The City of San Francisco has moved to intervene on behalf of the gay Burbank couple and the Berkeley lesbian couple who are the mascots in a huge federal lawsuit to overturn Prop 8 which is awaiting trial at the 9th Circuit. A trial date has still not been set, but the drama over who is best equipped to argue the case has been underway for several weeks, and won't be decided until mid-August.

In summary, there is one young politico and two mega-lawyers (David Boies and Ted Olson) looking for Inherit the Wind-style glory by taking this case swiftly to the Supreme Court, where the fate of gay marriage will likely be up to the whim of Justice Kennedy and whether he's feeling liberal or conservative that day. Then you have the old guard of gay legal organizations -- Lambda Legal, the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Center for Lesbian Rights -- who have filed a motion to intervene in the case in order to bring their expertise in the area of gay rights litigation, something that the two mega-lawyers (one of whom was Bush's Solicitor General and argued on his behalf in Bush v. Gore) don't really have.

And now San Francisco wishes to join the case as well, in order to bring a "unique local government perspective."