IGF CultureWatch

All right, so the Republicans have had better years. But don't forget their secret weapon. Not an ABM, MIRV, or MX. An MPA: the Marriage Protection Amendment, precision-targeted on same-sex marriage and, through it, the Republican base.

The MPA would amend the U.S. Constitution to forbid gay couples to marry. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., says he will bring the amendment up during the week of June 5. It has zero chance of passing by the required 67-vote majority, as Frist knows. In 2004, the amendment garnered only 48 Senate votes, and the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group, figures it will get only about 52 votes this year.

So why bother? Consider Virginia, where in 2004 the Republican-controlled Legislature hit on the promising formula of passing both a whopping tax increase and a gratuitously vindictive anti-gay-marriage law. (The so-called Marriage Affirmation Act outlawed not only gay marriage and civil unions, but also private contracts between same-sex individuals seeking to replicate marital arrangements.) Lyndon Johnson once said, "Hell, give [a man] somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." The Virginia formula was in that vein: Knock the gays hard enough, and maybe conservatives wouldn't notice the tax hike.

In Virginia, the moral-values credit card seemed to have maxed out in 2005; Democrats held the governorship. Nationally, many conservative voters seem to have noticed that the same Republican politicians who are trotting out the marriage amendment have also spent up a storm, created the biggest new entitlement program since LBJ's Great Society, riddled the budget with earmarks, and approved unprecedented restraints on political activity.

Whatever its political merits, the MPA remains as unwise substantively as when it first came up in 2004. Since then, moreover, the case for its necessity has disintegrated.

The question posed by the marriage amendment is not just whether gay marriage is a good idea, but who should decide -- the states or the federal government? From its debut in 2001, the marriage amendment was misleadingly advertised as a restriction on activist courts. In truth, the amendment would strip the power to adopt same-sex marriage not only from judges but from all 50 states' legislators, governors, and electorates.

Defining and regulating marriage has been within states' purview since colonial times. (Utah was required to ban polygamy while it was still a federal territory. On the few occasions when the U.S. Supreme Court has intervened, it has curtailed states' powers to restrict marriage rights, not imposed a definition.)

Why should the federal government usurp the states' authority over marriage? Amendment supporters have insisted that gay marriage anywhere would soon spread everywhere. How, they demanded, could one state have a separate definition of marriage without creating chaos? Unless the federal government stepped in, they said, one or two states would impose same-sex marriage on all the rest.

Actually, states have defined marriage differently for most of the country's history. Until the 1960s, mixed-race marriages were recognized in some states but not others. That each state is entitled to regulate marriage in accord with its public policy views is established legal precedent; otherwise Maryland, say, could start marrying 10-year-olds and every other state would be obliged to go along -- an absurdity. Moreover, in 1996 Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act, which explicitly relieved the states of any obligation to recognize other states' same-sex marriages.

Federal-amendment proponents have claimed that the Supreme Court might strike down DOMA. That argument, already weak on the law (DOMA is almost certainly constitutional), is even weaker now that President Bush's two Supreme Court appointments, Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito, have solidified the Court's conservative majority. Would-be amenders are now reduced to claiming that the Constitution should be revised to pre-empt a hypothetical ruling by a future Supreme Court. On this prophylactic theory of constitutional jurisprudence, it is hard to imagine what amendment might not be in order.

So far, DOMA has stood up. The country's most liberal federal appeals court, the California-based 9th Circuit, saw off a challenge to DOMA just this month. Meanwhile, for more than two years Massachusetts has been marrying same-sex couples, including couples who travel and move outside the state. Spot the chaos? The wholesale legal confusion?

In fact, what is most remarkable about Massachusetts's gay-marriage experiment is how little legal confusion and inconvenience it has caused. As evidence that a state-by-state approach is unworkable, proponents of a federal amendment can point to a messy Virginia child-custody case and -- well, not much else.

The social ramifications of gay marriage will take time to unfurl; but if rampant legal confusion were going to be the result of Massachusetts' gay marriages, it should have begun to appear by now.

Indeed, few defenders of a state-by-state approach would have dared predict that the Massachusetts experiment would create as few legal tangles as it has. That the states can go their separate ways on gay marriage is no longer a prediction; it is a fact.

