The first laws giving gay people the right to 'marry' are to be unveiled this week in one of the most significant changes to Britain's social make-up since the passing of equal opportunities legislation in the 1960s. Attempting to show it still has a radical edge, the Government will say that all couples who sign up to a committed relationship should have the same rights, regardless of sexual orientation. 'It is about equality,' said a Whitehall source. 'It is not about special favours - they will have the right to commit to one another and the responsibilities that brings.' Under the Civil Partnerships Bill to be published on Wednesday, same-sex couples will be able to sign a register held by the register office in a procedure similar to a marriage. Although the Govern ment will insist it is not officially a 'marriage' but rather a contract between two people, the fact that couples will have to announce their intentions beforehand in a similar way to the reading of the banns before a wedding reveals its true effect.

...State officials are...preparing forms, scheduled to be available by May 17, with gender-appropriate language for same-sex couples who request marriage licenses, Hutchenrider said. "The attorneys are going over them," she said.

And the registry is working on other new vital records forms, such as birth records, where language may need to be changed to reflect same-sex couples, she said...

I am sure you are aware that "traditional marriage" is not a media-created word, but instead one used by social conservatives for years. A quick Google search on the phrase results in hits on a number of "pro-family" websites --including the American Family Association -- and further search ends up in hits on other conservative organizations, the conservative and religious press, the recent Senate Judiciary Committee, and the Family Rights Council.

It appears that "traditional marriage" was created by "pro-family" groups to differentiate between the marriages they were defending and "other marriages." Given how pervasive that term is among the social conservative movement, this is actually an example of the media picking up on conservative nomenclature and not the media creating a phrase to diffentiate marriages.

Steven Petrow, president of the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association, said journalists also have wrestled with language. He cited as an example his organization's objection to the phrase "gay marriage." Marriage is marriage, whether it's for straight couples or same-sex couples, he said.

He [Kemp] and his wife Stacy learn a lot about each other by mentoring younger heterosexual married couples through a program at Crossroads Bible Church in Bellevue, Wash., he said.

...Many cases of breakups by same-sex couples involve adoption laws, since often, at least one parent has adopted the child. But the status of the second parent is less clear. Only nine states have explicitly allowed so-called second-parent adoptions for gay couples in decisions of their highest courts, four states prohibit them, and many others have not definitively addressed the issue....

Some recent cases suggest that the availability of gay marriage could lend clarity to often hopelessly confusing situations. But there is disagreement about that, too.

In the case of K and E [two lesbian women who had twins, one donated the eggs, the other carried them in her womb], K said that the women, who were registered domestic partners, would have married if they could have, which would have most likely led a court to give them joint custody.

"The way we lived our lives tells the story," said K, who said the twins look like her. "We shared everything. Our nanny for five years never even knew which one had given the physical birth."

But E's lawyer, Diana Richmond, said they would not have married, that the domestic partnership was only so K could join E's gym, and that E intended K's role to be akin to stepparent.

"She did a lot of the caretaking, that's not in dispute," Ms. Richmond said about K. "She functioned as a stepparent would function, and there's no question but that she loved the twins." But, Ms. Richmond said, granting shared custody would be "trampling" on E's rights and "giving this woman greater rights than stepparents have."

[Schlessinger's] idea is simple: The major cause of the American divorce epidemic is the refusal or inability of women to care for their husbands.

Sexual freedom and personal liberty turned out to mean that women have to leave their self-respect at the bedroom door. Have you looked, really looked, at the women's magazines in the supermarket lately? From Cosmopolitan to Glamour, the headlines blast such sentiments as "Be His Love Slave," or "Find Those Spots on Him That Will Make Him Want More," or "What Do Men Really Want in Bed? Our Survey Tells You!" Feminism wasn't supposed to be about the titillation of watching Madonna masturbate on stage, and female dignity wasn't supposed to be about becoming someone's love slave.

In a nutshell, Dr. Laura believes that many of the aspects of adult life that I had always considered complicated and messy and finely nuanced are in fact simple and clear-cut; that life ought to be neatly fitted around duty and responsibility rather than around the pursuit of that elusive old dog, happiness. This is what makes her the most compelling advocate for children I have thus far encountered, because the well-being of children often depends upon the commitment and obligation of the adults who created them. If you want to know whether the divorce culture has been a disaster for children, tune in to the Dr. Laura show one day. The mainstream media have a cheery name for families rent asunder and then patched together by divorce and remarriage: they are "blended families." But the day-to-day reality of what such blending wreaks upon children is often harsh. The number of children who are being shuttled back and forth between households, and the heartrending problems that this engenders in their lives, is a sin. Every June, Dr. Laura fields multiple calls having to do with transporting reluctant children across vast distances so that court-ordered visitation agreements can be honored. Whereas an article in Parents magazine or the relentlessly upbeat family-life columns in Time might list some mild and generally useless tips for dealing with such a situation (have the child bring along a "transitional object," plan regular phone calls home, and so forth), Laura throws out the whole premise. What in the world are the parents doing living so far away from each other? One of them needs to pick up stakes and move. "I can't do that," the caller always says. "Yes, you can," Laura always replies, and when you think about it, she's right.
...
There are many of us who understand that once you have children, certain doors ought to be closed to you forever. That to do right by a child means more than buying him the latest bicycle helmet and getting him on the best soccer team. It means investing oneself completely in the marriage that wrought him, for there isn't a person in the world who won't date his moments of greatest happiness to the time his family was the most intact, whole, unshakable.

You note that "On many social indicators children in stepfamilies look more like children of single parents than they do children who have their own married parents."

