Deadbeat dads. They might surprise you.

Sure, some are teenagers, as young as 15. Yes, most have been in
trouble with the law -- dealing, using. Some were gang members. They didn't
finish high school. Don't have a job.

But some decide they want to change. They walk and bus to a place they
heard about on Lake Street in Minneapolis to declare they want to be a
responsible parent and to admit, often with great shame, they don't know the
first thing about how to be one. Their fathers were never around.

"I don't want to be like him," they say.

At  every turn in her hunt for a new home, Melissa Kleinholz was learning just how undesirable a buyer she was. As a newly divorced mother with primary custody of two daughters, she had been out of the work force for nearly six years.

Her real estate agent, her lawyer, her mortgage broker - all told her the same thing. "They said that co-op boards were going to look really hard at me," she said. "I was not part of a double-income situation and I didn't have a work history. I was a stay-at-home mom for so many years, and that is hurting me now."

The economists drew on a unique dataset, the Minnesota Twins Registry, which tracked most twins born in Minnesota between 1936 and 1955. ... Consistent with other studies, they found a significant marriage premium: controlling for education, age and other variables, the married men in their sample earned about 19 percent more than unmarried men.

They then examined just the wage differences between twins, while still controlling for education. They found that married twins had 26 percent higher wages than their unmarried siblings. Hence, even among very similar men, those who are married earn substantially more.
...
This result suggests that marriage really does have a causal impact on wages. Of course, it is not conclusive. After all, maybe the married twin really is different in some way from his brother, and that difference is important to both potential spouses and employers. Still, it is suggestive evidence.

There's overwhelming evidence that children do best when raised by married, biological parents, adds David Blankenhorn, president of the pro-traditional marriage Institute for American Values, a New York think tank.

The idea that parenthood is a cultural creation conferred not by biology but by choice isn't new. It's the premise behind adoption. "Once you have legalized adoption, that's the end of the picture in terms of genetics," says Leonard Glantz, professor of health law at the Boston University School of Public Health. "It's a very broad statement of social policy by legislature that genetics and parenthood are different issues. "

Some courts consider psychological parenthood a fuzzy, potentially dangerous concept. What would stop a stepparent, or even multiple stepparents, from suing for custody? Should anyone who is deeply involved in the day-to-day workings of a child's life be able to lay legal claim? Nancy Polikoff, a professor of law at American University and an expert on laws relating to gay parenting, argues that that won't happen. "The courts that have ruled that way have tried to be very careful about how they fashion a test, so that, for instance, a grandmother wouldn't be able to claim parental rights," she says. "You have to show that you have a parental relationship to the child and that the person with the legal rights intended for you to be a real parent."

It is, of course, the children's voices that are missing from this debate. What are their wishes, their feelings, their needs? As with heterosexual couples, gay partners in a hostile split will say and do hurtful things. They will use children as weapons. With no legal recognition of their families, however, without the possibility of marriage or, in some states, second-parent adoption, doing so is just that much easier. Ultimately, it is the children who suffer.

How do we legally categorize a woman who gives birth to her own sibling? Or mothers who are akin to fathers, providing gametes but not gestating their offspring? What happens in divorce when a man denies paternity of a child his wife conceived, with his consent, using donor sperm?

In one mind-bending California case (most of the significant cases have emerged from that state), a couple used a donor egg and donor sperm to create an embryo that was then gestated by a surrogate. One month before the baby was born, the couple split up, and the husband refused responsibility for the child. A lower court found that the girl - whose creation involved five separate adults - had no parents whatsoever. (The decision was later overturned, and the divorcing couple were declared her mother and father. The mother got custody, and the father was ordered to pay child support.)

To be a child with a mother who possessed those two books [Dr. Spock and "The Settlement Cookbook"] and the cheerful willingness to follow their practical and time-honored suggestions was to live in a world that seems to me now a bygone age, as remote and unrecoverable as Camelot: a world of good meals turned out in orderly fashion, of fevers cooled without a single frantic call to the pediatrician, of clothes mended and pressed back into useful service rather than discarded to the rag heap as soon as a button pops or a sleeve unravels. If a household is a tiny state, as of course it is, then my mother was the potentate of ours...her subjects were assured of safety, continuity, comfort of the highest order. God was in his heaven, and a rump roast was in the oven, seasoned with salt, pepper, and ginger, and basted with fat from the pan.

This was before housewifery was understood to be an inherently oppressive state, before a marriage soured was a marriage abandoned; this was in the time when thrift and economy were still the cornerstones of middle-class American life.

No mother today who could afford to do otherwise would go to work without making any provision for her young child except to tie a key around her neck and hope for the best. My mother was by no means indifferent about me; I was her pet, the baby of the family. But children then were not under constant adult supervision, even if their mothers were housewives...Moreover, anxiety as a precondition of the maternal experience had not yet been invented. We kids were topped up with Salk vaccine, our fathers had saved the world, and our neighborhoods were chock-full of busybody housewives who delighted in scolding other people's errant children...

At age twelve, I wasn't doing much that required my mother's presence. The notion that after-school hours might constitute prime time for imporvement - athletic, academic, social, psychiatric - was still years away. When I think of what it was like to be a girl then, I remember an endless series of afternoons, each an ungraspable piece of time. I watched television, and hurtled perilously down our steep block on my Schwinn, and dressed the cats in baby clothes. Children didn't have "passions" and "talents"; we had hobbies and collections - glass animals and plastic horses for girls, baseball cards for boys, and stamps for geeks of both genders. These were activities that required no parental involvement and produced just as little quantifiable enrichment.

