"The opponents of marriage equality consistently seek to reduce this emotional and complex issue to straight versus gay, good versus evil, religiously-blessed love versus mere sex," said Matt Foreman, Task Force Executive Director. "In reality, marriage is about much more than gender and sexual orientation, it is much more than a package of civil rights and responsibilities, and it is about much more than sex. Highlighting bisexuals in the debate underscores all of this and shows that love and commitment are wonderfully complex and multi-dimensional." Author, activist and sexologist Dr. Loraine Hutchins agrees, "Bisexuals who married same sex partners in California, Massachusetts, New York, or Belgium, the Netherlands or Canada have a distinct perspective on marriage equality. It's not who you love that's important, but how you love and that you love, and are loved in return. All the ways we make families and intimate connection are important and all are equally valuable and worthy of societal support. Equal marriage is a good beginning."

Most experts agree that healthy marriages may be key to solving many of society's ills -- crime, substance abuse, domestic violence, teen pregnancy and more. But how can a community make marriage a priority? ... The first step toward establishing that cohesion happened around a conference table at Newman University on Friday, at a community summit organized by the Kansas Healthy Marriage Institute. Duxler and his partner, Joyce Webb, director of counseling for Catholic Charities, gathered with about 20 community leaders to talk about what Kansas could do to strengthen marriage by interweaving counseling, research and social policy ...Webb said one key may be money. About $200 million in federal funding will become available next year under a reauthorized Temporary Assistance for Needy Families welfare program, which could be used for marriage initiatives. Only a handful of states have healthy marriage initiatives now, she said, but almost every state is exploring the idea. Webb said Kansas can learn a lot from other states' efforts -- most notably Oklahoma, which five years ago launched an extensive campaign to reduce its rate of divorce and out-of-wedlock birth. "This is right in our back yard, and they've done some things that have worked well," she said. Something as simple as reducing the marriage license fee for couples that complete premarital counseling can have an effect, Webb said.Other initiatives have included television and radio ads, relationship skills workshops, marriage enrichment programs and Web sites where people can access a plethora of healthy-marriage services.

In every relationship I have ever been in, I wanted it to be just like my mom and dad's marriage. I wanted that kind of strength and love and all that. I wanted a guy like dad. Hardworking, funny, etc. And I wanted to be like my mom. Great cook, excellent housekeeper. Why was I dumb enough to compare my relationships to the June and Ward Cleaver ideation I put my parents in. It was probably wrong of me to put them there in the first place. So here I am, a 24 year old mother of two, preparing for a marriage of my own, sulking about my mom and dad's decision to end their marriage. I really thought that they could do it. I really thought that I had the parents that weren't going to stop at anything ... I guess everyone just got really tired. But I'm mad, and I don't know why. It's not my life or really my business. It's just happening. I can't stop it, I can't control it. It's just another thing in my life to add to my insomnia.

You're itching to get hitched, but negotiations with your beloved over the prenuptial agreement have snagged. But since you really, really want to get married, you bring in the lawyers to write up a legal agreement regarding your planned "faux" marriage and "alleged" wedding ceremony. That's the predicament lovebirds Britney Spears and Kevin Federline faced earlier this month as they planned their glorious union. With no prenup in place, the couple signed the below agreement--first obtained this week by Us Weekly--regarding their September 18 "wedding," agreeing that their blessed union would not be legally valid until the pair later finalized details of Federline's dowry. Nothing, of course, screams romance more than a notary public.

Dear Prudence,
I've been dating a wonderful man for just over three months. I've completely fallen for him, and I think he feels the same way, but we're just taking one day at a time. We've both been burned in previous relationships. The problem is: We both have back problems, but he prefers his waterbed, and I prefer my firm mattress. We love being together, but when I stay at his place, I can't sleep. It's a "wavy" bed, and I wind up rolling into him and am uncomfortable the whole night. Then I wake up with excruciating back pain. When he stays at my place, he doesn't have enough room, and he's not comfortable either. Since it's only been three months, it's not like we can go buy a bed together. Any suggestions?

