Seventy-nine percent of married heterosexual men felt non-monogamy was not okay, compared with only 34 percent of gay men not in civil unions and 50 percent of gay men in civil unions. Over 82 percent of the women in the study, regardless of sexual orientation, said monogamy was important.

Rothblum hopes the project�s results will be useful. �We have heard from policy makers and individuals who are working for civil union benefits in other states,� she said. �Our results will allow them to have some data to convince lawmakers and the general public.�

If young men turn to guns and drugs, why? It surely isn�t simply because guns and drugs are ever more available, or that the kids have �picked up bad habits� from songs or films. These things are symptoms of malaise, not causes. For the latter, one must delve into problems that are impervious to quick fixes cobbled together at �summits�.

Problems, for instance, like the collapse of the family and the disappearance of positive male role-models from inner-city life. Most boys who end up in young-offenders institutions come from families without a father or even a father-figure. Most will never encounter a male teacher at primary school. They will fall hopelessly behind in the classroom because, these days, that�s what inner-city boys are expected to do. By the time they are 14, thousands will have dropped out of education, to the unspoken relief of teachers under huge pressure to improve their school�s GCSE results.

Nor will those dropouts come under the guiding influence of a church youth club, a scout troop or a cadet corp, because such �old-fashioned� institutions have largely been ridiculed out of modern life. They will have no mentors to teach them the difference between right and wrong, no prospects, no skills, no �stake in society�, no hope.

So they kick around the streets and the arcades, get sucked into a gang (at first as much for self-preservation as for kicks), slip casually into petty crime � mobiles and bikes, stolen and then traded for drugs � and then, imperceptibly, into the fullblown gun-totin� gangsta image which, they truly believe, is the only way to gain �respect�, status and wealth in their circumstances.

... Many will be dead long before their grandparents. In Tony Blair�s ostensibly egalitarian Britain, a white middle-class girl can expect to live 15 or 20 years longer than a black working-class boy. Much of that discrepancy is explained by the number of young black men who die violently. To all of this, most of us (including government ministers) are content to turn a blind eye for most of the time, until some horrible incident � the Aston shootings, the murder of Damilola Taylor, the Bradford riots � reminds us that there is something rotten at the heart of what we erroneously call modern civilisation. It�s stupendously hypocritical.

The natural growth of population in the more developed countries has essentially ceased. The overall increase in population for 2000 in these nations is estimated at 3.3 million people, or less than 0.3 percent. Two thirds of that increase, however, is due to immigration; the total "natural increase" amounts to just over 1 million. Over the coming quarter century, in the U.S. Census Bureau's projections, natural increase adds only about 7 million people to the total population of the more developed countries. And after the year 2017, deaths exceed births more or less indefinitely. Once that happens, only immigration on a scale larger than any in the recent past can forestall population decline. (The specter of population decline in more developed countries looms even larger if the United States, with its relatively high fertility level and relatively robust inflows of immigrants, is taken out of the picture. Excluding the United States, total deaths already exceed total births by almost half a million a year.)

In my judgment, [families] are weak in large measure because of broad, long-lasting cultural changes in Western society, changes that for blacks were made even worse by the legacy of slavery. Westerners have sought personal emancipation, at first from kings and bishops, then from social pressures and customary expectations, and now from familial obligations. Enslaved blacks were never allowed to form families at all so that, when emancipation finally came, there was no lasting tradition of family life that could support newly freed people who were cast out into a still-segregated society.

Even adjusting for social attachments, social support, and economic support, widowhood remains significant [as a predictor of depression]. Something other than lack of social and economic support increases the depression levels of widows. Perhaps it is the grief of loss.

Of the 105 players on U.S.F.'s football team -- most of them between 18 and 23 years old -- about 30 are fathers and many have produced multiple children. ''I would say there's a total of 60 children from this team, and that's a conservative estimate,'' said LaBaw. ''It's amazing how quickly it occurs, usually in the first year. Or they come to school already fathers.''

What this means is that the recipients of Lee Roy Selmon's scholarship program for needy young men are recreating the need that many of them came from -- children living in poverty, without fathers at home.

I asked Leavitt [the head coach] if his long football hours left him much time with his 7-year-old daughter. ''Quality time,'' he said, then repeated it as if trying to convince himself. ''Quality time. It's got to be quality time.''