My Baby's Daddy, the title of a new film by Eddie Griffin and Anthony Anderson, is almost guaranteed to elicit a reaction regardless of gender or generation. The aging hip hop crowd, it's assumed, will find no fault with it and accept it as terminology reflective of their reality. The husband is from a forgotten time. The baby's daddy is today.

We've seen the Huxtable generation of the eighties, but no one has seen how this generation would deal with fatherhood once it's thrust upon them. It's not like you can sit down nowadays and decide to have a child. Nine times out of ten it's just -- "I'm pregnant!"

I began to think ... about the implications of the ["baby mama/baby daddy"] phrase and its wide acceptance. The initial and given connotation is that two people have had a child out of wedlock. Subsequently, in order to become a baby mama or daddy, you have to be reduced in importance; the phrase is typically prefaced by the word "just."

A new survey from the University of Chicago found that typical urban-dwellers spend much of their adult lives unmarried -- either dating or single. And that has led to an elaborate network of "markets" in which these adults search for companionship and sex.

Grab your partner and SP45 sunscreen: Rosie O'Donnell is planning what is being billed as "the first gay cruise with family values." The comedienne and former talk show host said the first offering from R Family Vacations, a company she co-founded, would be a week-long cruise on the new Norwegian Dawn to the Bahamas. On the cruise, which will depart New York on July 11, passengers will be able to learn about topics such as adoption and artificial insemination.

The leader of a state group that opposes gay marriage acknowledged it did not release portions of a poll that indicated voters are deeply divided on whether to ban same-sex marriage. Ron Crews of the Massachusetts Family Institute said he regretted downplaying the omitted survey results as irrelevant. "I want to apologize," Crews said. "I misspoke. I misspoke primarily out of ignorance, but that does not excuse misspeaking. There were other questions, and we are ... going to release those other questions." At a rally Wednesday, the group touted Zogby poll results that indicated 69 percent of respondents wanted a chance to vote on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. The group also highlighted a question that showed 52 percent said that "only marriage between one man and one woman should be legal," with 42 percent disagreeing. The group didn't release information that poll respondents opposed the constitutional amendment, by a split of 49-48 percent. It also didn't mention that poll respondents, by a margin of 48-46, did not want lawmakers to prevent marriage licenses from being issued to homosexual couples in May, when the Supreme Judicial Court decision legalizing gay marriage takes effect.

The short answer is that if a customary social institution is trashed and trivialized by irresponsible buffoons, we ought to exert more control over it — to tighten access, not loosen it. ... Things are for whom they are for. ... [M]arriage is for men and women; the fact that either institution might have been abused in some particular instance does not make a case for altering fundamental definitions.

[S]ocial conservatives who blow their stacks over homosexual matrimony's supposed threat to traditional marriage tomorrow should focus on the far greater damage that heterosexuals are wreaking on that venerable institution today.

She zeros in on the lives of six teenage mothers, some single, some divorced and some temporarily "hooked up" with unreliable or unsavory men, the teen fathers of their babies or the next boyfriend in line. The narrative focuses on their lives as daughters in families that range from the solid to the dysfunctional; these are teenagers who crave attention and thrills, and those desires get them into trouble that lasts a lifetime.

SO LET ME get this, uh, straight: Britney can grab any guy, go to a cheesy wedding place, which incidentally offers drive-thru service, get hitched in a ceremony reminiscent of a drunken trip to 7-Eleven, and immediately gain more than 1,000 legal rights as a married person, even if she'll never use any of them. It'll take more than a Big Gulp and a bag of Cheetos to digest that insult. And what makes the whole thing so incredibly ludicrous is that they got the marriage annulled a mere 55 hours later. Fifty-five hours of a prank marriage, and we can't marry legally for 55 seconds. So, all you right wing, holier than thou, Bible-thumping zealots, how's that for preserving the sanctity of marriage? Why hasn't the world, as we know it, come to an end when a heterosexual couple makes "a mockery of this scared institution"?

Last year, as she does every year, Brunilda Bonilla hung a condom on the Christmas tree. There it was in its little plastic package, dangling among the shiny lights and baubles, should either of her daughters be in need.

Her eldest, Silky, 24, already has a 3-year-old, so the prophylactic ornament was more likely meant for her 18-year-old daughter, Barbara, who tends to fall asleep these days with her boyfriend in her bed.

"You need it, you take it," is what Ms. Bonilla says.

When Silky's daughter, Michelle, was born, it was a joyful day. After all, Ms. Bonilla was now a grandmother. It was also a sobering day: Silky -- like Ms. Bonilla -- would be raising the child without the presence of a man.

For her own part, Silky seems to hold no grudge against her father. "My father taught me that if there's no man in my life, I can do it by myself," she said. "Even though he may not live with us anymore, that was the lesson he had to teach."

"When I knew that I was going to raise Michelle myself, I really understood everything my mother went through. When I think about it now, it makes me proud."

