Remember when the days were long
And rolled beneath a deep blue sky
Didn't have a care in the world
With mommy and daddy standing by
When "happily ever after" fails
And we've been poisoned by these fairy tales
The lawyers dwell on small details
Since daddy had to fly

"There are constant complaints among clergy that to start off a wedding with, 'I picked my own service, I picked my own minister, I picked the location,' feeds this culture of 'I do whatever suits me,' " he said. "That is what many mainstream clergy find irritating." He added: "In marriage, by definition you make those outrageous vows of till death do us part; it's not just you deciding what you want by finding somebody on the Internet who will do it exactly how you would like it, with Frank Sinatra singing 'My Way.' "

France resolved its debate over same-sex marriage several years ago by creating civil unions. But the law has had unexpected effects. What began as a way to provide some legal protection for people in homosexual relationships has become a real alternative for heterosexual couples in France, thousands of whom come to municipal offices to sign "civil pacts of solidarity," or PACS, rather than get married.

A landmark study of American evangelical Christians released this month determined, among several findings, that evangelicals oppose gay marriage but are lukewarm in their support for a constitutional amendment to ban it. The survey of more than 1,600 respondents found that, while 85 percent of evangelical Christians oppose gay marriage, only 41 percent of those who oppose the practice felt the Constitution should be amended to do so. Instead, 52 percent of evangelical gay-marriage opponents said it was enough for states or non-constitutional federal laws to prohibit same-sex marriage. Support for such an amendment among evangelicals was only slightly stronger than among the general population, 35 percent of whom preferred amending the Constitution to ban gay marriage over legislative bans. The survey, conducted in late March and early April by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, was commissioned by U.S. News & World Report magazine and the PBS television show "Religion & Ethics Newsweekly."

Billy Bob Thornton is going to be a father -- again. The 48-year-old actor already is celebrating this weekend's debut of his latest film "The Alamo." Thornton announced Thursday he and 39-year-old girlfriend Connie Angland are expecting a child this fall ... Thornton has three children from two past marriages. He divorced actress Angelina Jolie last May.

There's clear evidence that strong marriages protect children not only from poverty but from a large range of poor social outcomes. In the United States this evidence is prompting churches to find new backbone to promote marriage. And the results have been surprising. A study released early this month suggests church-based marriage saver programs have succeeded in bringing down the divorce rate. For the past five years clergy from a range of churches in 184 cities across America have supported a community marriage policy (CMP), in which trained mentor couples provide rigorous marriage preparation, ongoing enrichment of existing marriages and support for couples in crisis. While the divorce rate overall is dropping in the US, it fell by 17.5 per cent in counties with CMP, compared with 9.4 per cent in other counties. So perhaps the cynics are wrong when they argue there's nothing that can be done to stem the drift away from marriage. Not only are these faith-based efforts apparently starting to bite but there's other good evidence that the annual $240 million the Bush Administration proposes to spend on "healthy" marriage initiatives may prove effective, says Dr Wade Horn, the assistant secretary for Children and Families in the US Health Department, who is visiting Australia.

[Jamiel Terry:] I am basically responsible for my dad's reputation being what it is right now.

How do you mean that?
By talking to reporters that he asked me to talk to [during his divorce]. Talking to different Christian leaders to keep the story quiet. The story didn't break for eight months because I kept it at bay. ....

Do you believe your homosexuality is part of your genetic makeup?
I believe sexuality can be tampered with. I do believe there are people who are genetically predisposed to be attracted to the same sex. But sexuality can depend on environment. There's no way I would have come out if my parents had stayed married. Because I wouldn't have gone down the questioning of my identity, I wouldn't have gone down that path if they had stayed married. That was the trigger for me to come out, not the trigger that I was gay.

How did that affect that decision?
It made me question everything I had been raised with. It made me question truth, it made me question morality. Before that, I would have said indefinitely that the Bible is the infallible word of God. Now I'm like, it's kind of good sayings and I'm sure that God had something to do with it, but it was written by men, so it can be fallible. As for the divorce, in my eyes, he was doing something wrong. So I was like, if he's doing something wrong and it's making him happy, and God knows his heart, then God knows my heart, and I want to be happy too.