--Sleepless

Dear Sleep,
As for ever buying a bed together, Prudie is unaware of a half water bed, half firm mattress, so that's not even an option. In the meantime, to make the pajama parties more comfortable, the solution for you is easier to put into practice than for him: Make yourself a sleeping bag-cum-bed board by wrapping up in a comforter and sleeping on the floor. And maybe he can sleep in the bathtub at your place. (Kidding.) The ideal solution, of course, would be a BIG bedroom and some extra cash so there could be the favored bed for each. Either that … or an orthopedist telling this man to give a firm mattress a second chance. Prudie did not finish medical school (OK, she didn't even start), but it is her understanding that firm support is recommended for people with bad backs. But as you say, the romance is still new, and Prudie has so far not heard of a couple split asunder by disagreement about beds. Good luck.

--Prudie, restfully

With its backdrop of gangs, guns, and drugs, the Manor of Angie's adolescence sounds like a familiar story of a big-city ghetto. Or it does until you take a closer look, when the facts of neighborhood life upend expectations. Jeffrey Manor wan't even poor; the poverty rate of ten percent in Angie's census tract was two points below the national average. Nine of ten families owned their own homes. Seventy-three percent of the adults worked, well above the national average of 62 percent. Household income (about $47,000 in contemporary terms) ran a third higher than the average citywide. It certainly wasn't a welfare neighborhood; Hattie Mae aside, only one household in ten received cash aid. That was a bit more than the national average (8 percent) but much less than the Chicago norm (15 percent). In demographic terms, that is, the Manor defied the theories of decline canonized left and right. If it wasn't poor and jobless (left) or enervated by the dole (right) -- then what was it? What made so many kids like Angie, "lose they damn mind"?

Despite decades of study, the honest answer may be that no one really knows. But one theory starts with race: black neighborhoods like Jeffrey Manor just seem like more precarious places to come of age than their white equivalents, even when they have similar incomes. The sociologist Mary Pattillo-McCoy spent three years studying a neighborhood just north of Jeffrey Manor for her book, Black Picket Fences. Like the Manor, the neighborhood she gave the pseudonym "Groveland" was filled with lower-middle- to middle-class homeowners and beset by drugs and gangs. She argued that the residents of such neighborhoods were caught in spatial buffer zones, trapped between the ghetto and prosperous white areas beyond. Given the recency of their middle-class status, black families lived in social buffer zones, too; they were more likely than whites to have relatives or friends who were poor or in jail. As a result, their kids grew up at what Pattillo-McCoy called a "crossroads," with as many ties leading back to the ghetto as leading away.

If the story was partly one of exclusion, from established social networks, it may also be one of seduction. Street culture can exert a downward pull even on would-be achievers. (The black student accused of "acting white" is a staple of inner-city life.) Southern black folklore paid special homage to tricksters and badmen, marginal figures skilled at overpowering or deceiving -- "getting over" on -- their white oppressors. Pattillo-McCoy, who was raised in a buffer-zone neighborhood in Milwaukee, warned that their modern equivalents, gangsta styles that "glamorize the hard life of poverty," carry special peril for buffer-zone teens. The Winnetka kid who wears baggy pants draws a reproving look from his mother; the Groveland kid draws a cop or a real gang. Lots of crossroads kids succeed, but with licit and illicit, gangsta and straight, so deeply intertwined, one Groveland resident could have been speaking for Angie when she said: "You could go either way any day."

There's another lens through which to see the Manor's problems: the abundance of single mothers. By 1980, a third of its children were being raised in female-headed households. That was less than the national average for African Americans (49 percent), but twice the rate for all kids nationwide. Indeed, it's the only piece of demographic data that makes the Manor look like an at-risk neighborhood; statistically the evidence is clear that children raised in single-parent homes face greater risks of educational failure, early pregnancy, unemployment, and crime. ("I wanted to join, 'cause I thought my father didn't love me," one Groveland gang member said.) In most Jeffrey Manor cases, the single moms were working moms, which may have meant they set an industrious example but also left their kids with lots of unsupervised time. "When we were in Jeffrey Manor, a lot of those kids out there didn't even have fathers," Charity [Angie's mother] said. "They were living with the aunties, staying with their grandmothers. They could stay out as late as they want." And Angie yearned to be with them.

