The main reason marriage is considered good for society is that committed relationships help settle individuals into stable homes and families. Marriage does this by establishing collective rules of conduct that strengthen obligations to a spouse and often to children.

Justices of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled 5-2 Monday in favor of full, equal, and mandatory gay marriages for all citizens. The order nullifies all pre-existing heterosexual marriages and lays the groundwork for the 2.4 million compulsory same-sex marriages that will take place in the state by May 15. "As we are all aware, it's simply not possible for gay marriage and heterosexual marriage to co-exist," Massachusetts Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall said. "Our ruling in November was just the first step toward creating an all-gay Massachusetts." Marshall added: "Since the allowance of gay marriage undermines heterosexual unions, we decided to work a few steps ahead and strike down opposite-sex unions altogether."

But make no mistake: Conservatives never had much to say on the issue of marriage until it offered them the opportunity for the latest in a long line of wedge issues. (Distinguished predecessors include "state's rights," "welfare queens," and another Massachusetts special, "Willie Horton.") Thus, the Republican Party did not offer $1.5 billion in marriage incentives when a Friends episode showed Ross and Rachel getting drunk and waking up the next day as newlyweds. And no constitutional ban was proffered when Brittany Spears used marriage as a publicity stunt. So while the institution of marriage has been under attack for years, most notably through the rising divorce rate, Republicans have done nary a thing.

"We think it is fair to ask during this debate how many legislators who are demonizing gay marriage have actually committed the most grievous possible injury to the institution they claim to want to protect," said Linda Perdue, president of the Indiana Stonewall Democrats.

The amendment would not bar or condemn homosexuality, which is the real issue here, but merely turn marriage into a version of a restricted club: Gays need not apply. Just about everyone agrees that Bush is securing his conservative base before the general election. This makes political sense, but it also represents moral cowardice.

In my view, the religious right amendment is both extreme - in that it bans any state from granting civil marriage rights to gays - and premature - in that the need for it on purely federalist grounds hasn't been in any way proven. Here's my offer, then, to my friend, Charles. If all legal precedent fails, if DOMA is struck down, if one single civil marriage in Massachusetts is deemed valid in another state, without that other state's consent, I will support a federal constitutional amendment that would solely say that no state is required to recognize a civil marriage from another state. By that time, we might even have had a chance to evaluate how equal marriage rights play out in a single state or two. How's that for a compromise?

Wedge? Marriage has been around for, oh, 5,000 years. In every society, in every place, in every time it has been defined as an opposite-sex union. Then four robed eminencies in Boston decreed otherwise. And then those not quite prepared to accept this undebated, unlegislated, unvoted, unnegotiated revolution are the ones accused of creating a political wedge! Who is dividing the country? Was it the Republican National Committee that told the Massachusetts court to make May 17 in a hotly contested election year the day on which gay marriage is to be imposed for the first time in America? A front-page Washington Post "analysis" piece asserts that with the constitutional amendment the president is ready "to rekindle the culture wars." Who did the kindling here? Bush had no desire to get involved in this issue. If not for the activism in Boston and San Francisco, it would not be an election issue at all. Boston and San Francisco have made the question very stark: We are going to have national gay marriage or we are not. "States' rights" is a phony - and ironic - alternative that will not withstand constitutional muster. I welcome the debate on the constitutional amendment because it will shift the locus of this issue from unelected judges to where it belongs: the House and the Senate and the 50 state legislatures. In the end, however, I would probably vote against the amendment because for me the sanctity of the Constitution trumps everything, even marriage. Moreover, I would be loath to see some future democratic consensus in favor of gay marriage blocked by such an amendment. Nonetheless, that does not render the abusive, ad hominem charges made by the marriage revolutionaries any less hypocritical. Gay activists and their judges have every right to revolution. They have every right to make their case. But they deserve to be excoriated when they then cry, "culture war!"

Overwhelming numbers of Americans report that they are concerned about the problems confronting children and youth. Yet despite a broadly based and deeply felt concern with the welfare of children there is little social movement mobilization demanding that society work to improve their health and welfare.

You wrote:

"But at no time in recent Western history have we viewed some marriages as "civil" and some as "religious.""

I must inform you that in France for more than two centuries there is "civil marriage" and "religious marriage." The first is mandatory if you want to be married by the language of the law. The "religious marriage" is an option that you do in the church or temple or whatever, after the civil ceremony at the Townhouse. This procedure is coming from the French Revolution that separates the Church from the State.

I've read about Marquardt's research [on the college hook up culture, see our report]. I graduated from college more than twenty years ago, so my college years were post-sexual revolution, and pre-AIDS. ...Sometimes I think that what Marquardt is describing really isn't all that new. After all, neither I nor the people I knew went out on dates all that often, during our college years; we got to know each other by hanging out...Friendships where you don't really know whether you're dating or not are also familiar to me, and what are now called "hookups" were called "one night stands" in my day.

On the other hand...I don't remember a place where hookups were so common as to be "scripted," where it was actually normal to want to have sex and then not talk to the person afterwards. So, maybe ...things have changed relatively recently.