Tom Sylvester worries that the idea of a husband economically supporting his family being a "gift" fosters "dependence" and has "connotations of noblesse oblige, which undercuts the ideal of gender equality." He is right that marriages organized around a logic of gift exchange do promote dependence, but such marriages need not undercut the ideal of gender equality. Spouses are free to organize family labor as they see fit (though most spouses--even avowedly egalitarian ones--continue to divide their labor along traditional lines when babies arrive). More importantly, for marriages organized around this logic, gift-giving goes both ways. Husbands see their wives' contributions as gifts and vice versa, and they both feel deeply dependent upon one another. Guess what mutual dependence and gratitude do to marital quality and stability?

Of course, as I argue in my new book -- Soft Patriarchs, New Men (Chicago) -- gifts are generally perceived as such when they have elements of excess (doing more than is expected or minimally required), surprise (doing something in a way your spouse did not necessarily expect), and specialization (offering and receiving distinct gifts to one another). Much of what goes on in any marriage falls outside the logic of gift exchange. Tom is right to argue that each spouse has basic responsibilities, responsibilities that must be fulfilled for basic marital/family functioning. But couples who meet these responsibilities and then go the extra mile to offer their spouses big and small gifts--a cup of coffee in the morning, a heartfelt thanks for a day spent caring for a sick child, or working two jobs to feed and house a family--are the couples most likely to experience marriage as meaningful, important, and fulfilling.

On the other hand, as work by sociologists Julie Brines, Kara Joyner, and Steven Nock suggests, married and especially cohabiting couples who seek to retain their independence and to divide all responsibilities 50-50 are much more likely to experience low relationship quality and to break up. Keeping a running tab on your partner's contributions doesn't exactly make the heart grow fonder. And depending upon your partner for nothing but emotional sustenance does not necessarily bind you together when the going gets tough.

Unfortunately, most contemporary theorizing about family has been so focused on issues of equality, self-interested exchange, and power that it has been unable to see how dependency, specialization, and commitment can be linked to this logic of gift-giving in ways that enrich marriage. Fortunately, scholars like Nock, Stacy Rogers, Paul Amato, and others are beginning to appreciate the value of dependence and gift-giving in marriage. They also argue that dependence need not be linked to marriages in traditionally gendered ways, though I think the jury is still out on that score. Bottom-line: Mutual dependency and gift-giving make good, strong marriages.

...And the news, [Human Rights Campaign's president Cheryl Jacques] noted, was not uniformly bad. More than half of the 44 state legislatures debating gay rights issues introduced legislation favorable to the GLBT community within the first two months of 2004 -- including the New Jersey Domestic Partnership bill, which passed and will go into effect in July 2004.

Additionally, Jacques noted, Maine and Maryland have active bills in the legislature that would provide vital rights to unmarried partners.

Thirteen states have introduced bills to protect gay and lesbian citizens from job discrimination. ...

Unlike most writers on motherhood--conservatives and feminists--de Marneffe does not ignore or downplay fatherhood. In a passage sure to raise feminist hackles, she recognizes a man's willingness to shoulder the burden of breadwinning as a "gift" to his wife. But she also urges women to include men more fully in family life, to recognize and confront their resistance to sharing the power and pleasure of being the primary parent.

Divorce may never be good, but for many, it's getting better. Professionalized. Standardized. Equalized. As the rate of broken marriages remains dauntingly high, divorce has become big business, and couples, who once put their separation almost entirely in the hands of an attorney, now often turn to a team of advisers to ensure a fair deal.

Attorneys and mediators do their parts, and so do psychologists, particularly when children are involved. But the key component when any partnership breaks down is finances. And that's where divorce financial analysts enter the scene.

I have argued -- in my own gratingly abrasive fashion -- that homosexual couples cannot become parents without an explicit act of infidelity. Well, aside from adoption, of course. ...

Regardless of whether or not you beleive the "de-stigmatization" of illegitimacy was a good thing for society, it is quite another question of whether we should encourage it, and inflict it upon a generation of children...

