"If we want to have a hopeful and decent society, we ought to aim for the ideal," the top Bush adviser explained. "And the ideal is that marriage ought to be and should be a union of a man and a woman."

"We cannot allow activist judges to overturn that," he insisted. "We cannot allow activist local elected officials to thumb their nose at 5,000 years of human history and determine that marriage is something else."

Editor's note: