Question: My wife and I are married 14 years, with kids ages 7 and 4. She cares little for sex, once a month, it's not very satisfying. She thinks I'm unromantic but it's difficult when she has no interest in me. She wants me to treat her like a princess and buy her things but I'm practical and don't think you should spend unless you have it. She's always angry about her housework, I help out, but between doing homework, baths, putting kids to bed and some cleaning, I don't get finished until 9 p.m. We tried counselling; she quit because she wouldn't write down about her past. She says she's the way she is, period. I want to stay for the children and for her, but it seems at the expense of my own happiness.

Answer: This is a tough one, because, like you, I believe in trying everything possible to work out marriage problems when children are involved. However, having been divorced myself, I know that sometimes couples feel they have to separate. I also know it's possible -- with effort on both sides -- to raise children in a better atmosphere apart, than had the couple stayed together.

With marriages no longer remaining a simple ceremony and becoming an event to show off one's wealth, Union human resources development minister Dr MM Joshi today advocated formulating a model "Code of Conduct of Marriages" on the same lines as the Dowry Prohibition Act to save the bride's parents from incurring a huge financial burden. The good professor, himself happily married for decades, obviously doesn't have time for the theory that one cannot legislate in social change. "Marriage is no longer a simple, sacred ceremony. It has become an event to show off one's wealth, which leaves the bride's side financially strained," Dr Joshi said at a conference on dowry organised here today as part of the National Commission for Women's week-long foundation day programmes.

Are you due for a marriage check-up? You regularly see a doctor to detect physical problems, why not a counsellor to catch marital trouble spots? That's the thinking of the Ontario Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, which is offering couples a free 50-minute marriage check-up during Valentine's week, February 9 to 13. It's not a therapy session. Couples will be given a survey on key issues such as dealing with in-laws, parenting, handling money, spending time together, communicating, enjoying sex. A registered marriage and family therapist will rate the strengths and weaknesses of the partnership and talk to the couple about the state of their union.

Now comes the coup de grace: In a campaign year likely to be poisoned by a culture war over same-sex marriage, politicians feel compelled to play marriage counselors. Last month the president from the small-government party proposed a $1.5 billion program that will mount its own advertising push, among other federal elixirs, to promote "healthy marriages." Some might argue that taxpayers' money would be better spent on drug plans that cover Viagra for husbands who leave their wives for the N.F.L., or, better still, on job programs that would increase the ranks of the potentially marriageable. Cynics might say that the president's "healthy marriage" initiative is merely political posturing anyway. Congress will never sign on to such a scheme - or so one might hope - and meanwhile the president can claim credit for, as he put it himself, taking "a principled stand for one of the most fundamental, enduring institutions of our civilization."

President Bush's $1.5 billion initiative to boost the marriage bond relies on the support of many members of Congress who are, ironically, divorced. Just last year, three Texas lawmakers -- Reps. Joe Barton, R-Ennis, Charlie Gonzalez, D-San Antonio, and Henry Bonilla, R-San Antonio -- had high-profile divorces. Gonzalez's ex-wife, Becky Whetstone, coincidentally a marriage counselor, has attracted widespread media attention as she prepares to run against him for election as an independent. She has accused the congressman of being verbally and emotionally abusive. Of the 535 members in the House and Senate, 108, or more than 20 percent, were divorced at least once, according to a 2000 survey by Roll Call, a newspaper that covers Congress.

Utah House members could be more worried about marriage preparation than the brides and grooms. After a long debate Friday, representatives decided to hold onto Democratic Salt Lake City Rep. Roz McGee's proposal for marriage preparation classes to get more information. McGee's bill would give couples a $20 break on their license fees if they undergo counseling from therapists or religious leaders. McGee points to the cost of divorce to make her case. For example, in 2001, nearly 10,000 couples nationwide divorced, costing $300 million in legal fees, child support and property costs. She noted lawmakers considered requiring marriage counseling in 1971, but never put the rule in place. "Marriage is the most complex relationship," McGee said. "Unfortunately, too many couples are not prepared. Many couples do not have the communication skills."

