It was at a wedding recently that the old riddle of what makes Americans different from the rest of humanity sprang suddenly to mind. The moment of revelation came as the rabbi waffled on about love and commitment, and how the bride and groom were so lucky to have found each other. Lucky? It was his third trip down the aisle and her second, all previous marriages having ended in divorce. Everyone present knew as much, and quite a few would also have been aware that the happy couple had been carrying on behind the backs of their former mates for more than a few years. But why bother with quibbles? The caterer was paid for, the bar stocked and the flower girl a little angel. So, by common and unspoken accord, all present overlooked the gossipy details and wore expressions of unqualified delight. Hypocrisy? Some might call it that, but it wouldn't be the right word. It's more like cheating, and in the view of this long-time stranger in a strange land, it's what sets Americans apart: not only do they accept cribbing as a fact of life and human relations, they have made it an officially unofficial part of everything from sport to sex to politics.

The Senate voted overwhelmingly today to give an increased child tax credit to millions of low-income families who did not receive it in the new tax law, moving rapidly to quell an issue that Democrats had used to portray Republicans as brutish toward the poor

Seeking to boost tourism, the state House voted 70-23 Thursday to let out-of-staters get married in New Orleans without the normal three-day waiting period ... "We're trying to make New Orleans a destination place like Bermuda is or like Las Vegas is," explained state Rep. Mitch Landrieu arguing for the bill on the House floor.

While other organizations, notably the Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive Policy Institute, ferment Democratic ideas, Mr. Podesta said they tended to focus internally, on the party. He said he wanted to focus on the Republicans. "Others do good work in terms of policy analysis, but they don't view their mission as getting that analysis into the public dialogue," he said. "They don't have the communications muscle and focus that is important in influencing public opinion."

"We have to network with the cable shows so that they have a place to come for content, for a talking head," she added. "We want to cultivate a bench of effective surrogates who can speak to the issues. We'll provide media training, educate them about the ideas and then market them."

"They, like, don't know anything," said Mary, 14, giggling.

"They're, like, do you like Michael Jackson?" said Karen, 14, rolling her eyes.

That�s why I like this 70 percent number, where 70 percent of families are headed by either a single working parent or two working parents. In other words, in 70 percent of households there is no parent home full-time. I�m not saying that�s a good thing. I�m saying we have to accept it as fact now, and move on.

It's almost impossible to find a positive depiction of contemporary dating anywhere. Television sitcoms from "Friends" to "Frasier" delight in the antics of lovelorn singles--not because they're more glamorous than their married counterparts, but because the vicissitudes of modern dating lend themselves to easy laughs. In novels, we see Bridget Jones as the modern-day counterpart of Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet--only somehow the centuries have robbed our heroine of her ability to bring Mr. Darcy to his knees.

What's great is the "opposing view," given by someone from SIECUS, a liberal sex-ed group. The spokesperson accuses the Heritage study of doing a "disservice" for ignoring "divorce, domestic violence, sexual abuse, substance abuse, [etc., etc.]"

Men's unrestricted leisure time has been shrinking for years, according to Dr Michael Bittman from the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of NSW. Bittman's analysis of the Australian Bureau of Statistic's time-use data shows a steep drop in men's "out-of home leisure" from the mid-1970s. He has tracked the decline through to the late '90s and suggests it's likely to have continued since then. A man can still enjoy his leisure - the can in front of the telly, kicking the football around with the kids - but these days his fun is largely of the carefully monitored domestic variety, with limited opportunities for drunken debauchery, hooning and whoring.

Doug Stevens, a social science researcher at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, has analysed time-use data and finds that during this early breeding period - when families have children under five - men spend 4.2 per cent more time working than their wives do (when paid work hours are combined with household work). Time spent by men working at home increases - they do slightly less housework but significant amounts of child care - but there's also a dramatic 41.5 per cent increase in time spent in paid work. The mother's time in paid employment drops (by 18.7 per cent) and, while she has a huge increase in child-care time, overall the female work time comes in slightly under the males'.

A controversial policy paper on the changing nature of American families � and an alternate draft proposed by members of the General Assembly Committee on National Issues � are both being returned to the group that produced the original, �Living Faithfully with Families in Transition.� Commissioners to the 215th Assembly voted Friday to return the original 47-page report and the two-page substitute proposed during committee debate, to the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP). The advisory group, which develops social policies for GA consideration, is to work in consultation with the PC(USA) Office of Theology and Worship to �strengthen� the denomination�s report on families and report back to next year�s General Assembly in Richmond, VA.

Perhaps discomfort with our society's exceptional degree of racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity undergirds the enduring appeal of our relentless campaigns for everlasting family conformity.

Paradoxically enough, the United States manifests both the greatest degree of family diversity and the most concentrated resistance against coming to terms with that fact. Perhaps discomfort with our society�s exceptional degree of racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity undergirds the enduring appeal of our relentless campaigns for everlasting family conformity.

Good fun� We laugh at quite a lot of things. We�ve got a new cat and a garden� Mum laughs more� It�s nice to be with mum and Mel and I get to see Daddy Pete in London and he phones us� It�s quite an ordinary family. It was good when they splitted up because they used to argue a lot� It�s better now, lots better.

