My own time in the inner city leaves me with some sympathy for what the Bush plan is trying to achieve. Inner-city kids want and need dads, and while marriage is no panacea (Ken's parents were married), stable marriages are the surest way to provide them. Expanding economic opportunity is clearly a big part of the solution, but probably not the answer in whole, given the hurdles to fatherhood and marriage posed by community norms. Wanting to marry only when you can do it on a tropical beach is like wanting to work only when you can start at $100,000 a year -- that is, not to want it in any meaningful sense. Even as teenagers, Jewell's and Angie's kids talk of wanting kids someday, but dismiss marriage out of hand. ''That'd be too plain -- like you'd have to see the same woman every day,'' Jewell's son Tremmell said. Angie's son DeVon, who is 16, said, ''I need some little me's''- children. But, he added, ''I just can't see myself being with one woman.'' One lesson of the 90's -- from the declines in smoking and teenage pregnancy to the plunging welfare rolls -- is that cultural signals matter, so even public-education campaigns aren't to be dismissed out of hand.
On the other hand, if the Bush plan ends up emphasizing exhortation alone -- as opposed to tying marriage promotion to the other services poor men need -- it is likely to alienate the allies it needs to give a cultural campaign its heft and limit its effectiveness. (Perhaps Ken would be more likely to marry if he were making twice as much laying bricks.) The truth is that no one really knows how to help poor men become better fathers and husbands. The debate is in its embryonic stage, as the debate about poor women was 20 years ago. It took a succession of efforts, most of them failures, before welfare-to-work programs started to work. Why not let 1,000 flowers bloom, or at least a good half-dozen, and rigorously test them -- marriage versus Marriage Plus, counseling versus training? While the discussion sometimes sounds fractious, the real news is that it is fractious mostly over tactics, with both sides generally agreeing on the importance of fathers -- in contrast to, say, 1992, when Dan Quayle was ridiculed for criticizing television's single mother, Murphy Brown. From the perspective of children wanting a dad, that much, at least, spells progress.

He was already a convicted car thief with a blossoming drug habit when he imagined himself cruising D.C. with a thick wad of cash, buying expensive clothes, partying with friends, but also paying his bills: for his girlfriend, for his three children (ages 5, 1 and 1) by two other women, for his own mother, who had struggled to raise him and his two younger sisters. He hardly saw his father.

A few years ago a friend of mine who was getting a divorce and was considering the idea of joint custody of the children, decided to interview my children, whose parents were among the pioneers of this arrangement in Israel, about their many years of experience with joint custody....

When they were little, I would hear them on the phone with their friends, most of whose parents were also divorced, and not a few of whom were growing up under joint custody. Every attempt to set up a meeting would start with a question along the lines of, "On Monday I'm at my mother's place, where will you be, at your father's or at your mother's?"...

Over the years my Shabbats were divided into "Shabbat-with-kids" and "Shabbat-without," and the weekends of my divorced friends of both sexes were arranged accordingly, as far as possible. For all of us, Shabbat-kids made it possible to organize multichildren meals and to overcome jointly the boredom inherent in the need to entertain children. Shabbat-without was the basis without which it would have been impossible to make the (somewhat pathetic) attempt to conduct what was known as "private life" or "relationships." That was by its nature possible only between two people whose timetables of "with" and "without" matched, a matter which of course required prior coordination with the exes, who also had a circle of people and their own partners with whom it was necessary to coordinate their Shabbats and half-weeks, and they also had partners with...

For years I admired the motherhood of my friend Dalia, who preferred, out of what appeared to be a solid belief in the demands posited by the good of her children, to devote most of her time after her divorce to raising the children. Her ex, she would say, was leading a tumultuous life, and her role as the mother of the children was to be an island of stability and quiet for them. Because she maintained that in any case she couldn't be both a mother and a lover simultaneously, and so as not to confuse the children, she did not of course bring men home. Thus, bathed in an aura of nun-like sacrifice, she filled the hearts of all of us with an obvious sense of inferiority, until the day she met the man who to this day fills the position of the love of her life. Within a day, and based on exactly the same belief that she could not be both a lover and a mother at the same time, she informed her children that henceforth they were moving in with their father.