The administration is right that children who grow up in families with healthy marriages have a better start in life, for a mixture of economic and emotional reasons. As the government is in the business of promoting child welfare through public schooling and health insurance programs, there is presumably no conceptual objection to promoting child welfare by promoting marriage. However, marriage therapy is a woolly science; since the 1960s the number of marriage therapists in the country has gone up about 25-fold, yet the divorce rate is higher than it used to be. There is, in short, no guarantee that the government can do anything to promote stable marriage. Yet because the potential gains are large, there is a case for experiment and research.

... The administration's plan to spend an extra $1.5 billion over five years (a third of which would come from the states) is aimed at funding experimental programs across the country. These would give the evaluators more data, and might make a difference to the couples who participate in them. As research programs go, this is an expensive one ... Research on promoting marriage may be a worthy cause, but it deserves a fraction of the cash that President Bush plans to throw at it.

WHETHER ADVOCATES call it marriage equality, same-sex marriage or gay marriage, the notion of two men or two women legally marrying each other so upsets some folks -- including more than a few gay people -- that civilized discussion, much less civility, can be nearly impossible. Such has been the case even in picturesque, pastoral, generally liberal Vermont, as David Moats' new book, "Civil Wars: A Battle for Gay Marriage," which is scheduled to be released Monday, Feb. 2, makes clear.

I was recently chosen as one of the few journalists to be embedded with a division of U.S. troops working to implement the goals of President Bush's $1.5 billion Healthy Marriage Initiative. Here's my diary, keeping in mind that some details have been omitted so as not to jeopardize the troops' position or future movements:

MONDAY: We're in a Black Hawk somewhere over southern California, looking for a house where a young Hispanic couple is living in sin.

Captain Rigid, who's heading this mission, tells me over the racket of the rotating blades that President Bush wants to protect and promote marriage, particularly among minorities and the poor.

We set down, and Rigid orders his men to surround the house. We've all donned night vision goggles, even though it's about 3 in the afternoon. (We're going for a certain look.)

... I have never been this close to the action. THURSDAY: A day off, but it starts off looking like we're going to be busy. We're getting reports of rampant adultery and divorce and all sorts of sexual shenanigans in a single location, but just as we're about to take off in the Black Hawk, Rigid gets a call. "We can stand down," he tells me. "It's just Congress."

He [Pres. Bush] was conspicuously silent concerning an initiative that reportedly had been slated for inclusion in the address: a $1.5 billion proposal for a training program to help couples develop the interpersonal skills crucial for "healthy marriages." Apparently that announcement was replaced by the cautious endorsement of the amendment. The president's careful engagement of this wedge issue reflects its complexity and volatility.

It is a perennial complaint among members of the clergy that many straight couples regard the chapel as little more than a stage set for a picture-perfect wedding. In contrast, many of the gay couples who are heading for the altar are regular worshipers who say in interviews that religion is central to their lives. They represent an often-overlooked slice of gay America: the monogamous homebodies more likely to have met their mates at Bible study than at a bar.

...Gay marriage wouldn't even have occurred to us if our understanding of marriage hadn't already changed dramatically. The logical conclusion of this diagnosis, I had thought, is that merely preventing gay marriage really won't do all that much to fix what's already broken, although it might slow down the process of deterioration slightly. Unfortunately, that's not the conclusion that Mr. Kurtz draws:

"The death of marriage is not inevitable. In a given country, public policy decisions and cultural values could slow, and perhaps halt, the process of marital decline. Nor are we faced with an all-or-nothing choice between the marital system of, say, the 1950s and marriage's disappearance. Kiernan's model posits stopping points. So repealing no-fault divorce, or even eliminating premarital cohabitation, are not what's at issue. With no-fault divorce, Americans traded away some of the marital stability that protects children to gain more freedom for adults. Yet we can accept that trade-off, while still drawing a line against descent into a Nordic-style system. And cohabitation as a premarital testing phase is not the same as unmarried parenting. Potentially, a line between the two can hold."