A study of mainly unwed, U.S. urban parents finds that fathers of infants in poor health are less likely to be living with the child's mother following the child's first birthday than fathers of healthy children...

"Within a very short period, having a child in poor health increased the likelihood the parents became less involved," reported Nancy E. Reichman, of Robert Wood Johnson Medical School...

The findings are from the ongoing Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which interviewed about 5,000 sets of new, mostly unwed parents at hospitals in 20 U.S. cities and then again shortly after their child's first birthday.

Such people were twice as likely to kill themselves in later life than those whose mothers gave birth in their twenties, Swedish researchers found...

Writing in The Lancet, the researchers said: "Teenage motherhood proved an important predictor for suicide and suicide attempt.

"Young motherhood could possibly be associated with an adverse psychosocial home environment, inadequate child-rearing practices, the stress burden of single motherhood, and consequently, superimposed long-term socioeconomic problems, which can exacerbate the risk of the offspring's mental ill-health and risk of suicidal behaviour."

A motherhood study has debunked the image of women who elect to be child-free as selfish, career-minded and unable to find a life partner...

Far from being career-minded, women who decide not to have children are instead influenced by their own upbringing, with many not wanting endure the same financial struggle as they had during their childhood...

...a number of companies are selling elective ultrasounds that have little to do with neonatal health. The services, often in small offices or shopping malls, amount to fetal photo studios and use newer 3-D ultrasound technology to produce more realistic images than conventional machines...

Shirlesa Glaspie, 24, of Lanham, Md., underwent an ultrasound at Baby Insight late last month, when she was about 30 weeks pregnant (at its Web site, the company recommends the procedure be performed between 28 and 32 weeks for the "cutest" results). Ms. Glaspie said the images, while a bit "scary," have made the experience much more real...

One of the biggest problems that Yemeni young people face nowadays is that they cannot afford the marriage costs that constitute a dowry, an extravagant wedding ceremony, superfluous qat, and the rental of huge halls, just to show off, which incidentally, is against the teachings of Islam.

A modern couple give each other the freedom to flirt with new beginnings elsewhere.

If that other person makes you happy, that's good but you don't depend on each other.

France has for the first time extended official recognition to a family headed by a homosexual couple, giving legal rights to two lesbians raising three daughters one of them bore through artificial insemination, Le Monde newspaper reported. The authorisation, given by a Paris judge on July 2, sets a precedent in a country which is still grappling with a marriage of two gay men in June that the government has declared annulled ... Since 1999, France has offered a civil contract known as PACS to all couples, including same-sex ones, but it stops short of offering the same legal rights as marriage, notably in the areas dealing with taxes, inheritance and children. Although homosexual partnerships are recognised to varying degrees in several other European countries, Belgium and the Netherlands are the only two EU members so far that recognise same-sex marriages.

In a case believed to be the first of its kind in Illinois, a judge ruled Thursday that a Chicago man is the legal father of a 3-year-old boy even though he is not the boy's biological father and was never married to the boy's mother.

Even in cases where one of the parents alleges fraud, the document is normally considered final if not challenged within two years.

It makes sense for judges to adhere strictly to the two-year limit, said Nancy Hablutzel, a lawyer who has taught children's legal rights at Chicago-Kent College of Law.

"You have to look at it from the standpoint of the child," said Hablutzel, now an education professor at University of St. Francis in Joliet. "You want to know who your daddy is. ... You don't want kids 8, 9, 10 years old suddenly having a change of daddy for no reason. There has to be some time period in which this is decided forever."

[The mother] said in a deposition that she had never asked Huddleston to be the child's father. She said she merely allowed him to act as a "male figure" in the boy's life and didn't refer to him as the boy's father in front of other people.

AUSTRALIA'S young people want to settle down before they turn 30, but many won't make that deadline because they are either too choosy or too cautious, a leading researcher said today.

What sets these secular celebrations apart from traditional rituals is their focus on the individuals. In the past, people didn't need ritual to speak to them personally; if it was part of their religion, it was inherently meaningful. Today, with confidence in our institutions eroding, authority and belief come--for many people--from self and personal experience.

