep, and I start saying to myself: “Must think of … tipping point … for book … must … think of …” and then fell asleep. And my next conscious moment someone in the house walked in my room and said, “Al? You’re being sued by Fox.” And it took me about a second and a half, and I looked at them and I said, “Good!” and then I went back to sleep. And then I got up a couple of hours later — I was doing a lot of sleeping in Italy, because I’d really been in a rush to get the book done and it was very hard — and I went on my e-mail and started reading, and all Team Franken was e-mailing the complaint that I was, let’s see, unstable, shrill and unstable …

“Shrill and unstable” … “deranged” … and “a parasite,” to be precise.

Right. And what was funny about that was I noticed that it said in the complaint that the press said I was this. And it wasn’t until I got back to the U.S. and looked at the complaint that I saw a reference to where it came from, which was the prestigious WashingtonDispatch.com, which boasts on its homepage that if you’re an amateur writer writing on a whim you have a much better chance of getting published on their Web site than on any other Web site. So that’s where they got that.

So are you shrill and deranged?

I’m deranged, but I don’t think I’m shrill. I think I’m the kind of deranged that’s kind of cute and cuddly. Like the Danny DeVito character in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” [Laughter.]

Are you happy with the judge’s decision? This has brought you so much publicity that I wonder if part of you doesn’t wish Fox had appealed instead of dropping the suit.

Well, if Fox had gone on to appeal it probably would have strung out the thing and it would have probably been better for me in that sense. But you know, I was talking to our lawyers over the weekend and I said they gotta withdraw the case because it would be totally irrational to continue, and they said, ‘Well, the case is irrational to begin with.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but it was sort of based on an infantile rage by one of their commentators and to placate him they did it, but for some reason they didn’t realize how stupid they’d look.’ So now that a judge has basically said — [Salon columnist] Joe Conason e-mailed me and said — ‘I have a new trademark for Fox: Fox News Channel. Wholly without merit.’

Bill O’Reilly really made this personal, didn’t he? It sounds like he really had it out for you after the Book Expo flare.

Well, I don’t want to make this personal …

But he already did …

Just because he made it personal, I don’t have to.

OK, then what does this say about the Fox conservatives’ mentality that they would bring this suit on his behalf?

Well, it says a lot. The levels of irony of the suit are manifold. Either manifold or manifest.

Both, I think.

Yeah. Well anyway, using the word ‘press’ for WashingtonDispatch.com is very much their style. It’s distortion, it’s shoddy, and it’s lame. So I talk about Fox, I talk about Ann Coulter, I talk about the Wall St. Journal editorial page, I talk about the Washington Times, I talk about Bernie Goldberg, and Rush — all those people employ that sort of m.o., they all do the same thing. Also just that Fox trademarked “fair and balanced” — that’s pretty ironic in and of itself, although the judge ruled that their trademark probably wasn’t valid. And then there’s the bullying thing, which — O’Reilly went on his radio show and said that the purpose of the lawsuit was to punish me for coming after Fox.

So this is the mindset of the right, that they have to punish you. Joe Wilson, the former Gabon ambassador, was sent to Niger by the CIA and came back and said the uranium claims weren’t true. And when the controversy started broiling again about the 16 words in the State of the Union address and Wilson wrote the piece in New York Times, senior administration officials blew the cover on his wife, who was a covert [CIA] operative. And it jeopardized the lives not only of her contacts but every American, because she was a covert agent in weapons of mass destruction. And it’s a way of intimidating other analysts who might come forward, and there’s a parallel here: You will be punished if you come after us.

I really think the Wilson thing is the most disgraceful action of any White House since Iran Contra.

More than Clinton and Monica?

There’s a difference between getting a blow job and lying about it, and blowing a national security asset.

Then why do you think there’s this current defeatist meme among liberals that none of the current Democratic presidential candidates are capable of beating Bush? Do you agree with them?

No, because I think people are catching on — if you look at the latest Newsweek poll the president has 44 percent reelect, the lowest since before 9/11, and you usually need 50 percent, or at least a plurality, to win. Now, Bush didn’t get that in the last election, so he may be able to steal it again, who knows. In politics, a month is forever, so obviously these things will change, but in the last three months Bush’s position has been eroding significantly.

Which Democratic candidates do you favor?