Oh, sad, after such a great article, why does Mr. Kurtz have to go here? I think it seriously undermines everything he has written up to this point, making it appear that all he really cares about is excluding gays, not trying to do anything to fix marriage. Or, less cynically, that he's just seizing on gay marriage because it's a politically expedient "solution," which can utilize a lot of anti-gay sentiment that I'm afraid motivates the average voter's opposition to gay marriage. This is problematic first of all because it's not much of a long-term solution. Younger people are far more accepting of homosexuality than their elders, and so as they grow up, the anti-gay marriage sentiment that banning gay marriage relies on will disappear.

But even beyond that, it seems foolishly optimistic to me to think that if we allow our culture to continue as it is and just stop gay marriage from happening, somehow marriage and the family will survive the way we want it to. Look at our divorce rate already, Mr. Kurtz! Look at the number of children born out of wedlock! The status quo is not just fine, even if we could preserve it, which I seriously doubt. I really don't think we can ultimately afford to accept the "trade-off" of no-fault divorce. It has already contributed greatly to the delinking of child-raising and marriage. Premarital cohabition has also already had an enormous impact on the way we think about commitment and family. ...The Federal Marriage Amendment would not be a magic cure for our social problems; it's a band-aid for a gaping wound in our culture.

It is refreshing to read that transgender people are being accorded more recognition; while a gender change is difficult for most people to understand, those who undertake it are very serious and must make enormous physical, financial and emotional sacrifices. How disappointing that, after all that struggle, a transgender person must lose their marriage once they arrive at the identity which is true to their inner nature. Certainly this situation isn't what opponents of SSM had in mind when they formed their position on marriage; at the very least, a marriage formed when the partners are of opposite sex should be "grandfathered" and remain in force after one of them changes gender.

Although 37 states have passed laws banning same-sex marriages, members of the clergy say they are seeing a growing number of religiously observant gay couples who are sidestepping the debate over legal rights and seeking to consecrate their unions in churches and synagogues.

These ceremonies bestow no legal or civil rights whatsoever. But the couples say they are seeking to have their relationships blessed not by the government, but by God.
...

Although denominations that do permit these rituals formally refer to them as holy unions, same-sex blessings, covenants or commitment ceremonies, more and more of the couples and members of the clergy are simply calling them marriages. The services are often nearly identical to the marriage rites traditionally used for heterosexual couples.

"In most cases, we use the same vows and prayers, the same scriptural references," Ms. Fitzgerald said. "The only thing we change is that we say 'partners' instead of 'husband and wife.'"
...
Christian churches that permit gay blessing ceremonies, though sometimes with limitations, are the Unitarian Universalists, Disciples of Christ, United Church of Christ and the Metropolitan Community Churches. Among the Jewish branches, Reform and Reconstructionist rabbis have permission.

The Episcopal Church, torn over the election of an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire last year, has never formally approved same-sex unions but left the door open for dioceses that wish to allow them. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) allows holy union ceremonies as long as they are not regarded as marriages.

...The most recent state by state comparison of divorce rates in the U.S. shows that the least number of divorces take place in northeast states that are predominately Catholic. States in the bible belt rank high in the number of divorces. According to a study by the Barna Research Group, Born Again Christians are more likely to go through a marital split than are non Christians. The question is why is this happening in a place where many people are so attached to religion?

"Christians tend to avoid co-habitation, and in other parts of the country, people just live together and break up and they're not contributing to the divorce rate in those parts of the country," said Ron Deal with Southwest Church of Christ in Jonesboro.

Southwest Church of Christ is one local church that has a pre-marital counseling program, urging couples to wait 6 months to a year before getting married....

Married Scots who undergo a sex change will be forced to divorce under new legislation giving transsexuals greater legal rights.

Hugh Henry, deputy justice minister, told the justice committee of the Scottish Parliament that, even if a married couple wanted to stay together after one had a sex change operation, they would have to divorce under a new UK law which the Scottish Executive proposes to adopt wholesale.

The parliament had heard pleas from people who had undergone a sex change that they should be able to stay married if they wanted to, but Mr Henry said that this would create same-sex marriages, a measure to which both the executive and the government at Westminster were opposed.

…The new measures are contained in the Gender Recognition Bill which has been introduced at Westminster and which the executive wants to adopt. Under the proposed legislation, anyone who has undergone a sex change would be issued with a new birth certificate acknowledging their new gender.

Ina press release, the protest organizers said President Bush's marriage initiative puts lives at risk because the poor women targeted for pro-marriage programs tend to be victims of domestic violence and "should not be forced to stay in dangerous and even fatal relationships." Women who are being abused need help escaping and recovering from the abuse, not incentives to stay in unsafe relationships, a press release said. "Spending $1.5 billion to promote marriage is fiscally irresponsible, when low income citizens, married or not, require proven ways to bring them out of poverty, such as a livable income, decent schools, affordable health care and housing," the protest organizers said. The protest against President Bush's marriage initiative is being organized by a number of community groups, including the Washington-based Center for Community Change, which says it works to reduce poverty and rebuild low-income communities.

The Canadian government on Wednesday announced it will rewrite its constitutional questions for the Supreme Court regarding gay marriage. In announcing the decision, Justice Minister Irwin Cotler said the questions would be framed to ask the court whether the traditional definition of marriage violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canada`s bill of rights. Cotler said the government remains "committed to same-sex marriage" but wants a broader hearing because the "country is divided on this issue". He said that his ministry will argue in favour of civil marriage before the court but believes the court needs a broader "scope" to consider.

I believe in the institution of marriage. I was reared by two parents in a loving and stable home, and I have no doubt that this arrangement is best for children. But I have my doubts about President Bush's proposal to spend $1.5 billion encouraging "healthy" marriages, mostly in poor neighborhoods. It is unlikely to prompt a big bump in bridal bouquet sales. Nor will there be less traffic on the road to divorce court. Bush's proposal isn't really intended to do those things. Instead, it is a transparent and cynical election-year ploy intended to placate conservative Christians -- one of his core constituencies -- who are upset about recent trends favoring same-sex marriage.

You would expect a proposal built on such cynicism to be shallow, and this one is. While many conservatives seem to see the "healthy marriage" initiative as a way to address a broad spectrum of problems afflicting the nation's underclass -- out-of-wedlock births, poor educational attainment, unemployment -- the man who would administer the marriage initiative describes it as something far less ambitious. Wade Horn, head of family support in the Health and Human Services Department, says the initiative would merely teach "marriage skills" to couples who are already wed or couples considering marriage. Not only is the initiative not the Bush administration's anti-poverty program, it doesn't even aim to promote marriage, Horn claims. "I think that is an unfortunate phrase. It does suggest we want to get single parents in a room and lecture them on the virtues of marriage. But we don't think it would be helpful to do that. What we do want to do is help those people who do want to marry to sustain a healthy marriage," he said ... But if Bush were serious about promoting marriage among America's underclass, there are easily hundreds of better ways to do it. The president could start by ratcheting down the failed war on drugs, which has imprisoned many young fathers for nonviolent drug-related crimes. If Bush used the marriage funds, instead, to help these men find jobs after parole -- how about paying businesses to hire them? -- they would become more eligible as prospective husbands. And they might then be encouraged to marry the mothers of their children. But that sort of initiative would require some serious investigation of the barriers to marriage in poor neighborhoods. Besides, real help for America's underclass might not sell so well on the campaign trail.

The problem is, the public just doesn't seem to be in the mood for it, and the recent mediocre album sales by Spears, Pink and similar artists may reflect a classic case of mismarketing.

SEPARATED AT BIRTH: "Such [civil union-style] statutes point to a future in which couples will have many options, from 'covenant marriage,' in which both parties sign a contract pledging not to divorce, to a number of less binding choices." - gay leftist, Richard Goldstein.

"People thinking of living together would then have three choices: civil marriage, religious marriage, and household partnerships. In effect there would be a competition between these three institutions for their custom." - National Review's John O'Sullivan.

So why are so many on the liberal side of the aisle so skeptical of President Bush's marriage initiative? From watching the media's take on this -- and the reaction to his State of the Union address -- one gets the impression that Bush & Co. must be out to pull the wool over our eyes somehow, that there must be an ulterior motive.