Also, one of my vices is reading women's magazines, and I find really disconcerting some of the articles where they talk to young men, in order to give their readers an idea of what men want. I remember, for example, one article where a magazine cheerfully relayed the news about what men think when they first sleep with you ("Don't worry, it's mostly good"). What was "mostly good" turned out to be merely the obvious -- most of the time, men like having sex -- and it was accompanied by news that struck me as not at all good - men don't care to be asked where you stand, when you first have sex. OK, I can even half understand this - that kind of conversation can be awkward at any time - but the reason given bothered me. The first time you have sex, the men related, is supposed to be just fun, not too serious. Since when? Why should I buy those rules? When I read that kind of things, I feel as if women's magazines are bringing me the worst of both worlds of sex roles, a world in which I get to be as vain as a traditional woman (all those glamour photos and pages of beauty advice) and as promiscuous as a traditional man.

So, I'm really not sure whether young women today are just seeing the same sort of thing I saw as a young woman, or whether they're seeing a "hookup culture" which is worse than what I saw.

Of course, the movement to ban gay marriage is a religious movement. It is one of many illustrations that God as conceived by the Bush administration is dedicated to the destruction rather than preservation of basic liberties. All of us know that theocracy is not compatible with freedom, a fact richly established by history if anything has been, and which was one of the basic insights of the founders of the American republic.

As an election-year policy initiative, George Bush's plan to foster "healthy marriages" among the poor is sheer genius. Even as he eliminates the last shreds of the nation's social safety net, Bush gets to showcase his compassionate conservatism. He gets to do something to promote old-fashioned heterosexual unions without having to jump all the way in to the gay-marriage debate. And, thanks to the burgeoning Marriage Movement, he's created a program that enjoys the support of a wide swath of the liberal establishment. Too bad we're talking about money that otherwise might actually help families make ends meet.

It is a cardinal rule of politics, all the more so for a president who saw his father defeated largely because he failed to heed it fully: Pay attention to the party's base.

Mr. Bush was acting under enormous pressure from conservative supporters, who insisted that he speak out in an election year on a matter of critical importance to many of his Christian backers.

They wanted a wedge issue," Mr. Newsom said. "He is appealing to the right wing of his party. And it's shameful to play politics with peoples' lives, and that is what the president of the United States is attempting to do."

They understand what President Bush does not: the Constitution is too important to be folded, spindled or mutilated for political gain.

Thus, one of the challenges facing the gay rights movement has been how to break the grip of religion on our secular democracy.

Check out this provacative article, where gay Democrats are asking Republican critics of SSM if they have ever been divorced. The implication, of course, is that divorce harms marriage and renders SSM opponents hypocritical. Note that Joan Walsh, Salon's divorce poster girl, has been silent on the San Francisco SSM debacle. As a culture war tactic, those on the left rarely support traditional values except as a means of accusing their opponents of hypocrisy. Will the promotion of SSM finally give divorce criticism a legitimate platform on the left? To be consistent, will SSM advocates also call for the repeal of no-fault divorce laws?

A broader list of complaints is laid out by Patrick Johnston, a prominent Ohio evangelist, in an essay titled "Why Christians Should Not Vote for George W. Bush" on the Web site IntellectualConservative.com. According to Johnson, Bush is: Soft on abortion; soft on homosexuality ("He has appointed open homosexuals to high government positions at a rate that makes Bill Clinton look like a homophobe!"); soft on Islam and Shintoism ("He demoralized Korean and Japanese Christians by bowing down at a pagan Shinto shrine in Japan"); soft on the National Endowment for the Arts, which finances "blasphemous" art; soft on federal funding for education (why this is un-Christian is never explained); soft on the assault-weapon ban (ditto); soft on deficit spending (ditto); and so on.

The individuals in marriage education are well-intentioned. They are apolitical. They are resolute. Now, they may have an opportunity to do immeasurable good beyond what was previously possible. It's time to let them go to work on a broader scale. It's time to see how widely successful they can be in reducing family breakdown through community-based initiatives targeted at strengthening marriages.

Decades of studies have shown that kids do best when raised by a mother and a father. Men and women bring unique and complementary gifts when they unite to parent. This is the reason AFM has built a movement of diverse communities united around a common vision for seeing more children raised in a home with a mother and a father. And we are active on a wide range of reforms to encourage marriage and provide intact families for kids. As founders of a minority social-service agency, my wife and I also have served as foster parents to more than 50 inner-city children. We have found that every child has an innate need to connect with a mother and father. Children instinctively seek a connection to both halves of the human race.

And I know you think it's just a fantasy
But since your dad walked out
Your mom could use a guy like me

And what people have taken to calling "the m-word" is more charged than most, because it's what linguists and philosophers call a performative notion. Like christening a boat or adjourning a meeting, marriage is a state of affairs that can be brought about merely by pronouncing certain words in an appropriate setting -words that have traditionally conferred not just solemn rights and obligations, but permission to canoodle, too.

...In the end, though, the meaning of "marriage" will be determined by the way ordinary people use the word, not the edicts of courts or legislatures.

A majority of Massachusetts residents said they oppose legalizing gay marriage, a significant increase since the state's highest court ruled three months ago that gay couples have a constitutional right to marry, according to a new Boston Globe poll. The poll also found that an overwhelming majority of those surveyed wanted the voters, not the courts or the Legislature, to define marriage in Massachusetts, through a statewide ballot question to amend the constitution. And it indicated significant support for civil unions.