In This Issue

A YEAR AGO this week, thousands of San Franciscans were in the streets, shutting down the city to protest the war in Iraq. It will remain one of those unforgettable moments in time: the city standing still, no traffic on Market Street, no traffic on Mission, no business as usual anywhere near the Financial District ... The whole world really was watching, and it was a great day to be a San Franciscan.

We were breaking laws, a lot of us. We were saying that what was going on in Iraq was so awful that stopping traffic for a while wasn't even relevant by comparison.

And here we are 12 months later, watching another type of protest play out in the legal world. For several weeks now, San Francisco has been issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples – defying Washington and Sacramento, setting off a political tsunami (as the San Francisco Chronicle called it) and, I think, forever changing the political landscape on the issue. The state Supreme Court – at the urging of Attorney General Bill Lockyer, who will never live this down – has ordered the marriages to stop, but as Paul Reidinger points out on page 18, the ultimate outcome will almost certainly be the legalization of gay marriage in California.

In the meantime, as I point out on page 18, it's worth noting that in some ways, what Mayor Gavin Newsom has been doing is an act of municipal civil disobedience. He can argue that he thinks he has the legal authority to direct the city clerk to issue same-sex marriage licenses, and maybe he does. But I'd like to think he was driven on this not by the finer points of law but by a much stronger mandate: the state's ban on gay marriage is just unacceptable, and no decent person should tolerate it – so whatever the laws on the books say, a principled mayor had no choice but to go forward.

And like the antiwar movement, this one has attracted worldwide notice.

It's not an exact parallel, of course, but the war protests and the gay-marriage battle are reminders of what I think is increasingly a trend in this country. National and even state politics are corrupt and paralyzed. The best ideas, sometimes the only ideas, are coming out of cities, places like San Francisco.