...Do you know whether children do better when raised by a parent and stepparent as opposed to a parent and a cohabiting partner?

...Likewise the question for same-sex marriage should not be how do children do raised by same-sex couples versus opposite-sex couples, but rather do they do better raised by cohabiting same-sex couples or married same-sex couples. Obviously no studies have been done yet on that last question, but I can think of many reasons why I believe they
will probably do better when the parents are married. ...

...A recent paper by Wendy Manning at Bowling Green State U. ("Parental cohabitation experience and adolescent behavioral outcomes") found this: "Spending time living with two biological cohabiting parents is more consequential than living with a cohabiting stepfamily for the odds of becoming a teenage mother." Also, "In terms of sexual and education outcomes, we find that children who lived in cohabiting two biological and cohabiting stepparent families share similar odds of early sexual debut and high school graduation." This would seem to suggest that biological relatedness is not that important, but they go on to say that the result may be due mostly to the selection effect.

[Sandel] objects to technological modification of human characteristics on moral grounds, foremost among them the ethics of "humility, responsibility and solidarity." Sandel's position misses the mark on all three counts.

Humility, it seems to me, is not only to accept your own nature, limitations and all, but also to accept the nature of others and of the broader universe. If others embark on some project to improve themselves or their children, we should not be too quick to judge it as mere vanity. What looks frivolous to one person may to another be a profound act of self-realization. Consider, for example, the (technologically enabled) process of gender change and the seriousness with which a transgender person undertakes it.

Likewise, if we humans are to uphold solidarity, we must let each other follow our own paths in the search for identity. The unity of our civilization cannot justify a "reverse eugenics" of forced genetic normalcy, where new forms of human identity are extinguished in the name of reverence for God or nature. Those of us who happen to be homosexual are all too familiar with this phenomenon.

Responsibility requires that we establish safeguards and guidelines as new technologies emerge, but to suppress technologies that could alter human nature is itself irresponsible. Study of natural ecosystems shows the importance of biological diversity in surviving both natural and man-made disasters. Humanity as constituted today may not be suited to survive in future eons, and for that matter is not currently suited for life on any world other than our home planet. We cannot bequeath the future to the successors of homo sapiens if we stand in the way of their evolution.

Although gay-marriage advocates at the university are often the most vocal side of the debate over same-sex unions, there are student groups quietly protesting the idea of homosexual unions. Many university religious organizations oppose gay marriage but do not take a formal stance on the issue because of a liberal campus culture that might perceive such an action as prejudiced and intolerant. "I think the LGBT has a very strong voice on campus. I think that the voice of Christians is not always heard as being genuine and concerned but rather (is heard) in the condemning way," Timothy Borgstrom, an InterVarsity Christian Fellowship campus staff worker, said. Denell Woller, head of the Catholic Student Union, agreed that students find it intimidating to speak out against gay marriage. "Students who oppose gay marriage don't speak out as much because it's not the cool thing to do. Even if they do, they are outnumbered," Woller said.

Then there's Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the nation's most prominent gay politician, raining a cold shower on the city of bliss: "Now is not the time to be pushing this issue," he said, or, in his more generous mode, he'd call the whole West Coast love-in a "well-intentioned mistake." "When you're engaged in a political fight, if you're doing something that really, really, really makes you feel good then it's probably not the best tactic," he says. It's tempting to think that Frank is taking the buttoned-down view to keep things safe for the Democratic Party, which just happens to be holding a presidential convention this summer in his home state, the East Coast ground zero for gay marriage. But that interpretation would overlook the irritable side of Frank, who never seems content just playing nice. Frank supports gay marriages, just not the ones in San Francisco. Those were not legal marriages but acts of civil disobedience, he says, a mass "spectacle" that accomplished only one thing: increasing support for President Bush's proposed constitutional amendment to limit marriage to unions between men and women. What they should have done, he says, was do it the legal way and wait for Massachusetts to start issuing licenses to gay couples in May.

For example: Birth can be a dangerous process, and sometimes mothers die from complications during childbirth, leaving children and widowers behind...

The national prison population [has] skyrocketed, from a modest 200,000 in 1973 to an eye-popping two million today...

What jumps out at you from '"Life on the Outside" is the extent to which imprisonment has been normalized, not just for adults from poor communities but for children who visit their parents in prison. Spending holidays and birthdays behind bars for years on end, these children come to think of prison as a natural next step in the process of growing up.

"...When I think about the general conditions under which most of the world's children live, I can't say that I get all that overwrought about the nine-year-old middle-class American child who must start dealing with two households and a "blended family." Life and relationships are messy and complicated, and no amount of moralizing and prescribing simple solutions will change that..." Etc etc

"Nancy Melucci has a hard time feeling sympathy for children of divorce. I don't. To sit a child down and tell him that Daddy is moving out is to destroy the thing that matters most in the world to him: his home. When parents divorce, they inflict deep pain on their children. It's legal to do it; it's sometimes necessary to do it; but let's not lie about it: it breaks children's hearts.

Since writing my review of Laura Schlessinger's new book, I have had countless people tell me that they can't stand her because she's "mean." But Laura says you'll hurt a child if you divorce; don't do it. Nancy says she can't work up much compassion for a nine-year-old from a broken home. So who's mean?"

Andy Rooney on 60 Minutes tonight (3/21/04) railed against President Bush's proposal for a constitutional amendment protecting marriage and said, instead, we'd do more to protect marriage by making divorce illegal.

He then said that he realized it would be impractical to ban divorce but cited the sad state of marriage that ends in so much divorce. He suggested couples should take tests to qualify for marriage, and instead of obtaining a "license" they would get a permit for ten years with the possibility of an extension....