The spirituality-without-religion movement has been criticized by many in the religious world as being hopelessly narcissistic--too, or even exclusively, focused on the self. And it does seem like individual choice has become, for some at least, a religion in and of itself.
...
But if the secular-ceremony movement has its challenges, it also has its promise.

For one thing, secular officiants cater to people who don't feel at home in churches and synagogues. Their clientele is largely interfaith or same-sex couples wanting to get married, unmarried parents seeking to commemorate their babies' births, and others whose situations leave them outside the tradition in which they were raised.

Under the statute, registered domestic partners will both be the legal parents of children born into their households for children born after Jan. 1, 2005. Thus, lesbians who use IVF or gay men who use a surrogate will both be the legal parents because there is no legal biological parent in that situation since the donors forfeit their parental rights by acting as sperm donors or surrogates.

Your comment about interdependence is interesting because part of my legal practice is helping same-sex couples separate. One of the biggest challenges is getting them to view the money and assets as "ours" not "mine" and "yours." When mediating such situations or providing legal advice, I
geneally tell them to think of it as a legal fiction that they are married and we will approach this like a divorce. In my experience, there is usually significant dependence in same-sex couples since many involve one partner with signficant assets and one with fewer. It's rare that I see couples who are equal.

I think the apprehension and why interdependence doesn't happen in these situations is that there is no legal mechanism protecting them. Marriage (and divorce) protects the partner who has less. Without those kinds of legal mechanisms, however, the dependent partner always lives with the threat of being tossed out with nothing (which happens often).

It would be interesting to see if co-habiting heterosexual couples have the same level of financial interdependence as married couples or the independence of same-sex couples? I also wonder if being divorced (or widowed) impacts the level of interdependence in a married couple.

...leading publishers, both Christian and secular romance houses, are rolling out what they call "Christian chick lit" lines. These novels typically feature Bridget Jones types looking for the right man, the right chocolate, the right friends -- and the right relationship with God.

The point being that as forces of free enterprise drive up both men's and women's work hours, leaving no one at home, gone is the invisible hand that used to gas up the car, pair the socks, restock the fridge. Domestic help can be hired, but something deeper than the service this represents has been lost: the magical sensation of being cared for, of feeling comfort at the hearth and in the family, of having one's quotidian life - yes, are you ready? - touched by an angel. Because any way you slice it, there is a hole where Mother used to be. Under the rage lies sadness. But of course, those Bastards argue, it doesn't have to be this way. Instead of the now worrisomely capitalistic Having It All, we can Make Do With Less. That way one partner can stay home (perhaps in a sign of the times, the only writer of the fifty-three who describes currently living as a full-time nurturer is a man: Rob Jackson, in "My Life as a Housewife"). Alternatively, as Rob Spillman suggests in "Ward and June R Us" (you've got to love those optimistic, solution-oriented men), why not trade off who plays Ward and who plays June week by week? This eliminates snarling over territorial control (and for me, happily, would mean knife points down in the dishwasher all week long) and ensures that by day's end someone's going to have dinner on the table.

The fact is, someone has to be June Cleaver some of the time. Otherwise we've got an unloved nation of Wards.

On New York's UrbanBaby, a popular Website where women share and kvetch about everything from baby names to real estate to the intricacies of sonograms, "weight polls" regularly erupt:

13 weeks, 4 lbs24 weeks, 20 lbs!
13 weeks, 0 pounds (Okay, I might have gained a pound or two in the very beginning but that's at most. Should I be concerned?)
Check with your doctor but probably fine. . . .
13 weeks, 12 lbs! I feel like a hippo compared to you!
25 weeks, 24 lbs! (No wait. Did the math wrong. 22 lbs. Wow. I feel better.)

Occasionally, a naysayer will interrupt the endless flow: "148 weeks, three thousand pounds. Just f--kin' eat, gain weight, get fat if you want, have a healthy baby, lose the weight if you want, get on with your life!!!" But libertines are quickly put in their place--"It sounds like somebody is unhappy about the weight she has gained"--and the expectant mothers happily return to plugging in their weeks and weight, weeks and weight.

Gay men and lesbians throughout California are poised to celebrate when the state's muscular new domestic partners law takes effect Jan. 1 -- but a funny thing is happening on the way to the ribbon cutting. Some committed couples are saying thanks, but no thanks.