MPA supporters note that a court, and not the people, ordered gay marriage in Massachusetts. That is true but not relevant. Congress has no more business overriding state courts than it does overriding state legislatures. If a state fears that its courts will order gay marriage, it can change its constitution, which is exactly what 18 states have already done and what as many as nine more will do in November. More than half the states have statutorily banned gay marriage. A handful of states -- California, New Jersey, New York, and Washington are possibilities -- might wind up with judicially imposed gay marriage; the large majority, it is now clear, will not.

In 2004, MPA advocates liked to say that pre-empting state legislatures and electorates was of no practical consequence, because only judges would support so alien a notion as same-sex marriage. That argument expired last September, when the California Legislature passed the Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act, a bill legalizing same-sex marriage. Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill, but the question is no longer academic: How do MPA proponents, who claim to champion democratic decision-making, justify handcuffing the democratically elected Legislature of the largest state in the union?

At bottom, what many MPA proponents want to forestall is not judicially enacted gay marriage; it is gay marriage, period. They say that an institution as fundamental as marriage needs a uniform definition: a single moral template for the whole country.

That argument would seem more compelling if marriage were more important than human life. Many of the same conservatives who want the federal government, not the states, to settle gay marriage also want the states, not the federal government, to settle abortion. Sen. George Allen, R-Va., for example, supports the MPA, but he would like to see Roe v. Wade "reinterpreted" so that states would decide the fate of abortion. Although the 2004 Republican platform calls for a "human life amendment to the Constitution," you will look in vain for any such amendment on the Senate floor.

Two questions for anti-gay-marriage, anti-abortion Republicans: If states can be allowed to go their own way in defining human life, why not allow them to go their own way in defining marriage? Where constitutional amendments are concerned, why is preventing gay couples from marrying so much more urgent than preventing unborn children from being killed?

It is precisely because marriage is so important, and because it is the subject of such profound moral disagreement, that a one-size-fits-all federal solution is the wrong approach. California and Texas, Massachusetts and Oklahoma take very different views of same-sex marriage. By localizing the most intractable moral issues, federalism prevents national culture wars.

In 2006, that argument is no longer hypothetical. Federalism is working. As the public sees that states are coping competently and that no one state will decide for all the rest, the atmosphere of panic over gay marriage has mercifully subsided, providing the time and calm that the issue needs.

The national Republican leadership's bid to upset this emerging equilibrium is demagoguery, which is sad. Conservative politicians' betrayal of federalist principles to distract attention from their broken promises is cynicism, which is sadder. And none of this is surprising -- which is saddest of all.

[Author's note: My wording left some readers under the impression that the modern Mormon church may endorse or practice polygamy. It does not. I should have made clearer that I was referring to certain people who claim to be Mormons, not to the church or mainstream practice.]

***

"And now, polygamy," sighs Charles Krauthammer in a Washington Post column. It's true. As if they didn't already have enough on their minds, Americans are going to have to debate polygamy.

And not a moment too soon.

For generations, taboo kept polygamy out of sight and out of mind in America. But the taboo is crumbling. An HBO television series called "Big Love," which benignly portrays a one-husband, three-wife family in Utah, set off the latest round of polygamy talk. Even so, a federal lawsuit (now on appeal), the American Civil Liberties Union's stand for polygamy rights, and the rising voices of pro-polygamy groups such as TruthBearer.org (an evangelical Christian group) and Principle Voices (which Newsweek describes as "a Utah-based group run by wives from polygamous marriages") were already making the subject hard to duck.

So far, libertarians and lifestyle liberals approach polygamy as an individual-choice issue, while cultural conservatives use it as a bloody shirt to wave in the gay-marriage debate. The broad public opposes polygamy but is unsure why. What hardly anyone is doing is thinking about polygamy as social policy.

If the coming debate changes that, it will have done everyone a favor. For reasons that have everything to do with its own social dynamics and nothing to do with gay marriage, polygamy is a profoundly hazardous policy.

To understand why, begin with two crucial words. The first is "marriage." Group love (sometimes called polyamory) is already legal, and some people freely practice it. Polygamy asserts not a right to love several others but a right to marry them all. Because a marriage license is a state grant, polygamy is a matter of public policy, not just of personal preference.

The second crucial word is "polygyny." Unlike gay marriage, polygamy has been a common form of marriage since at least biblical times, and probably long before. In his 1994 book The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, Robert Wright notes that a "huge majority" of the human societies for which anthropologists have data have been polygamous. Virtually all of those have been polygynous: that is, one husband, multiple wives. Polyandry (one wife, many husbands) is vanishingly rare. The real-world practice of polygamy seems to flow from men's desire to marry all the women they can have children with.

