Time for honesty by the left & right.

If the debate over "homosexual marriage" weren't so depressing and horrifying, it would be laughable. Even the wildest dreams of a raving McGovern Democrat, at the height of the sexual revolution, never conjured the spectacle of two men publicly plighting their troth.

Yet nearly 40 years after the sexual social upheaval subsided, the "marriage" of two men defines leftist ideology. And liberals say that Congress must do nothing about it because only the states may regulate marriage. The federal marriage law that defines marriage as a union of one man and one woman would trespass states' rights. Likewise, the left shrieks that other Bush proposals, such as his federal money tree for right-wing religious groups, are unconstitutional. And the left is correct.

Honest conservatives should concede that point and repent of the centralization of power in Washington and the massive federal spending increases they have abetted. In turn, that might pave the way for the honest left and honest right to settle on one important point: the enemy of every American is the leviathan on the Potomac.

That would require, however, an ideological agreement illuminating how our country arrived at this pass. That agreement would concede that the left created the pretext for the new federal powers and that every federal initiative and program the left now opposes grew out of its lust for centralized power. The left is reaping what it sowed.

It was the left, not the right, that gave us federal civil rights laws and rule by unaccountable judges. It was the left, not the right, that created the welfare bureaucracy. It was the left, not the right, that gave us two world wars, which set the stage for a protracted cold war with the Red Empire and paved the way for the interminable war in Iraq and the quest for American Empire.

For years, the American Civil Liberties Union has run thither and yon clucking about abusive federal powers. Meanwhile, it filed a series of lawsuits enhancing federal powers, particularly those of the judiciary.

Americans suffer in a Procrustean bed of financially debilitating, unconstitutional federal laws and court decisions: the Civil Rights Act, Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, and environmental and banking laws, not to mention Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Federal edicts even govern buying a home or renting a room in one.

Admittedly, the political right consented quietly and sometimes assisted in this dangerous usurpation of state and local authority. Regardless, the left played Frankenstein, and its monster is running amok.

"Homosexual marriage" may be the best example. For years, the left used the Congress and federal judges to capsize state laws that stood athwart centralizing power in Washington, waging a culture war against the average American, charging that the term "states' rights" disguised a desire to "turn the clock back" to the era of sex discrimination and slavery.

But now, the left has found constitutional religion. "States' rights" became imperative to the left when the issue became buggery. Congress, the left says, may not control marriage because it isn't a federal matter.

Similarly, for years, the religious left collected federal money. Now, suddenly, such funding through Bush's "Office of Faithbased and Community Initiatives" is unconstitutional. In short, free wampum for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference is all right. But not for the Family Research Council.

Even more gallingly, the left squawks about "activist judges," denouncing conservatives for not being conservative on judicial appointments. And the left has a point. After years of combating the left-wing program, at least in words if not in deeds, the right supports it. The irony of it all? The left is being done in by its own devices.

These truths aren't lost on all leftists and liberals. But the dishonest ones, such as Al Gore and John Kerry, who oppose Bush either out of partisanship or outright hatred, will never admit them. Indeed, if most liberals were honest, they would sing hosannas to Bush, who spends money faster than the Treasury can print it, and has used that money to redouble federal power and the welfare state. Power isn't a bad thing, you see, as long as the left has it.

Dishonest conservatives are no better. If the beltway league were honest, it would admit that Bush is no conservative and that his programs and policies are leftist, but they also lust for power, and so they keep up the facade. Both sides maintain the fiction that they oppose each other. They don't.

Eventually, the honest left must admit that real conservatives are right about the dangers of omnipotent government and judicial despotism. And the honest right must confess that real liberals are right about the nature of imperial war and the intrusive State.

Again, time for an ideological council.

Mr. Kirkwood is a syndicated columnist and managing editor of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Virginia.