Gays and lesbians will settle for nothing less than full marriage rights because anything else is pure discrimination, one of Canada's leading gay-rights groups said Monday. Some federal Liberal MPs are urging their government to back away from its proposed same-sex marriage legislation and instead create a parallel status for gay and lesbian couples. That's not good enough, says the gay-rights group Egale. "Imagine if the federal government prohibited interracial couples or Jewish couples from marrying but said 'We'll let you register your partnership instead,' " Laurie Arron, executive director of the group, said in a statement. "The very idea is offensive and demeaning."

Conservative Party Leader Peter MacKay called yesterday for the federal government to get out of marriage completely, leaving it only to churches, and said he would seek to rally his caucus to his position. The idea, once considered extreme, also has some support in the ranks of Liberals and the Canadian Alliance, as MPs opposed to same-sex marriage seek a compromise that will pass muster in the courts.

Personally, I think it is unfortunate that there aren't a whole array of alternative marriages, like there are mortgages: There could be a five-year marriage, a 10-year, an adjustable, a fixed. After all, with a mortgage, they always ask you, How long do you plan to keep the house? But when you get a marriage license, they assume it's forever. That flies in the face of what we know to be true: People change; people make overly optimistic projections. Still, permanent marriage makes for a more stable society and that's probably why it's so enshrined in law and custom.

"It is important to note that lower income married households in the index year increased their real income substantially by five years later. Here is a critical difference between the married poor (all of whom in this sample have children) and the single-parent poor: the former, taken as a group, do better with time; the latter do not. On average, the married poor move out of poverty; the single-parent poor remain there."

Source: Weiss, R.S. (1984). The impact of marital dissolution on income and consumption in single-parent households. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 46(1), 115-127.

According to the Census Bureau, [there are] exactly 172,000 same-sex households with children in this country (these children are mostly products of divorced homes by the way). In the Netherlands, just ten percent of same-sex partners have married. If the same proportion holds here, we are redefining marriage to suit the needs of 17,200 same-sex households with children.

Taxpayers even invest heavily in K-12 education for every child in this society, and they collectively spend vast amounts of money on child health, child care and family activity programs.

In the past two decades or so, the cost of having children has risen much faster than the cost of being childless. Conventional wisdom aside, this has little to do with spoiled kids, acquisitive parents, or PlayStation 2. Instead, it�s the result of two things: housing and education. According to the Federal Reserve Board, between 1983 and 1998 the price of housing for married couples with children rose seventy-nine per cent in real terms, roughly three times as much as it did for childless people. One reason is that houses are bigger now. But, according to Warren and Tyagi, the real reason is that parents get into bidding wars for homes in safe neighborhoods with good public schools.

Then, there�s college. Thirty years ago, middle-class parents could feel they�d done a good job of raising a child if he or she made it through high school�decent jobs for unskilled and semi-skilled labor were readily available. Today, such jobs are much harder to find, and college is considered a necessity. Needless to say, it is also extremely expensive.

To save its soul, marriage needs to be removed from power politics and privatized. What constitutes a marriage should be determined by contract between the consenting adults involved, not by government. Politicians should be stripped of the power to dictate which consenting adults may marry or the terms of those marriages. The only proper concern of law should be to enforce the contract and to arbitrate any breach that occurs.

How about an amendment that outlaws all marriages? At least then all Americans would be treated equally under the law, which is the general idea of the Constitution the last time we read it. Think of how the "institution of marriage" has sucked our culture into a moral swamp. Have you ever watched "Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?" "The Bachelor," "The Bachelorette" or "Joe Millionaire?" We are inundated with non-stop Michael Jackson updates whenever he spends a few months in the "institution of marriage" with Lisa Marie Presley or his kids' nurse. News programming is actually spent on the alleged impending nuptials of Ben and J-Lo, and we were this close to Liza Minnelli getting her own reality show by marrying, oh-so-briefly, David Gest. Stop the madness! Stop marriage now!

So this novel idea of ending government-sanctioned marriage would be a logistical nightmare to make practical, produce little if any gains in terms of liberty and political harmony at the cost of knocking away one more support from an institution vital to society and child-rearing that is already under assault.

Never has a people enjoyed a greater range of individual rights, or been more jealous of their freedoms, or been more convinced that the liberty they prize is good not only for themselves but also for other peoples than we in the United States today. The freest society in most respects that the world has ever seen has produced the world�s most diverse society; the world�s best army; the world�s most organized, industrious, and productive economy; and a political order that to a remarkable degree contains the factions and divisions that have prevented so many other countries from innovating and solving collective problems. This represents the triumph in America of liberalism, a tradition of thought and politics stretching back at least to seventeenth-century England, whose fundamental moral premise is the natural freedom and equality of all and whose governing theme has been the securing of equal freedom in political life.