Mothers with professional training are thick on the ground these days, and their desire to work is at once more complex and more profound than Spock imagined. A woman with an education and a desire to take part in the business of the world - someone who wants a public life even a thousandth as vital and exciting as Spock's - may not be uniquely suited to the simple routines of child care. In fact, the life of the nursery can handily diminish what is most hard-fought-for in a person. It isn't simply a matter of "extra money" or "satisfaction." For many women, the choice amounts to the terrible prospect of either relinquishing a measure of influence over their children or abandoning - to some extent - the work they love. For them, this will always be the stuff of grinding anxiety and regret.

If she had lived in another time or place, certain solutions to these familiar and perhaps inevitable discontents might have presented themselves. She might have hosted faculty-wife teas or read "Middlemarch" or taken up watercolor. But my mother climbed off that steppladder during a moment when there was a single panacea for what ailed her: work.

An overflow crowd sat on wooden folding chairs in my parents' garden and ate lunch. Then everyone pressed into the living room for the speeches. People remembered the countless dinner parties my mother had thrown over the years, and also the encouragement she had given with her famous pepe talks and cheery phone calls, the excursions she would plan if anybody was feeling low. Sitting on her writing desk in a corner, unnoticed and unremarked upon, was her old nursing school portrait, which had been taken in a photographer's studio more than half a century earlier, and which she had paid for wih her very first wages.

But why did we want to do it at all? Years ago, when we first got together, we teased a jealous friend by announcing that we would soon be traveling to the United States to get married. The idea that we would want to seemed even more absurd than the possibility that the United States would legalize such marriages.
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"Does this mean I now have to call her your wife?" asked my old friend Laurie, one of the most outspoken gay opponents of same-sex marriage. I've always cringed when someone referred to a same-sex partner as a "husband" or "wife." But it seems now I should refer to Svenya that way. I've never liked the sterile partner, preferring, whenever possible, to use the youthful girlfriend, but over the years I've come to appreciate the privacy-protecting lack of clarity inherent in both terms. (Russians are generally more likely to understand girlfriend to mean just a friend, and Europeans often refer to heterosexual mates as partners.) Now it seems like this visibility action will continue for the rest of our lives. Which again raises the question of why we did it. Because we could, and also because this was the first time we made our relationship visible in such a way that other people were moved to tears. And yes, I do think that the visibility, combined with the memory of listening to my wife's breath when we were wrapped in the prayer shawl, will help hold up the walls of our home. 

By now, in fact, adjectives like "mainstream" and "traditional" aren't really necessary -- the bare word "values" alone evokes all those hot-button cultural issues that are summed up as "God, guns, and gays." During last fall's Democratic primaries, Joe Lieberman could say "(the Republicans) can't say I'm weak on values," and everybody understood that he was talking about his religious convictions and his campaign against sex and violence in the media, not his views on Enron, the environment, or the Iraq war. And when you run into an organization with a name like the American Values Coalition or the Institute for American Values, you can be confident that the American values in question aren't things like "different strokes for different folks" or "a fair day's pay for a day's work" -- nor for that matter, "pick up after yourself," which is how my mother used to sum up her position on environmental policy.

The gay marriage issue provides a perfect example. Set aside the editorial page, the columnists or the lengthy article in the magazine ("Toward a More Perfect Union," by David J. Garrow, May 9) that compared the lawyers who won the Massachusetts same-sex marriage lawsuit to Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King. That's all fine, especially for those of us who believe that homosexual couples should have precisely the same civil rights as heterosexuals. But for those who also believe the news pages cannot retain their credibility unless all aspects of an issue are subject to robust examination, it's disappointing to see The Times present the social and cultural aspects of same-sex marriage in a tone that approaches cheerleading. So far this year, front-page headlines have told me that "For Children of Gays, Marriage Brings Joy," (March 19, 2004); that the family of "Two Fathers, With One Happy to Stay at Home," (Jan. 12, 2004) is a new archetype; and that "Gay Couples Seek Unions in God's Eyes," (Jan. 30, 2004). I've learned where gay couples go to celebrate their marriages; I've met gay couples picking out bridal dresses; I've been introduced to couples who have been together for decades and have now sanctified their vows in Canada, couples who have successfully integrated the world of competitive ballroom dancing, couples whose lives are the platonic model of suburban stability. Every one of these articles was perfectly legitimate. Cumulatively, though, they would make a very effective ad campaign for the gay marriage cause. You wouldn't even need the articles: run the headlines over the invariably sunny pictures of invariably happy people that ran with most of these pieces, and you'd have the makings of a life insurance commercial. This implicit advocacy is underscored by what hasn't appeared. Apart from one excursion into the legal ramifications of custody battles ("Split Gay Couples Face Custody Hurdles," by Adam Liptak and Pam Belluck, March 24), potentially nettlesome effects of gay marriage have been virtually absent from The Times since the issue exploded last winter. The San Francisco Chronicle runs an uninflected article about Congressional testimony from a Stanford scholar making the case that gay marriage in the Netherlands has had a deleterious effect on heterosexual marriage. The Boston Globe explores the potential impact of same-sex marriage on tax revenues, and the paucity of reliable research on child-rearing in gay families. But in The Times, I have learned next to nothing about these issues, nor about partner abuse in the gay community, about any social difficulties that might be encountered by children of gay couples or about divorce rates (or causes, or consequences) among the 7,000 couples legally joined in Vermont since civil union was established there four years ago. On a topic that has produced one of the defining debates of our time, Times editors have failed to provide the three-dimensional perspective balanced journalism requires.