Commission left out

Remarkably but perhaps not surprisingly, Utah's Constitutional Revision Commission is being left out of the process of determining whether the state constitution should be amended to define marriage as between a man and woman and to ban same-sex civil unions. The Salt Lake Tribune chronicled this development in "Amendments get scant review," a story that I think should have received more play than it did -- at least online, where I found it buried among other pedestrian local stories.

I can imagine that Utah will incur a lot of legal fees down the road to fight litigation, and those are fees that might have been mitigated by allowing the Revision Commission to do its job. Like a lot of people and entities, Utah seems not to want to bring in the lawyers until there's a crisis at hand.