I WAS DRIVING my five-year-old son, Michael, to school last week, and he'd been unusually quiet for a few minutes, so I was kind of zoning out and listening to the KPFA morning show, when he suddenly interrupted with a loud question.

"Daddy," he asked, "why can't boys marry boys and girls marry girls?" –He's a San Francisco kid, but I imagine five-year-olds all over the country ask their parents that question. It's basic logic.

I explained that the law said you couldn't do that, but in this case the law was silly and wrong, and someday we'd change it. I told him it was sort of like the silly and wrong laws Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. helped change. (I was in his kindergarten class when the teacher showed a movie about King and the days of segregation, and I got to see the kids in a very multicultural classroom look around and wonder what the grownups back then could possibly have been thinking.)

It turns out Superior Court judge Richard A. Kramer agrees. His ruling March 14 was direct and clear: the laws against same-sex marriage are as unacceptable and unconstitutional as the old laws that sent blacks and whites to separate schools. It's a huge step.

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Our cover package this week is on the new (maybe) hip-hop scene. Senior arts and entertainment editor Kimberly Chun reports:

"Since the shooting death of Tupac Shakur in September 1996, some playas and listeners have theorized that Bay Area hip-hop perished along with the Marin City rapper, who got his start as a dancer and roadie with the Bay Area's Digital Underground. Call it the 2Pacalypse theory.

"But that notion overshadows – and neglects – a local hip-hop scene that has survived the snubs of the mainstream press, the outright theft of phrases like E-40's "poppin' collars," and the departure of OGs like Master P and Too $hort. Fa sheezy. So despite the controversy – and diss records – emanating around the Yay since the emergence of Balance's and the Frontline's catchphrase, "New Bay" (which some say dates an "old Bay" to benefit the newcomers), we look at the indigenous sounds of those who followed 2Pac, from the surviving members of Digital Underground to the new blood on the radio (such as our cover artists the Team) to 40-Water, a.k.a., Forty Belafonte, a.k.a. Forty Fonzarelli."

Tim Redmond