There's always enough misery to go around when a marriage fails, but none is as undeserved as the secret anguish of a child. In The Wasp Eater, William Lychack's deeply moving first novel, we watch as a 10-year-old boy navigates the emotional minefield in which his family spends its last days together.

In essence, the film's view of marriage, and marrieds, is one of unhappy compromise, loneliness and self-loathing punctuated by restless infidelity and bitter recrimination.

Law Backing 2-Sex Marriage Is Upheld by Federal Judge

Girlfriend Acting All Clingy After Getting Pregnant

TUCSON, AZ - Human-resources manager Dave Buckner, 27, said Monday that longtime girlfriend Janice Feener, 24, has been "a lot more clingy" ever since July, when she learned she was pregnant with his child. "All of a sudden, she's saying 'I love you' six times a day and wants to sit around hugging on the couch all night," Buckner said. "I'm not sure what's gotten into her, but it's getting really annoying." Buckner added that there's no way he can stand six and a half more months of Feener's behavior, and is considering buying her a puppy to keep her company.

Fast on the heels of a recent Washington State court decision holding that homosexuals had a right to marry under Washington state law, a federal judge in the same state ruled this week that the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defines marriage under federal law in light of the traditional opposite-sex definition of the term, is constitutional.

I am pleased that Felix Carroll included a discussion of the study by Elizabeth Marquardt and myself in this article titled "Legacy of Divorce Depends on the Study" (August 12). However, one point in the article needs clarification. Some of the "adult children of divorce" we studied felt they had emotional scars that would last a lifetime, but being no older than 35, they couldn't know for sure. Some persons almost certainly do suffer lifelong emotional effects from a parental divorce and its aftermath, but to my knowledge there is no good evidence about the numbers who do. In any event, to say that some, or even many, are permanently affected doesn't contradict [Constance] Ahrons' apparently correct belief that "the majority of children of divorce emerge emotionally well grounded." Disagreements on this topic are not as much the result of conflicting research findings as they are a matter of seeing the glass half empty or half full.

Norval Glenn
Ashbel Smith Professor
Stiles Professor
Department of Sociology
University of Texas at Austin

The death of Laci Peterson has captivated the nation--but it turns out that her tragic case is part of a much larger phenomenon supported by a frightening statistic: the leading cause of death for pregnant women is murder...by a spouse, partner, or ex.

But the importance of same-sex marriages in San Francisco was never chiefly legal, which is why gay-marriage foes are mistaken when they claim a great victory. The event's importance lay in its graphic illustration of what this debate is all about. Mr. Newsom's order revealed the existence of a large group of people in committed relationships who want to formalize their bonds with the same official recognition that states offer heterosexual couples. The issue is not, as some gay-marriage opponents characterize it, an ideological pursuit in behalf of a nefarious "homosexual agenda." It reflects the desire of couples to partake of society's blessing for the lives they have built for themselves. Their requests are not going away.

"The only way she thought she could have any influence was through sex," says a 24-year-old public policy student in Washington for a summer internship. "I don't think anyone should use sex for power. If you want to have unattached, unemotional sex, that's fine. But using it for power is wrong."

What is an acceptable motive for having unattached, unemotional sex?

"Pleasure," she says.

Social-science research has established beyond reasonable doubt that marriage, on average, makes people healthier, happier and financially better off. More than that, however, the prospect of marriage shapes our lives from the first crush, the first date, the first kiss. Even for people who do not eventually choose to marry, the prospect of marriage provides a destination for love and the expectation of a stable home in a welcoming community.

the words "activist judge" have no more meaning than the words "hectic smurlbats."