Wave away the colored smoke of the Jackson family circus, Paris Hilton, and the antics of San Francisco, and you can see how Americans have been self-correcting from a decades-long experiment with "alternative values." Slowly, almost imperceptibly during the 1990s, the culture began a lumbering, Titanic turn away from the iceberg, a movement reinforced by the 1990s economic boom and the shock of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. During the last ten years, most of the miserable trends in crime, divorce, illegitimacy, drug use, and the like that we saw in the decades after 1965 either turned around or stalled. Today Americans are consciously, deliberately embracing ideas about sex, marriage, children, and the American dream that are coalescing into a viable -- though admittedly much altered -- sort of bourgeois normality. What is emerging is a vital, optimistic, family-centered, entrepreneurial, and yes, morally thoughtful, citizenry.

...Mr. Rosenberg...states, "First, marriage make this legal responsibility automatic and immediate for children born into the marriage." [Catelli argues:] Basic biology shows that children are not, in fact, born into any homosexual marriages. A person in such a union could use artificial reproductive techniques to conceive a child and, unlike someone married to a heterosexual, would have to use donor gametes, or could adopt.

The Generation Ex Scholarship Essay Contest is open to high school seniors and registered college students whose parents are divorced. First, read Generation Ex by Jen Abbas. Then, in no more than 1,000 words, describe your experience as related to one of the effects outlined in Generation Ex.

One of Hollywood's most beautiful couples is calling it quits. A rep for John Stamos and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos confirms to us that they're separating after five years of marriage.
"It's very amicable," says spokesman Lewis Kay. "There's no third party. There's no real reason except they've decided to go in separate directions."

Well I ain't gonna marry, no I ain't gonna settle down
Lord, I ain't gonna marry and I ain't gonna settle down
I'm gonna be a rounder till the police shoot me down

"A good marriage is when you become better when you're with the other person, not because they do good things for you but because you truly rejoice in the other person's flourishing," she says.

And: "The ideal of marriage is ever more the one place in a society, like ours, where you can fulfill the highest virtues of which we are capable: sacrifice, understanding, commitment."

And: "It would be the kind of social institution that not only is good, in a practical sense, for people -- stabilize their lives, help them be productive, help them be law-abiding citizens, help them raise children -- but would develop the moral qualities, and even the personal qualities, we value most in human beings."
...
As society removed sanctions on divorce, making it easier for marriages to dissolve, people felt their marriages threatened. And yet, Swidler found, when it comes to their own spouses, many also felt a need to take their own (voluntary and very personal) commitments all the more seriously -- precisely because they were no longer supported by the social sanctions that once made divorce extremely punishing. Put another way, society may loosen the ties that bind; but we can, individually, tighten them for ourselves. That doesn't mean the divorce rate goes down, but marriage itself can become richer because it is more frail.
...
Swidler's personal view on the subject of gay marriage might be called radically traditionalist. Marriage surprises her, fascinates her, obsesses her because it is such a hard institution to sustain; yet people persist in getting married, and trying to make those marriages work. Marriage, in many ways, is an argument against society, or at least against that part of society which is cynical, exploitative, materialist and dismissive of human needs and aspirations. And none of the values fundamental to the ideals of marriage is the exclusive property of heterosexuals.

"If it really were the 'bedrock of society,' " she asks with a flash of the air quotes, "why wouldn't you want more people to be able to enact that bedrock? It seems that gay marriage ought to be welcomed with open arms as the thing that would consolidate that ideal and make it more widely available."

"I feel worse than I ever have in my entire life," Freiburg said. "When I'm not working, I'm packing. When I'm not packing, I'm talking to my lawyer. When I'm not talking to my lawyer, I'm crying. It feels like everything is falling apart around me. I just want to be alone."

They're the buzzwords in Washington these days: "marriage" and "family values." Of course, we're having a little disagreement over how to define them, what with President Bush's marriage initiative and the proposal for a constitutional amendment to define the institution pitted against the fight for same-sex marriages.