But the Bush marriage initiative is simply a head start for marriages and families. Early investment in at-risk families can often prevent and even heal some devastating social problems.

...the chairman of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, Suzi Leather ...has suggested that, henceforth, the clause requiring doctors to take account of the need of a child for a father, when offering in vitro fertilisation to infertile women, should be removed from the law. The idea that fathers are necessary or even desirable in the lives of children is, in the opinion of Ms Leather, too old-fashioned to be entertained any longer.

Ms Leather is one of those who think that the social trends she no doubt approves of are self-justifying. "It is absolutely clear," she said, "if you think about the changes in society and the different ways that families can be constituted that it is anachronistic for the law to include the statement about the need for a father."...

...In my medical work, I meet practically no child, youth or young adult who has any kind of relationship with his or her father. Not only do fathers believe they have no responsibility towards their offspring, but the mothers do not believe it either. The mass misery of this way of life cannot be offset by the undoubted fact that a relatively small number of very capable women bring up children successfully without the support of fathers.

Ms Leather's proposals are thus completely lacking in compassion, deeply unimaginative and wholly bad in their effects. A social trend is not to be accepted merely because it exists...

Mothers from Hell started out as a casual support group and turned into a group of women who take a stand.

The women of Mothers From Hell share a common goal: to ensure fair treatment and education for their disabled children. They counsel each other through crisis and unite to lobby for their children's rights.

Some 55% of all women in prison have at least one child under 16. Over one-third have a child under five. When they're sentenced, they must make provision for these children, or see them taken into care, which not even the most flagrantly blase authority would pretend is anything other than a developmental disaster. So, the burden falls on family members, and is rarely taken on by one constant household for the entire sentence, but rather patchworked together from a variety of people, in whom the mother might have fluctuating amounts of trust.

Prison privileges, the crucial carrot/stick business of institutional life, mainly centre around phone calls -- and while for men this is about keeping in touch with the outside world, for the majority of women it's the scant and only control they have over their children's welfare. The stress is intolerable, and the difference in atmosphere between male and female prisons is acute and astonishing.

So, rather than experiment with part-time imprisonment for both men and women, let's try something else -- let's not imprison mothers at all. ...

For the 14% of female inmates who've been convicted of a violent crime, the case for incarceration could still be made, but for the overwhelming majority -- the fraudsters, the thieves, the stolen-goods handlers, the drug-related offenders -- what on Earth are they doing in prison, when the disruption of their absence is going to echo through generations?

Find another punishment...

IT IS not easy trying to bring up children and hold down a job, but research suggests more women are doing this than ever before.According to figures released by the Office of National Statistics, 55% of women with children under-five now have full-time or part-time jobs. Experts say this could be contributing to Britain's childhood obesity problem...

The Bush marriage proposal, costing $1.5 billion over five years, aims at fostering "healthy marriages" among the poor, with whom such marriages are less common. The money would go for counseling services, marriage enrichment and the like. At precisely that notion, blood boils in certain veins. A libertarian spokesman for one prominent think tank sniffs, "1965-style Great Society liberalism" -- meaning do-gooding at taxpayer expense. The impeachment has its ironic side. Great Society liberalism has been fingered (by scholar Charles Murray among others) as one of the causes of family decline from the '60s forward. A Murray-ite could argue that what the government undid (by encouraging welfare dependence) it now should work to restore (by funding marriage enrichment and so on). The intensely private nature of marriage works against a $1.5 billion government spending program or, for that matter, a $1.5 trillion one; though it probably should be said that, compared with ventures on which the government wastes far more than $1.5 billion, marriage enrichment doesn't seem unworthy.

...AMERICANS take it for granted that, despite its recent troubles, marriage will always exist. This is a mistake. Marriage is disappearing in Scandinavia, and the forces undermining it there are active throughout the West. Perhaps the most disturbing sign for the future is the collapse of the Scandinavian tendency to marry after the second child. At the start of the nineties, 60 percent of unmarried Norwegian parents who lived together had only one child. By 2001, 56 percent of unmarried, cohabiting parents in Norway had two or more children. This suggests that someday, Scandinavian parents might simply stop getting married altogether, no matter how many children they have...