Well, I think Kerry, Dean, Gephardt, Edwards, Graham are all serious candidates. All of those guys could make great presidents, and each has his strengths. Dean is obviously mobilizing people, even people who haven’t voted before. I think he’s willing to take it to Bush. I think Kerry has incredible depth and breadth of experience and knowledge, and is sort of inoculated on national security issues by virtue of not just his experience in Vietnam but his knowledge of that stuff through his work in the Senate. The same with Graham, in terms of his depth of knowledge, as former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and as a governor. I mean people like governors, and he’s from Florida.

What do you think about Gore having dropped out of the race?

I thought it made sense, in a way, because I think what he said — ‘If I run it’s going to be a rehash of the 2000 campaign and we’ve got to look to the future.’ So I think he took himself out more for his own good, but also for the good of the country. Although he would have made a great president, and I really think he won the election.

What about the California recall? Arianna Huffington is an old friend of yours …

Arianna is a friend of mine, I really like Arianna, and you know I’m a Democrat, so it’d be hard for me to tell you exactly what I would do there. I would probably focus on what was going on a couple of days before the campaign, if Arianna didn’t have a chance to win I’d certainly vote for Bustamante. I’m a Democrat, I think you have to do pragmatic things, and I don’t want to see Schwarzenegger or another Republican take that governorship.

And your take on Arnold?

He’s another guy who has entered a race for an office for which he doesn’t seem particularly suited or experienced. Also, I have a few problems with his history, the fact that even after it was shown that [former U.N. Secretary-General] Kurt Waldheim participated in the massacre of Jews, Schwarzenegger still considered him a friend, and toasted him at his wedding, to the horror of the entire Kennedy family.

What is it about you in particular that gets under the skin of conservatives like O’Reilly and Limbaugh, more than other satirists?

Well, O’Reilly didn’t really start hating me until the Book Expo. He came up to me after the Radio and TV Correspondents’ dinner last April and said, “Oh, you did a great job.” So it really was about my explaining why he was on the cover of my book at the Book Expo, which he understandably wasn’t happy about …

You know what, I have to go through airport security now, so my phone will have to go through the machine, but that’s OK. You want to hear what it sounds like when it goes through?

Sure. Wait, can they do that?

Yeah, I think an on phone can go through, can’t it? Yeah. So here, hold on.

[Puts the phone in the tray and it goes through the X-ray machine. It is quiet in there, with occasional sounds of mumbling. Clatter as Franken picks up the phone again.]

OK, so we were talking about why you get under the skin of …

Well, they don’t like it because I’m a liberal who’s not afraid to take them on, and to take them on, on their own terms. I’m fascinated with their methods, and therefore I call them on it, and they don’t like that. These guys are notorious — they can dish it out but that can’t take it.

There are not a lot of people like you doing this right now. Why do you think that is?

Because there is an aspect to it that’s sort of ugly. You have to be willing to get the day-by-day dish from NewsMax.com, you have to be willing to see things like the complaint they ran against me. Those kind of techniques. Which I don’t use. I won’t sink to that level, but what’s great about it is when you expose them, it’s jujitsu. You just use what they do against them. And when you do that, they get mad. They go, “How dare you read what I said on Nexis!” O’Reilly keeps saying I’m a smear artist, but all I do is just say what they said. They think somehow it’s unfair that they’re held accountable for what they said, I guess. I don’t know. They’re awful people. I’m not talking about conservatives, I’m talking about people who do this kind of distortion. There are a lot of conservatives I like, but they don’t indulge in what the guys I write about do.

Let’s talk a little bit about the “Savin’ It” letter you sent to Ashcroft and the 26 other officials. Some journalists have accused you of lying, that by sending the letter you’ve lied in the same way as the people you write about.

I don’t know why, but people have been trying to put this in the same category as the other kinds of lies. No one who reads the book thinks I’m writing a book called “Savin’ It.” I think even in the context of receiving it it’s clear what it is, which is a prank to these 27 people, but it’s not like announcing to the public that I won something I didn’t win, or that I’m going to fund education for people that I’m not going to fund, or that the vast majority of my tax cuts are going to the bottom, or that I was vigilant before 9/11, or that Iraq tried to obtain uranium from Niger. Those are really lies; this is a totally different thing. It’s a chapter in a satirical book which makes a satirical point. But it’s something the media can bring up, and I think it’s their of way of going like, “We’re going to give a fair and balanced news report.”

What was it like having to issue an apology for it?

