The idea of marriage between two people of the same sex is still very new, and for some unsettling, but we have been down this road before. This debate follows the same narrative arc as women's liberation, racial integration, disability rights and every other march of marginalized Americans into the mainstream. Same-sex marriage seems destined to have the same trajectory: from being too outlandish to be taken seriously, to being branded offensive and lawless, to eventual acceptance ... The rebellious mayors have so far acted honorably. Testing the law is a civil rights tradition ...

Kerry, who personally opposes gay marriage, said for the first time he would bestow all federal benefits such as the right to file joint income taxes and collect survivor benefits to same-sex couples who unite legally in civil unions, domestic partnerships and even marriage under their state laws.

In de Marneffe's view, it is a mistake to equate staying at home with forgoing an adult identity, because it is precisely in caring for children that an adult identity is forged....She realizes that this notion may strike some as hopelessly regressive; however, she assures us, it is not. "To take maternal desire as a valid focus of personal exploration is not a step backward but a step forward, toward greater awareness and a truer model of the self," she writes.

I don't really take issue with Ms. de Marneffe's claim that women have a natural desire to raise their kids. I'll bet that's by and large true. However, the idea that adult identity is forged by raising kids is, I think, a little dubious. In fact, I think that justifying your decision to stay home with your kids by talking about the self-fulfillment and identity-forging that you are going to get out of it is itself a little dubious. Who cares if your self gets fulfilled? You had the kids and so it's your responsibility to take care of them. If you think that they'll be better taken care of if you stay home with them, then that's what you should do. Certainly, having kids is in many ways enjoyable and fulfilling, but the actual day-to-day is often exhausting and frustrating. How about we ignore maternal desire and forget about taking a step forward to "greater awareness and a truer model of the self," because parenting isn't about you, it's about the children!

A large percentage of my high school class had shrinks. A large percentage also had divorced parents (there was a significant, but not complete, overlap between these two groups). I think this attitude - adults can do what they want and kids will be able to deal with it with the help of a psychiatrist - was dangerously pervasive, even beyond issues of divorce. The way I saw therapy used for kids in my high school, including as a solution for a student whose father occasionally hit her, has really led to my current aversion to all things shrink-related. I try really hard to accept that there are situations where therapy and medication are totally warranted, but the overuse that I have witnessed makes me agree wholeheartedly with Ms. Marquardt. Whatever the legitimate uses, I've seen this stuff used way more to enable adults to avoid the consequences of their own choices and actions.

...But legalizing same-sex marriage doesn't take away free speech. It doesn't require us to burn the thousands of pages of research that indicate that kids benefit from growing up with their own mothers and fathers.

Sure, some factions will want to fight the notion that kids need moms and dads--but what else is new? In the marketplace of ideas, the argument that an intact, married, mom-and-dad family is the best place to raise kids will continue to win out."

I caught part of a TV magazine show last night where four couples were intereviewed, each made up of two women, one of whom was transgender, i.e. they used to be heterosexual married couples. It was quite interesting. One thing that stood out to me was the absence of any biological male / transgender male couples, or formerly gay/lesbian couples who were heterosexual after the change. It could be that there are just a lot fewer female-to-male transgender people out there compared with male-to-female, or that men are less likely to stay with their former wives after they become men. Then again this was just a TV show, not a scientific study with controlled sampling.

Especially interesting were the kids they interviewed, whose father had gone through the change to become female. There were two teenage kids, one boy and one girl, and they had somewhat different reactions. The boy was "shell shocked" when he first found out, but said that now he has no problem with it; even his friends know about it, and their main reaction is curiosity. His summary of the relationship with his former father, (I'm paraphrasing here, can't remember the exact words) "a person is just a person, the connection is in the heart and nothing can change that". The girl's reaction was more negative. She said her main question about the change is "why?", and though she has tried to stay close to her former father, she summed it up by saying "I miss having a dad.".

Like I said, this is not scientific evidence by any means, but it almost looks like parental gender is much more important for girls than for boys. Interesting that in the SSM debate, the argument that children need a mother and father is mostly being put forward by women, and that SSM advocates, mostly (gay) men, don't seem to feel much gut-level sympathy for that argument. For my part, I have to admit that I only comprehend that argument intellectually; maybe the emotional side of it is a more female way of thinking.

The big part is that legally redefining marriage, making it gender neutral, makes us unable to say that children need their *mother* and their *father*. The active public silencing of the importance of mothers and fathers that will be necessary to sustain legal and normative SSM will impact many, many kids of straights in negative ways....

Yet the Defense of Marriage Act is itself a reminder of the difficulties of achieving morality through legislation. It was, as Slate noted, written by the thrice-married Representative Bob Barr and signed by the philandering Bill Clinton. It's less a monument to fidelity than to hypocrisy.

I agree a little bit with Barry Deustch that your preferred solution to the SSM controversy (civil unions) sacrifices a bit of gay and lesbian freedom for the benefit of children. But in the end I don't think it really hurts gays and lesbians that much to be excluded from the word "marriage", nor am I convinced it will make a great difference in the number of children who are separated from their biological parents. Whether a gay couple's legal status is called "marriage" or "civil union", the couple's mere existence and their network or social contacts will have a vastly greater influence on society than the words used to describe them.

For one 50-year-old patient, the affair was the slow evolution of a long-standing friendship with a high-school sweetheart. She had loved him at 15, but their paths diverged and when they reconnected years later, she still glowed in the warm feelings embedded in her youth. But she was married by then, with kids and a career, and life was challenging enough. So there was little attention paid to those tender memories. So why now? Her marriage is predictably stable. Indeed, it's more than most since it went through a rocky period when she left and negotiated a return on her terms. Their children are not quite grown, but enough so that mom isn't needed to attend at every turn of the hockey blade or the instant summons from school. "Well, you're on your way to becoming a hero," I said, and her eyebrow quickly rose.

In a perceptive letter to Congress, Americans United for Separation of Church and State pointed out that the [proposed marriage amendment] would violate the First Amendment's establishment clause by giving the government's "greatest imprimatur" to religions that prohibit gay marriage -- while relegating to second-class status those religions that recognize same-sex marriage.

"Quite a few studies attest in some way to the emotional, health and behavioral risk problems of multiracial adolescents," [Dr. J. Richard Udry] said. "The most common explanation for the high-risk status is the struggle with identity formation, leading to lack of self-esteem, social isolation and problems of family dynamics in biracial households."

Here's how the Washington Post's Dana Milbank began his Page 1 analysis of the White House's newly announced position on gay marriage: "With President Bush's embrace yesterday of a marriage amendment, the compassionate conservative of 2000 has shown he is willing, if necessary, to rekindle the culture wars in 2004." This neatly encapsulates everything that's wrong with inside-the-Beltway discussions of the culture war we currently find ourselves in. Presidents do not start culture wars; they react to them. They can fan or soothe passions, but they cannot create divisions that don't already exist. Indeed, both Bush and the major Democratic presidential candidates, neither of whom supports gay marriage, would have preferred not to have addressed the issue. Why? Because nobody in the moderate, swing-voting center of American life wants to talk about it. This is why Bush and the Democratic front-runners circled each other for more than a year, each side hoping the other would be the first to, literally, make a federal case out of it. Both sides knew that whoever did would be blamed by millions of moderate Americans for inflicting the issue on the rest of "us."