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There was another Democratic candidates debate last night in California, specifically staged to address the hot-button social issues of homosexuality, gay marriage, gays in the military, and such. Did you hear about that one?

The Los Angeles forum, organized by the Human Rights Campaign and the gay-themed cable network LOGO, marked the newfound political confidence of a community being swept into the mainstream by a swift, generational change in American views.

The debate’s panelists, who included the president of the HRC, a Washington Post editorial writer and the lesbian rock star Melissa Etheridge, took for granted the candidates’ support for a sweeping package of federal rights for gays and lesbians.

And do the candidates offer implicit support?

The leading Democratic presidential candidates all but apologized for their failure to support same-sex marriage before a largely gay and lesbian television audience Thursday night…

“We should try to disentangle what has historically been the issue of the word ‘marriage,’ which has religious connotation to some people, from the civil rights that are given to couples,” said Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, whose relative newness to the presidential stage left him as the only major candidate who hasn’t shifted his position on gay rights.

But Obama, like Clinton and Edwards, was unable to explain his opposition to same-sex marriage in principled terms, referring to it as a matter of “semantics.” Obama cast his opposition as a matter of strategy and priority — he would not have advised the civil rights movement to make the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws a top priority in 1961, he said.

Clinton called her opposition “personal,” but didn’t explain it. And Edwards took back an earlier comment that his “faith” had led him to oppose same-sex marriage — but didn’t elaborate on the source of his current opposition.

See how hard this is to talk about? Why is that?

I’ll be talking with Drew Mariani on his show today about these issues, and we’ll try to guage the political atmosphere surrounding them. But we aren’t concerned with being politically correct. Politics don’t determine what’s correct.