Oh, I didn’t mind. I shouldn’t have written on Shorenstein stationery. I did get one letter thanking me for the apology, from Cardinal Egan. From the original letter I got four letters wishing me good luck with “Savin’ It,” but that their bosses were too busy to give their abstinence stories.

In your book you say that there’s really not a liberal bias in the media, and not even necessarily a conservative bias, but more of a global profit-motive bias, which is why news is skewed towards the sensational, violence and sex. Is there any sex or violence scandal I should know about you before I take this to my editor?

I think when I was intoxicated and deranged I went on a chain saw massacre, but … oh, man, I shouldn’t have told you that. That was stupid. If I wasn’t so drunk now I probably wouldn’t have told you. But I think the statute of limitations has run out on that.

Hey, whatever happened with that liberal radio show idea that Sheldon Drobny wanted you to do?

It’s in the works. What they’re trying to do is put together a network, and I would fit into that three hours a day. This is a very ambitious undertaking and they’re progressing. I’m not at liberty to disclose everything that they’re doing, but there’s been progress, and chances are growing that this will happen and I’ll be a part of it.

The problem is, with radio these days, if it’s talk radio it’s conservative talk radio. You can’t put me on after Rush Limbaugh because it’s like putting classic rock after hip-hop or something.

Are you still interested in being the liberal alternative to Rush Limbaugh?

Well, I don’t know if I’d put it that way, but yeah.

It’s interesting that the analogy you just used — classic rock and hip-hop — has you being the softer voice, in a sense.

Well, no, it’s putting classic rock on after something that’s incompatible. Me after Rush, I want to get the analogy straight.

OK, but conventional wisdom has it that liberals are too soft to do Limbaugh-style attack radio — that the reason there are only conservative talk radio hosts is because only conservatives are capable of it. Do you think that’s true? Where does that myth come from, if not?

I think there’s the empirical evidence that talk radio is dominated by conservatives, so you could draw the conclusion that liberals can’t do it. But I think you can do liberal talk radio, and this is something we should have started doing 10 years ago and we didn’t. There have been a few fitful efforts by individuals to do things, that haven’t succeeded for one reason or another, but I think you can do it. Liberals have a little bit of a different mindset, in which I think liberals by nature look for information and conservatives look for ammunition. NPR, for example, is just giving information, and NPR’s very popular. But conservatives consider it to be liberal because they’re not bloviating, they’re actually giving information. So I like to think of our progressive network as sort of NPR with more entertainment and fewer reports on Appalachian quilts.

[Slips into an imitation of Garrison Keillor for "Prairie Home Companion"]:

“There’s a man … (short pause, cough) … in Minnesota. Who is … building a road across the state for no reason. Today on NPR we’re going to be profiling him.”

[Laughs.] We probably won’t be doing a lot of those. Instead we’ll be putting words, ideas, thoughts, sounds together — very little physical shtick — to make people laugh. Real facts, real statistics, truth. See Rush and Hannity and those guys, their value-added is lying. My value-added will be comedy.

What kind of role do you think satire like yours has in the national debate?

I think it may have a big role. The president’s credibility is beginning to crack, and I think humor can always play a role in doing that, if it’s truthful and persuasive. I think people listen because it’s more fun to listen. It’s a way of truth telling that goes down easy.

“From the eyewitness accounts, it appears that Dana was fired on without warning,” wrote the Committee to Protect Journalists in an open letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “He was filming in an area where no hostilities were taking place, raising questions about whether U.S. troops acted recklessly in targeting him.”

For Mazen Dana, it would not have been the first time he was targeted by soldiers while filming a war; as a Palestinian reporter covering the intifada in the West Bank town of Hebron for Reuters, he was deliberately shot at by Israeli troops so often that Reuters eventually sent him to Baghdad for what was considered to be a safer assignment. It was a decision that pleased his wife and four children, who remained in Hebron. “Nobody could believe that now he was going to die doing a job somewhere else,” says Canadian journalist Patricia Naylor, who reported and produced a “Frontline/World” documentary in March about Dana and other targeted cameramen in the West Bank.

Coming just five days after the partial release of an investigation into the April 8 shelling by U.S. troops of the journalist-stuffed Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, Dana’s death has sparked new questions on whether U.S. soldiers are also targeting journalists. Five journalists have died due to American fire, accounting for one-third of the journalists killed in the war thus far. Whatever the investigations may have yielded, the lessons learned were not sufficient to prevent Dana’s death.