Yet cause for anxiety comes from many quarters. Freedom in America has produced or permitted massive income inequalities. It has given rise to a popular culture that frequently descends into the cheap and salacious. It maintains a public school system that fails to teach many students the basics of reading and writing and arithmetic; and at higher levels of education, it breeds an academic culture that preaches the relativity of values and that cannot reach agreement on what a well-educated person ought to have learned by the time he or she graduates from college. It has contributed to a destabilizing erosion of the old rules, written and unwritten, that govern dating, sex, love, marriage, and family. It has fostered among opinion makers and intellectual elites a distrust that borders on contempt for religious belief. And it has fortified among the highly educated an uncritical faith in the coincidence of scientific progress and moral progress.

Children living on the edge of divorce and separation from parents can face a bewildering upheaval, but Chancery Court Judge Jaye Bradley said a one-year Focus on Children in Separation (FOCIS) program in Jackson County has made a "dramatic impact." ... Parents have been drawn into a "terribly emotional time," and when their children get pushed aside it is not intentional. The children are taught that in FOCIS, King said.

IF PRESIDENT BUSH wants to be a true "compassionate conservative," he'll support civil unions for homosexual couples and try to avoid using gay marriage as a "wedge issue" in the 2004 presidential campaign ... It will be hard for Bush to cool this issue down. The press loves it. People feel strongly about it. But polls suggest that the public, while opposing gay marriage, favors civil unions. That would be a good place for Bush to stand.

Stanley Williams was introduced to the violent street culture of South Central L.A. on his first day there at age 6. He was fresh off the bus from Shreveport, La., when another boy approached and asked him his name. ''Tookie,'' he answered, and the boy promptly punched him in the face. Williams's parents divorced two years earlier. His job, as he saw it, was to protect his mother and sister, and to that effect, he carried with him a sharpened butter knife. Routine errands in the neighborhood involved dashing through a gantlet of older boys, who patted him down for money. ''I got my ideas about how to be a man from the street -- from the hustlers and pimps,'' he says.

But marriage�forget the "gay" for a moment�is intrinsically conservative. It does not just normalize, it requires normality as the ticket in. Assimilating another "virtually normal" constituency, namely monogamous, long-term, homosexual couples, marriage pushes the queerer queers of all sexual persuasions�drag queens, club-crawlers, polyamorists, even ordinary single mothers or teenage lovers�further to the margins. "Marriage sanctifies some couples at the expense of others," wrote cultural critic Michael Warner. "It is selective legitimacy."

Instead of conceiving of these associations as "marriage lite," think of them as personal partnerships and the body of law regulating them as analogous to that for commercial partnerships. A housing co-op has different concerns than a medical practice, a mom-and-pop enterprise differs from a publicly traded corporation�and so do the statutes that limn them. The point is to limit the law to issues germane to the relationships it oversees. For instance, if kids are involved, they and their parents need legal protections, especially in the event of a split-up. Adultery, on the other hand, is not the state's affair ... Because American marriage is inextricable from Christianity, it admits participants as Noah let animals onto the ark. But it doesn't have to be that way. In 1972 the National Coalition of Gay Organizations demanded the "repeal of all legislative provisions that restrict the sex or number of persons entering into a marriage unit; and the extension of legal benefits to all persons who cohabit regardless of sex or numbers." Would polygamy invite abuse of child brides, as feminists in Muslim countries and prosecutors in Mormon Utah charge? No. Group marriage could comprise any combination of genders. Guarantees of women's and children's rights and economic well-being would be more productive than outlawing multiple marriage.

Consider, however, that this discrimination is remedied by abolishing marriage as much as it is by extending its reach. A legal system that gives benefits to married couples but withholds those benefits from other types of relationships that help people flourish and fulfill critical social functions harms many people, both straight and gay ... Our neighbors in Canada are once again out in front. While the legalization of same-sex marriage north of our border has captured all the news, their reevaluation of the legal relevance of marriage deserves attention as well. A 2001 report from the Law Commission of Canada, �Beyond Conjugality: Recognizing & Supporting Close Personal Adult Relationships,� recommends radical revisions in the law to equally honor and support all caring and interdependent relationships. While it falls just short of recommending the elimination of marriage, its proposals in arenas as diverse as immigration, pensions, taxes, government benefits, torts and evidence topple the legal pedestal upon which marriage sits.

There are good reasons to reject Polikoff�s idea. The institution of marriage represents an enormous social investment, both in the couple and in the children they often raise. Every single one of the more than 1,000 marital benefits granted at the state and federal level costs us money, whether it�s in the form of a Social Security death benefit or tax breaks on transfers of wealth between spouses. There are many reasons we make that huge investment in marriage but not in other relationships. Marriage adds to social stability, including by curbing promiscuity. It furnishes caretakers to individuals who would otherwise rely on the state. Married people are healthier and wealthier than single people or unmarried cohabitants. Marriage affords a secure environment for children, who do better in married households. Even with today�s high divorce rates, marital relationships are also more enduring, which makes our investment in them all the wiser.