The Heritage report focuses on a subsample of unwed mothers and fathers who are romantically involved. In this "marriageable group," almost 70% of the couples are cohabiting. While cohabiting couples typically do not pool their income as much as married couples do, just over half of cohabiting couples in the Fragile Families sample do share their incomes with each other. However, the Heritage report (along with official poverty statistics) assumes zero income pooling among these couples. Therefore, if a cohabiting couple that pooled their income got married, their official "household income" would technically rise, but they wouldn't actually have any more money. In fact, due to the marriage penalty in the Earned Income Tax Credit -- a marriage penalty to be seriously concerned about -- they may even be better off financially if they stayed unmarried. As Columbia Professor Irwin Garfinkel points out, right now low-income couples "have more incentives to cohabit than marry." Thus, welfare programs need to "make marriage pay."

But all this should not be used to undermine the argument that more marriage would significantly reduce child poverty, even rather dramatically. Studies by Wendy Sigle-Rushton of the London School of Economics and Sara McLanahan of Princeton University, Adam Thomas and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution, and Robert Lerman of the Urban Institute all show that increased marriage rates would likely have a significant effect on reducing child poverty. Moreover, there are both compelling empirical and theoretical reasons to believe that marriage builds more wealth than cohabitation.

In the May 2002 issue of Journal of Marriage and Family, Rukmalie Jayakody of Penn State University and Ariel Kalil of the University of Chicago study the involvement of male relatives and mothers� boyfriends on preschoolers who live in father-absent homes. But their paper is titled �Social Fathering in Low-Income, African American Families with Preschool Children.�

�Social Fathering�? No, we�re not talking about communes or orgies. The authors write:

By a social father, we mean a male relative or family associate who demonstrates parental behaviors and is like a father to the child.

Other than his or her birth father, is there a man in the child�s life who spends a lot of time with the child or who is very close to him or her�someone who might be considered a father figure?

[T]hese findings highlight the need to consider children�s wider social networks and also the importance of adopting a more nuanced view of the adults who influence children�s lives.

So why do Jayakody and Kalil study �social fathers� instead of uncles, grandfathers, and boyfriends? I have two guesses, which may be completely wrong:

1) Fatherhood is a hot research topic these days. It might be easier to get funding for research on �social fathering� than it would for research on the involvement of uncles, grandfathers, and boyfriends.

2) Certain researchers want to downplay the negative effects of father absence on children. Therefore, by using the term �social father� and reporting that over half of the children in their sample had a social father, suddenly �father absence� isn�t such of a problem anymore.

The challenge before us is to make the connections between all the people whose lives don�t resemble a 1950s sitcom: the single people and stepfamilies, cohabitors and polyamorous families, single parents and childfree couples, adoptive and foster families, and bisexual, transgendered, lesbian, and gay relationships and families.

There's a fundamental question here: What behavior do we want to reward? Does society want to encourage healthy, stable relationships, or marriage licenses? While there's a strong correlation between the two, they're not the same thing. � Since we all know a healthy marriage is far more than a license, there seem to be dangers to loading up that license with prizes, and excluding those who are exhibiting the "right" behaviors sans license.

This is the fundamental question at stake: Does society best promote healthy, stable families by privileging the institution of marriage, or by erasing marital status as a unique legal category and treating all close relationships as the same? Marriage advocates lean toward the former; family diversity advocates lean toward the latter.

This is what I�d like to ask Solot: Do you think the act of getting married has any effect on the behavior of husbands and wives? Does the institution of marriage have any effect on society? If so, are these effects generally positive or negative?

Based on her writings, my sense is that Solot thinks that marriage has almost no effect on an individual relationship. To her, any supposed positive �effects� of marriage that show up in research are almost entirely due to selection effects (e.g., Yes, married couples are happier, but happier people get married; what matters is the relationship). Hence, Solot talks about �marriage licenses� rather than marriage. A good relationship is a good relationship; a piece of paper is irrelevant.

On a societal level, Solot seems to think that the effects of our �marriage-driven culture� are more negative than positive. Why? By idealizing heterosexual, monogamous, lifelong unions, the institution of marriage attempts to steer people away from a wonderful buffet of sexual choices and family shapes. Thus, Solot and Marshall Miller (to whom I�m also unmarried) state:

The challenge before us is to make the connections between all the people whose lives don�t resemble a 1950s sitcom: the single people and stepfamilies, cohabitors and polyamorous families, single parents and childfree couples, adoptive and foster families, and bisexual, transgendered, lesbian, and gay relationships and families.

Large numbers of married women in the United States experience unintended pregnancies, abortions and unwanted births each year--stressful events with emotional and financial costs that may potentially undermine marital stability

In Loving v. Virginia, a white man, Richard Loving, and his black wife, Mildred Jeter, were arrested in Virginia on the grounds that their marriage license from the District of Columbia was invalid and that they had violated the sinister-sounding Racial Integrity Act. They were given a choice of a one-year jail term or exile from Virginia for twenty-five years by the lower court judge, Leon Bazile, who declared: "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents.... The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix." (One wonders if conservative Virginia Christians noticed the judge's dismissal of the biblical story of the common origin of humanity in favor of the non-Christian Deist theory of "polygenesis.")

It's Dad's turn in the hero's chair. Yes, that Dad. The one with bags under his eyes, a snort in his laugh and a job that -- now, what does Dad do? It doesn't matter. To his children, he's larger than life, a grand magnification of reality. He builds self-confidence and self-esteem simply by being there, flaws and all, and he has a knack for turning ordinary activities into extraordinary adventures.

Helen Mary Jones, a single mother and Plaid Cymru's spokeswoman on education, said, "The question is whether people feel a piece of paper matters as much to them as personal commitment to each other. People are setting up home, having children, then getting married later. When you look at how much money people spend on weddings maybe it is something people are now saving up for."