In a phone interview Tuesday, Naylor spoke with Salon from her home in Toronto about her perception of Dana’s death and the repercussions that might follow.

Let’s talk a little bit about how you knew Mazen Dana and how the “Frontline” documentary came about.

I started doing the documentary because there was a group of [Palestinian] cameramen I’d met in Hebron. Mazen Dana was one, and he started telling me stories about being shot by Israeli soldiers on several occasions, mostly with rubber bullets, and being beaten up. And all of the cameramen in this area started showing me wounds, and they said it wasn’t an accident at the time and I didn’t believe them — I mean, I work every day and I’ve never been shot at. So we sat down and they started showing me videotape that they had collected of various incidents where they were beaten up by settlers or shot by rubber bullets by Israeli soldiers. That was before the intifada [in 2000] — after the start it was no longer rubber bullets, it was live ammunition.

At the beginning of the intifada, Mazen Dana was shot two days in a row — once in his leg and the next day twice in the foot, with exploding bullets, and he was off work for three months, and I came to believe what they said, that they were targeted. Not intentionally, like, “Let’s go shoot a journalist this day,” but if the anger among the soldiers rose I think the journalists seemed to get their anger …

On my last shoot with him, he was by that time only shooting from within buildings because it was too dangerous on the street to film. Which, you know, is amazing for journalists covering the intifada that you’d have to shoot from apartment buildings and whatnot. He was very careful. And he was even shot within the top floor of an apartment building, his camera was shot, and that’s when Reuters finally took him off the street because they said, “You know, if we can’t protect you within an apartment building, we can’t protect you.” His children often wanted him to stop doing his work. They were worried for him because they’d seen him shot so many times, so when Reuters took him off filming anymore in the West Bank and sent him to Baghdad, they thought this would be a safer assignment because he spoke Arabic and spoke English. Nobody could believe that now he was going to die doing a job somewhere else.

Do you see a parallel between what happened in Hebron and Baghdad? There’s such a terrible irony that he was shot by Israeli soldiers but killed by U.S. soldiers, in a situation that was supposed to be safer for him.

Well, I think it’s important the U.S. do a good investigation and honest investigation, and show what a democracy does and that it does protect journalists, and understands journalists are important to tell the story. Because what’s happened in the Middle East is that despite many documented shootings of Palestinian journalists, there’s never been an honest and full investigation.

Nobody’s particularly satisfied with the investigation of this shooting into the Palestine Hotel. There’s no indication of whether or not they ever knew there were journalists inside, which everybody did know; I mean, these things aren’t secret. These things are widely known, journalists stay together, people are savvy when they’re doing war reports.

And Mazen was probably one of the most savvy and experienced war reporters and cameramen in the world.

Right now there are parallels. There is shooting in the West Bank of journalists that is not investigated, and there’s not enough public pressure to make it stop, or make it investigated thoroughly and reprimanded to the point that it stops. And right now we have it happening in Iraq, and from the one investigation we don’t have a credible, solid investigation that sends out the signal, “Make sure you don’t shoot journalists.” Journalists aren’t hiding; we try to be as obvious as we can. We wear press jackets that say “Press” and dress our cars up with big signs that say “TV,” so everyone knows who the journalists are. We always try to talk to the soldiers, and I know Mazen Dana and his sound man had done that the day they were shot, so the soldiers knew who they were. But he was still shot, so it leaves a lot of questions.

His wife has been quoted as saying this was a deliberate shooting.

Well, she’s seen so many deliberate targetings of her husband, so I can imagine she feels like that. And we won’t know.

But having seen a comparison of his camera and what it was confused for, could she be right?

Of course I can’t possibly know that, but I think the possibilities have to be examined, because it’s such a strange and bizarre error to confuse those two things. It was daylight, and soldiers and tanks have excellent binoculars; they can see things in details at enormous distances. And if they were working on a lead from somebody that this person was dangerous, where did that lead come from? Why did they think this was a threat? I haven’t read in anything I’ve seen why they thought this person was a threat. I know they thought he was carrying something, but, you know, I find it hard to believe. I can’t even speculate what happened.

Do you think his being Palestinian had anything to do with it, that it separated him in some way for these soldiers?

No, I don’t. He certainly didn’t look Palestinian, if you passed him on the street in New York, he’s fairly Western in how he looked. Other than maybe there was somebody there who wanted to … I don’t know, it’s hard to know. Possibly they got a bad tip from somebody that was threatening. It’s the only thing I can honestly think of because I can’t imagine how it happened, that there was bad intelligence.