They are dissolving their current legal partnerships or declining to sign up, mainly because they're worried that under the new law -- which extends state marriage rights and responsibilities to same-sex partners -- their public benefits could be slashed, or they could wind up in a financial or legal quagmire.

...some wealthy gays and lesbians are blanching at the prospect of their income, assets -- and debt -- turning into community property. Under the new law, ending a partnership could entail losing half one's assets, just like divorce.

...To be sure, registering is critical for some gay couples, particularly those starting families, because the new law guarantees parental rights to the nonbiological parent, said Patricia Robertson, a professor at UCSF Medical Center and co-director of the Center for Lesbian Health Research.

But it may not be the most prudent decision for everyone, she said.

"Gay and lesbian relationships have not been as financially intertwined as marriage historically, which was traditionally structured on the basis that women were the property of men," she said in an e-mail.

"For a lot of LGBT (lesbian, gay bisexual and transgender) people, being independent financially is an important part of who they are," Robertson said. "To be told by the law that their financial relationship is now expected to mimic that of a married couple is unknown territory."

Rosie Amodio, editor of "The Knot" www.theknot.com, an online wedding magazine and an October bride, estimates she will fork over nearly five figures in an aesthetic makeover that includes braces and laser whitening for her teeth and thermal conditioning treatments to straighten her hair.

"You have those pictures for your entire life," said Amodio, 31, who lives in Manhattan, N.Y., "and you want to look good."

While that always has been a bridal mantra, many women are taking wedding-day makeovers to the extremes of plastic surgery, cosmetic dentistry, and pound-shedding workout regimens, bridal-industry experts say. In the process, brides are spending $606 million annually on matrimonial glamor, according to figures released in May by the Fairchild Bridal Group, a New York publisher.

Jesus' treatment of the marriage issue is significant because it recognizes that the spiritual institution of marriage is quite distinct from the legal institution of marriage--even though the legal institution is directly ordained by God. The legal institution of marriage accommodates sinful man's faults; the spiritual institution transcends them and aims for the highest ideals in marriage.

If the church must clearly distinguish between the legal and spiritual domains of marriage, where does that leave us on same-sex marriage? One might like to see the government get out of the marriage business altogether, leaving the definition and consecration of marriage to private choice, meaning, in our case, the church. But that isn't a terribly realistic option today, since the idea of marriage so thoroughly permeates our legal system.

The words marriage or married appear more than 500 times in federal statutes, more than 900 times in federal regulations, and thousands of times in state statutes. The concept of marriage flows through numerous statutory and regulatory schemes, including areas as diverse as taxation, military service, Social Security benefits, adoption, and agriculture.

If the government can't get out of the marriage business altogether, then perhaps we, as Christians, ought to take the lead in reconceiving the notion of civil marriage as distinct from holy matrimony. Perhaps we should abolish the word marriage altogether when speaking of the license granted by the state and instead appropriate the civil union terminology that has been created to deal with the same-sex issue. When asking about the definition of marriage or civil unions for legal purposes, perhaps we should take a functional, rather than normative, view.

Discussing the new book on Joe Namath the author said it wasn't the Super Bowl III victory or even the guarantee of it 3 days earlier that were the defining moments in Joe's life, but rather the divorce of his parents when he was in 7th grade and the subsequent failure of his own marriage.

...According to a recent survey, almost 70 percent of all Spaniards support gay marriage.

... lawmakers are pushing bills that would encourage more couples to receive premarital counseling. One bill would grant a couple a marriage license after three days -- the current waiting time -- only if they receive counseling or education. If they refuse, they would have to wait 28 days for a license. The legislation also requires a divorcing couple with children to take a class and fill out a questionnaire before being granted a divorce. The person officiating at the marriage would have to mark on the marriage certificate whether the couple received premarital counseling. The bills, which have passed the House, could be voted out of a Senate committee this week.

Louisiana voters overwhelmingly approved a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages and civil unions, one of as many as 12 such measures on state ballots this year. With 80 percent of the precincts reporting, the amendment was winning approval, with 79 percent of the vote.