When you decry the tenor and content of these op-ed pieces [on the Adminstration's marriage initiative] you miss a chance to have a meaniningful dialogue with these folks. Also, concerning the lack of progress, it seems to me part of the problem is the marriage movement won't come out unequivocally in support of all unions (rich, poor, straight, gay) needing support and guidance as a matter of good public policy. When the government picks and chooses which groups "need" its help, it opens itself up to sniping from both the right and the left. If the president were to get out in front of this issue, he would put himself on a stage behind a podium with all types of couples/families behind him (black, white, asian, hispanic, same sex, rich, poor). He would announce that his legislation is meant to help all these families -- they are all deserving of government's support. He would ask any diehard social conservative or left winger to stand up and choose which couples "deserve" more (or less) treatment and attention than others. I don't believe there would be any takers. But even if there were, he would get credit for taking a stand for ALL families not just the ones with which each of us feel comfortable. Just a thought.

Forgive me. This type of initiatives inevitably brings out my cynical nature. And spending $1.5 billion to talk the poor into marrying and staying married sets a new standard for smug self-righteousness. Not to mention ignorance. Does Bush really believe the poor are lousy marriage material because they don't have polished interpersonal skills? Does he really believe all that is needed to stop the repercussive damage of single-parenthood is a public relations campaign on the benefits of holy matrimony? And does Bush really believe this sop to conservatives will get him off the hook for not proposing a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage? What planet is this man on?

The poor have more pressing issues. They are undereducated, under-employed or unemployed. They are not paid a living wage. They don't have access to decent child care or good schools for their kids. They don't have transportation to decent jobs where they can work decent hours. If you want to spend money to help poor families stay together, you might pick something from this list to fund rather than spending money on some goofy initiative to promote the value of marriage. A poor woman might be open to this pitch if the father of her children has a decent job that includes health care for her and the kids. If he does not, she might understandably decide that it would be a mistake to hitch her wagon to his. Putting a marriage-counseling center in her neighborhood isn't going to change his suitability, but spending $1.5 billion to put some jobs in the neighborhood might.

"Middle-aged people have greatly changed their notions about divorce during the present social restructuring. Although the majority of them have children, they give first priority to seeking a happy life," said Xiao Fei, a judge who is in charge of writing a report based on the survey.

...The Bush administration's plan to use federal money to foster healthy marriages among low-income families, first announced two years ago, has drawn considerable fire. While there is consensus among family experts, conservative and liberal, that two-parent households give children the strongest start, there is sharp disagreement about government involvement in promoting marriage.

Some see such efforts as intrusive meddling in a purely private aspect of life. Others worry that marriage promotion could push women to enter into, or stay in, marriages with abusive men. And many advocacy groups concerned with poverty say that what low-income women need is not marriage education, but jobs, training, education and child care. The Bush administration has it backwards, they say: self-sufficiency leads to healthy marriages, not the other way around.

There are other concerns , too. The 1996 Federal Defense of Marriage Act, defines marriage as a man-woman union, and with gay marriage emerging as a wedge issue with voters, some see the Bush administration's marriage-education initiative as a sop to conservatives pushing for a stronger stance against same-sex marriage.

Those in the Phoenix class, though, are enthusiastic about the information and advice they are getting.

"We've been overwhelmingly impressed by these classes," said Sean Algee, 29, an embalmer, who attends with his fiancee, Tanya Wilson, 28, who works at a public radio station. "We get in the car afterwards, and we start talking right away, and it just keeps going. It brings out so many things I wouldn't usually be talking about."...

The president's announcement included few details about the program, other than its price tag of $1.5 billion. He has become a believer in his effectiveness as a promoter from his extraordinary success in raising funds for his re-election campaign -- more than $130 million in the bank and he wants to raise another $40 million by summer. So he may not need my advice. But as a patriotic American, I felt obliged to provide him with some suggestions, which are based mostly on promotional methods he is already using for some other initiatives. Picking up on his fondness for developing rallying themes for the war in Iraq, maybe "Operation Try Marriage" would bring us together in this effort.