The Pentagon has called this a tragedy and a terrible mistake. Is this shooting an anomaly, or part of a broader pattern of GIs targeting journalists?

I don’t know. I think the protection of journalists is at an all-time low, and what I saw in the Middle East was sickening. And to see it happen with U.S. soldiers … and there are mistakes! This could be a legitimate mistake! But you have to investigate enough that mistakes don’t happen, or rarely happen. Certainly less than we’ve seen.

But mistakes will always be made, right? Why shouldn’t we just accept that in guerrilla warfare-type areas, of course journalists are going to be killed, just as other civilians in the area will be killed, and that they know the risks going in?

I’d have to debunk the idea that there are periods where things are very volatile and journalists know the risks, and most stay away, but others take the risks and they know that they could die — during the early part of the war, that was true.

But when you get to this point in a war, the situation is very different from what you see on TV. Because of the way we show television, it feels like it’s chaos all the time, but it just isn’t. It’s not chaos all the time, you only see the chaos on TV in those short clips, a minute-20 [second] news story.

I’ve shot for hours in the West Bank, and I only shoot when you can be safe.

I think we have a misperception that it’s chaos at all times, and of course they’re going to be shot. And right now in Iraq there’s chaos, but it’s not everywhere. Everybody has to get up in the morning and do their things and try to get food, and it’s a life that’s predictable, so when we go to shoot it, we know what we’re shooting. And so when Mazen went to the prison, he knew it was calm and quiet. He didn’t go in the middle of riots, he wasn’t shot in the middle of riots.

It was a calm day, the U.S. patrolled that area, it’s a U.S. prison, that’s when journalists go in, and to have somebody suddenly start shooting is completely out of the blue. It’s as if you were standing in a field and suddenly got shot at. And way too many times, when journalists are being shot, it isn’t in the middle of war, it’s not in the middle of fighting. It’s actually during a fairly routine, predictable demonstration of some sort, and that’s when the questions really have to be asked — why would somebody then be shot?

The cases that we’re questioning are the ones that were calm.

Which actually makes it all the more ominous and raises the question of how many parallels there might be between what you covered in Hebron and what’s going on in Iraq now. Is this a general thing, do you think, that the military just don’t like reporters?

Well, that’s certainly the case in the Middle East. The Israeli military is not keen on reporters, though most of the time they treat us respectfully and give access to places, and most of the time we’re perfectly safe. But there are occasional times when they’re frustrated or aggravated or what, and it leads to these horrible shootings, but it’s mostly Palestinians that have been shot at.

I would anticipate that U.S. soldiers are not as antagonistic to reporters but I haven’t been to Iraq and I don’t know well enough to say.

But the parallels really are that there hasn’t been a good investigation or sincere answers about what happened in the earlier case [of the Palestine Hotel shooting].

Mazen would often say there has to be more public pressure to get this to stop. He and all the cameramen I knew in the West Bank would say, “Journalists are being shot here and no one seems to care, no one’s doing anything, and maybe the U.S. can investigate it fairly and clearly.” Somebody should be reprimanded or at least take steps that this type of thing doesn’t happen again, and to make sure that people remember that journalists have to be on the scene, and to be on the scene we have to be afforded the protection of the military and the people around us.

How do you think this case will be dealt with?

I suspect almost nothing will happen. Today the U.N. headquarters was bombed, there’s always another story, more people are hurt. And that’s one of the tragedies of these things, that there’s always the next story and it’s easy to get lost. But I really pray that it’s looked into, because it’s so frightening for all journalists. We do everything we can possibly do to be safe, we take every precaution we can, and then to step out of your car and be shot in the chest is unconscionable.

I think, why not shoot a warning shot if there was some confusion? There had to have been some kind of confusion in the mind of whoever pulled the trigger.

“What more do you need to see?” one protester screamed into a CNN camera on Monday. So far the American answer remains “More than this.”

If the United States regularly and consistently intervened around the globe anytime innocents were being slaughtered, the Marines would already be in Liberia. But there are deadlier wars in Africa clamoring for humanitarian intervention. And despite the idealistic rhetoric offered to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq, both the Bush administration and foreign policy circles are at best divided on whether the United States should ever commit its troops for humanitarian reasons alone. With American forces already stretched thin by Iraq and Afghanistan, some experts question the wisdom of sending additional troops to a nation that presents no immediate security risk.