The hard part, Silky said, is not in putting food on the table, or clothes in the dresser, or even gifts beneath the tree. The hard part, she said, comes when Michelle gets sick and there is no one there to hold her hand.
...
"The biggest problem is baby-sitting," said Carmen Silva, [a member of Mothers on the Move, a Bronx-based advocacy group for single mothers,] "The problems with money are always bad, but the worst is finding someone you really trust to watch your kids."

It is impossible to overestimate the burden that weighs upon our shoulders. We face a government that threatens our children, our lives, our Constitution, and quite possibly the very basis of civilization itself. Before our very eyes we see history's greatest experiment in human freedom being debased into a ruthless, depraved, diabolical tyranny. It has fallen to us "to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime." But this tyranny does not come from abroad; it has arisen in our very midst. It is a tyranny of cowards, that hides in secret courtrooms and protected offices, that fears the citizens it ostensibly serves, while cynically using and abusing innocent children ...

Most Louisiana men and women who have children out of wedlock believe marriage benefits children, but few think the institutionalized union will make the parents happier, according to an 18-month study ... Almost all the women surveyed wanted "father involvement" regardless of whether a marriage occurs, said the study's lead author, Ron Mincy, a professor of social welfare policy at Columbia University in New York. Almost all wanted a father who would spend time with the child as well as provide emotional, spiritual and financial support and safety, he said. In general, the men had more positive attitudes about marriage than the women, who are food stamp recipients who never married, Mincy said. Many of the women reassess their relationship with the child's biological father after they get pregnant, looking at him as a potential father and husband, Mincy said. In that new light, the women pull out of the relationship primarily because of infidelity and "relationship problems" that were less relevant before the pregnancy, Mincy said. In general, the women and the fathers of their children said they didn't think they should marry until they had more money saved and were better educated. The reality, though, is that they're more likely to achieve those goals as a married couple, Mincy said.

The state's interest in marriage is based largely on the public interest in -- hold your breath here -- stable relationships.

Might some of the divergence between Ms. Gallagher's point of view, and that of her airplane seatmate, be due to different interpretations of the word "need"?

More specifically, what is Ms. Gallagher saying when she says that children "need" a father, or "need" a mother-and-father? The young man on the plane may interpret that as meaning "is irrevocably screwed up without." Since he's the child of divorced parents, to accept that definition would be to accept that he's a mess and will never be put right. If that's the way he interpreted it, it's hardly surprising that he rejected the notion. (In fact, his restraint in the face of what could be perceived as a colossal insult is admirable.) If, on the other way, Ms. Gallagher means only "would be a lot better off with, or at least happier, at least for so long as one is a child," then her contention is not insulting. And it might, if phrased that way, have received an assent.

Take yourself, for example. You mention from time to time that you found (and maybe still find) it painful to have been a child of divorce. But you don't seem irrevocably screwed up to me, and I doubt that you'd describe yourself that way. (It'd be a sure way to undermine pundit authority!) So did you "need" your biological father (or mother) in your home? Or would it have just been a lot better for you if they'd both been there?…

Defeat is not an option, because we fight for our very survival and for the survival of our children, and of their children. We will comport ourselves with dignified outrage. We will never cross the line into violence. But neither will we relent, withdraw, or surrender. And if we are struck down, others will rise up in our place.

An out-of-state reader asks: "Britney Spears can get married in Las Vegas on a whim (and have it annulled later the same day), but gay people such as myself who have been together in a loving, faithful, monogamous relationship with one partner for over a dozen years are not allowed to marry because some say we would damage the institution of marriage. Is something wrong with this picture?"

Well, yes. There's something wrong with the argument that an institution in some disarray can be healed by expanding the variety of behaviors that are considered acceptable within it. Would Major League Baseball be improved by the acceptance of bat-corkers, steroid-users and problem gamblers?

No, it's a big business. More than 120,000 marriage licenses were issued by Clark County in 2003, and an estimated 1 million visitors came to southern Nevada to attend a wedding, either theirs or someone else's. The courthouse is open for licenses every night until midnight and 24 hours on holidays. Couples can get married here at a drive-up window while seated in their cars. They can be married by a Dr. Spock look-alike or by an Elvis impersonator. Many proper churches are available, too, as well as elegant, traditional chapels. Most take walk-ins, and some weddings are as cheap as $200.

Your comments about Britney and the fight over SSM actually clarified a major problem with the "debate:" the two sides are not debating the same issue. Your discussion of redefining marriage and weakening the culture is the debate being had by SSM opponents. The loss of important legal rights and legal recognition is what is being debated by SSM proponents. As long as the two sides continue to debate entirely different issues, there is never going to be a resolution.

In watching, and participating, in the debate, it is becoming clear that the two sides have picked the most comfortable battle they believe they can win and have chosen not to engage the other side. SSM opponents want to talk about the culture and the meaning of marriage because it becomes uncomfortable to talk about denying a significant bundle of legal rights to a group of people while impetuous Britney can have these same legal rights after a 5-minute Las Vegas marriage. Proponents want to talk about legal rights because of the discomfort in dealing with the possiblity that gay marriage could result in the parade of horribles pro-marriage advocates predict.