Taking a lesson from the dairy industry, how about launching a "Got Spouse?" advertising campaign to remind cohabitating couples of their patriotic duty. We'll need an easily understood barometer of how the marriage campaign is going. How about a national monthly color-code similar to the one for terrorist threats? Green would signify an increase in the monthly marriage rate, red an increased divorce rate, and amber an alert for missing husbands. Recognizing that most single-parent families are headed by mothers, Bush could propose to Congress a No Husband Left Behind Act, similar to the one he signed two years ago for children. The No Husband legislation would provide for mandatory personality profiles to be administered on Saturdays at golf courses, Home Depot, Radio Shack and other places where potential husbands tend to gather. The completed profiles would be submitted to a national Office of Matrimonial Security, which would use the data to alert single mothers of the locations of potentially compatible husbands in their neighborhoods. I'm confident that if the president implements all of these recommendations, he will be able to turn around his dismal record for preserving marriage in America.

Gay marriage is shaping up to be the battlefield of the culture war in 2004. "It's not going to be an issue on the order of national security or the economy," said GOP pollster Whit Ayers, "but I do think it's likely to be the most important cultural issue in the presidential election -- which makes it pretty important."

President Bush's proposal to spend $1.5 billion for the promotion of "healthy marriages" is, at one level, a matter of babies and bath water. There's precious little the government can do to strengthen existing marriages or to encourage new ones, as the president surely knows. The only pragmatic purpose I can see for his idea is that it might please his supporters on the religious right -- particularly if he yields to their pressure to define healthy marriages as traditional marriages. No gays or lesbians, thank you.

That is tired and tepid political bath water, and, not surprisingly, people who fancy themselves more socially aware than the president are demanding that it be tossed out the door. But wait: There's a baby in there that deserves more attention than some of us have been willing to pay. The president's proposal may not be entirely serious, but the state of marriage in America is. And when marriage is in trouble, the society is in trouble.

Same-sex marriage has locked in and reinforced an existing Scandinavian trend toward the separation of marriage and parenthood. The Nordic family pattern -- including gay marriage -- is spreading across Europe. And by looking closely at it we can answer the key empirical question underlying the gay marriage debate. Will same-sex marriage undermine the institution of marriage? It already has. More precisely, it has further undermined the institution. The separation of marriage from parenthood was increasing; gay marriage has widened the separation. Out-of-wedlock birthrates were rising; gay marriage has added to the factors pushing those rates higher. Instead of encouraging a society-wide return to marriage, Scandinavian gay marriage has driven home the message that marriage itself is outdated, and that virtually any family form, including out-of-wedlock parenthood, is acceptable.

It is just the getting married part -- the actual ceremony that marks the legal and often religious act of marrying -- that is treated as malleable. The wedding has become a great blast of a party, which is stuck with a slow start when everyone is expected to curb the fun and pay attention. Symbolizing the relative importance of the activities, brides now dress for the parties that follow, in strapless ball dresses, rather than donning the often impossibly elaborate but still somewhat modest wedding dresses that long symbolized the dignity of the occasion. Increasingly, the marriage doesn't even really take place at the wedding, where a marriage previously legalized may be a mere re-enactment serving as the excuse for a big wedding. (By that standard, brides who postpone getting married until after the birth of a child, because of the importance of fitting into the wedding dress, seem positively sentimental.) To whatever extent possible, the ceremony has become part of the couple's pageantry of personal display. As they inevitably declare, "We want this to be about us." So begins the reworking to "personalize it" with their own script. Not infrequently, this includes jokes and all-too-private reminiscences. Officiants, too, contribute their share in the spirit of undercutting the solemnity to make the ceremony entertaining. And guests recognize this with their applause. Miss Manners acknowledges that this approach to weddings is consistent with the society's belief that vows and loyalties are binding only in regard to the amount of entertainment they continue to yield. The idea of channeling the couple's commitment into the traditions of the society has been reversed, so that weddings have become opportunities for them to show off to society. She wishes them well. Just don't expect her to shed the traditional tear over the significance of it all.