But Liberians have a unique reason to ask for American help: Liberia was founded by black Americans. And more and more now see the lack of U.S. involvement as nothing less than a betrayal of kinship.

“There are strong family ties dating back to the early 19th century,” says Denise Barrett, Liberian country director for the humanitarian aid agency Mercy Corps. “Liberians look up to Americans to help them through this process.”

Liberia was founded in 1847 by freed American slaves and freeborn black American landowners, and they brought with them some of the baggage of Southern culture. Once in Liberia they built plantations and excluded the indigenous Africans from voting or holding office, considering them to be “uncivilized.” Evidence of the original American influence is still widespread, from the capital Monrovia, named after U.S. president James Monroe, to the architecture. Monrovia still has “a feeling of the deep South,” says Barrett.

Until recently, Liberia’s presidents have been members of the elite who trace their heritage back to the United States. This changed in 1980, when the indigenous Liberian Samuel K. Doe took power in a bloody coup. The U.S. threw its support behind Doe, using Liberia to counter Soviet-backed countries in Africa. During the 1980s, Liberia received millions of dollars in American aid, despite widespread corruption and a dismal human rights record.

But with the end of the Cold War came the end of American policy interests in Liberia. From the day that U.S.-educated warlord Charles Taylor took power in 1989 until now, America has essentially turned its back on the nation, though outbreaks of civil war have plagued the country the entire time. “When Taylor was elected, I think they kind of gave up on Liberia,” says Barrett.

Today, calls for American involvement have risen again, not just from Liberians but also from the international community. Such calls increased as President Bush traveled through Africa while rebel forces closed in on Monrovia and the war’s humanitarian disaster deepened. Many of those wounded by rocket shrapnel are women and children, and areas of Monrovia have run out of food and water. In a peace deal sponsored by the 15-member Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Taylor, indicted in June for war crimes in Sierra Leone, agreed to leave the country and the rebels agreed to a cease-fire. To date, neither of these has happened, and attacks on the capital have grown deadlier by the day. While Nigeria has promised to send a force of 1,300 within the next two weeks, Liberians are calling for U.S. intervention now. According to Jeremy Weinstein of the Brookings Institution, “There’s never been a clearer moment than in the last four weeks for the U.S. to intervene.”

Supporters of intervention suggest that there might be something in it for the United States, after all. “You can’t just carry a big stick all the time,” says Mark Burgess, a research analyst at the Center for Defense Information. A swift response to the crisis in Liberia “could see a few thousand American troops do more to raise America’s standing internationally than the 150,000 or so currently deployed in Iraq.”

There’s evidence that a team of 2,000 Marines would be enough to control the situation in Liberia, according to Weinstein of the Brookings Institution: The British in Sierra Leone and the French in the Ivory Coast both showed “that a small crack force could actually achieve something … This is an opportunity to intervene and succeed.”

The Bush administration’s arguments on behalf of the freedom and well-being of the Iraqi people are still fresh in the public mind, some advocates of intervention point out. “Put your money where your mouth is,” says Burgess of Bush. “If the humanitarian argument was good in Iraq, it’s surely more so in Liberia.”

But there are plenty of observers who, like Christopher Preble of the Cato Institute, dismiss the humanitarian argument entirely. “I’m frustrated with this administration’s decision to latch on to the humanitarian justification in Iraq,” he says. The United States, he argues, should never fight wars purely for humanitarian reasons, but rather only where there is an alignment of national security concerns and humanitarian concerns.

Liberia, he says, fails that test. “It goes back to the whole host of interventions conducted during the 1990s [Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo] that had nothing to do with national security,” he says. To intervene in Liberia “would open the floodgates to future humanitarian issues all over the world.”

And then there are other experts who argue that, though Liberia may need help, it should come from Africans themselves. “It’s not what American leaders need to do, it’s what African leaders need to do,” says Ghanaian professor George B.N. Ayittey, who teaches African history at American University in Washington, D.C. “When the international community obliges these African leaders, it simply allows them to abdicate their responsibility. Enough of this. We need to put pressure on ECOWAS instead of making excuses for them.”

If ECOWAS does indeed send in troops and force Taylor to leave the country within the next two weeks, that may be enough to persuade the Bush administration to send in a contingent of Marines to help. “Americans could have a major impact,” says Barrett of Mercy Corps. “The Liberians look up to America as their father and their mother.”