Ultimately, I think, the public will have to determine which debate to join and engage. My guess is that the debate will not be about values but instead be about legal rights. While the values argument is actually a lot more interesting, I sense the American people are not ready to debate the meaning of marriage and what role they are playing in strengthening or weakening that institution. All the abstractions and parade of horribles will likely lose out to the equity argument or "it's just not fair." Whether the American people are prepared to extend 'it's just not fair" to gays and lesbians is the bigger question.

We live a world in which Britney Spears just engaged in something "sacred" (in the president's words), where instant and joke hetero marriages and divorces are a subject of titillation, and where a decades-long monogamous lesbian marriage is a threat to civilization as we know it. Please. Can we have a smidgen of consistency here?

First of all, I think I was unclear when I said "the suggestion of anti-gay bigotry strikes me as a red herring". I didn't mean that you are using it as a red herring, but that they are. People whose view on marriage differs from yours should not accuse you of anti'gay bias; doing so diverts attention from the more important question of childrens' welfare. You have made clear many times that you are not morally opposed to homosexuality per se, which should be enough to satisfy such critics.

Reading ahead, I see we still have some differences on same-sex couples conceiving children in vitro:

"... the question is whether creating intentionally fatherless or motherless children, or claiming that any child does not need a father or mother, could ever be construed as adults 'arranging their lives to the maximum benefit of their children.'"

This is the hardest part of the debate for me, whether or how its right for a gay adult to conceive a child, but it's not exactly what I meant to comment on. I was just pointing out that the spillover effect you predict (SSM leads straights to have kids outside marriage) may be an unintended consequence of labeling SSM anti-marriage. Lumping gay couples in with stepfamilies, single mothers and unwed straight couples means that eventual legalization of SSM might be interpreted as social approval of other alternate family forms. If we were to make clear that SSM is a unique case that should be debated only on its own merits, the "collateral damage" might be greatly reduced.

In the hypothetical debate you describe, the suggestion of anti-gay bigotry strikes me as a red herring. Assuming that the discussion is among straight people, the accusation would carry little weight, since it was the accuser who "played the gay card". One might reply that same-sex parenting is not relevant to the topic at hand (divorce, single parenting, etc.), since gay couples, like infertile straight couples, cannot have children through sex. Fertile, straight adults, on the other hand, can take the shortest path to a child’s happiness -- marriage.

If marriage advocates were to support same-sex parenting, and same-sex marriage, as the most child-friendly option available to gays, it might deflate the sort of argument that you predict among straights. The central message would be that all parents should arrange their lives to the maximum benefit of their children. That straight couples can come much closer to the mother-father ideal than gay couples does not reduce the ideal's importance, nor does it demean gays to point out this obvious biological fact.

"When we got divorced there was no way he was going to get the dogs," said Zimmerman, 32, of Livingston. "I don't anticipate ever having children, and my animals mean that much to me." It's not unheard of in dog-friendly Montana for splitting couples to go toe-to-toe over who gets the dogs. Lawyers, veterinarians and shelter officials say they regularly deal with dogs caught between owners who are getting divorced. "People fight over dogs," said Carolyn Parker, a Bozeman divorce attorney.

The latest draft of a much-contested policy paper on families has a new name, a new theological backbone, and a new emphasis on what it calls the "marital-biological" relationship between a man and a woman as the ideal foundation for the Christian family. Its key assertion is that it is "preferable, on the whole," for children to be raised by a mother and a father who are married to each other and live in the same home. It also repeats the key assertion of the original, controversial version, that "God works through all kinds of families" -- but takes pains to point out that some kinds are better than others ...

It says that, "while the basic marital-biological form is not the only acceptable form of family, it ... exemplifies in a basic way God's ordering of the interpersonal life for which he created humankind." "The church affirms that marriage is instituted by God, that marriage is good for human society, and that marriage is a form of family life that provides a suitable context for the nurture of children," the new section says, ading: "Affirmation of marriage's centrality ... is by no means a claim that marriage exhausts what the church means by family." ...

The paper urges parents to nurture their children "to become suspicious of prevailing cultural attitudes towards wealth, consumption, entertainment and sexual self-indulgence." It identifies "infidelity, physical and emotional abuse, lovelessness, lack of mutuality, and casual divorce" as instances of "the disordering of God's intention."

"God works in and through all kinds of families," it says, following up with a demurral: "This affirmation does not bless every form of household, or lift up every conceivable form of family life as a model." As a model, it lifts up marriage -- which it says "is associated with many positive outcomes for women and men." "Married people are, on the whole, happier, healthier, better off financially, and more likely to be employed, than are single people," it says, adding: "Research provides strong evidence that, on average, children do better in healthy, intact two-parent (biological) families than they do in stepfamilies, adoptive families or single-parent families."