Moreover, in America today the main constituents for polygamous marriage are Mormons and, as Newsweek reports, "a growing number of evangelical Christian and Muslim polygamists." These religious groups practice polygyny, not polyandry. Thus, in light of current American politics as well as copious anthropological experience, any responsible planner must assume that if polygamy were legalized, polygynous marriages would outnumber polyandrous ones-probably vastly.

Here is something else to consider: As far as I've been able to determine, no polygamous society has ever been a true liberal democracy, in anything like the modern sense. As societies move away from hierarchy and toward equal opportunity, they leave polygamy behind. They monogamize as they modernize. That may be a coincidence, but it seems more likely to be a logical outgrowth of the arithmetic of polygamy.

Other things being equal (and, to a good first approximation, they are), when one man marries two women, some other man marries no woman. When one man marries three women, two other men don't marry. When one man marries four women, three other men don't marry. Monogamy gives everyone a shot at marriage. Polygyny, by contrast, is a zero-sum game that skews the marriage market so that some men marry at the expense of others.

For the individuals affected, losing the opportunity to marry is a grave, even devastating, deprivation. (Just ask a gay American.) But the effects are still worse at the social level. Sexual imbalance in the marriage market has no good social consequences and many grim ones.

Two political scientists, Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer, ponder those consequences in their 2004 book Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population. Summarizing their findings in a Washington Post article, they write:

Scarcity of women leads to a situation in which men with advantages-money, skills, education-will marry, but men without such advantages-poor, unskilled, illiterate-will not. A permanent subclass of bare branches [unmarriageable men] from the lowest socioeconomic classes is created. In China and India, for example, by the year 2020 bare branches will make up 12 to 15 percent of the young adult male population.

The problem in China and India is sex-selective abortion (and sometimes infanticide), not polygamy; where the marriage market is concerned, however, the two are functional equivalents. In their book, Hudson and den Boer note that "bare branches are more likely than other males to turn to vice and violence." To get ahead, they "may turn to appropriation of resources, using force if necessary." Such men are ripe for recruitment by gangs, and in groups they "exhibit even more exaggerated risky and violent behavior." The result is "a significant increase in societal, and possibly intersocietal, violence."

Crime rates, according to the authors, tend to be higher in polygynous societies. Worse, "high-sex-ratio societies are governable only by authoritarian regimes capable of suppressing violence at home and exporting it abroad through colonization or war." In medieval Portugal, "the regime would send bare branches on foreign adventures of conquest and colonization." (An equivalent today may be jihad.) In 19th-century China, where as many as 25 percent of men were unable to marry, "these young men became natural recruits for bandit gangs and local militia," which nearly toppled the government. In what is now Taiwan, unattached males fomented regular revolts and became "entrepreneurs of violence."

Hudson and den Boer suggest that societies become inherently unstable when sex ratios reach something like 120 males to 100 females: in other words, when one-sixth of men are surplus goods on the marriage market. The United States as a whole would reach that ratio if, for example, 5 percent of men took two wives, 3 percent took three wives, and 2 percent took four wives-numbers that are quite imaginable, if polygamy were legal for a while. In particular communities-inner cities, for example-polygamy could take a toll much more quickly. Even a handful of "Solomons" (high-status men taking multiple wives) could create brigades of new recruits for street gangs and drug lords, the last thing those communities need.

Such problems are not merely theoretical. In northern Arizona, a polygamous Mormon sect has managed its surplus males by dumping them on the street-literally. The sect, reports The Arizona Republic, "has orphaned more than 400 teenagers ... in order to leave young women for marriage to the older men." The paper goes on to say that the boys "are dropped off in neighboring towns, facing hunger, homelessness, and homesickness, and most cripplingly, a belief in a future of suffering and darkness."

True, in modern America some polygynous marriages would probably be offset by group marriages or chain marriages involving multiple husbands, but there is no way to know how large such an offset might be. And remember: Every unbalanced polygynous marriage, other things being equal, leaves some man bereft of the opportunity to marry, which is no small cost to that man.

The social dynamics of zero-sum marriage are ugly. In a polygamous world, boys could no longer grow up taking marriage for granted. Many would instead see marriage as a trophy in a sometimes brutal competition for wives. Losers would understandably burn with resentment, and most young men, even those who eventually won, would fear losing. Although much has been said about polygamy's inegalitarian implications for women who share a husband, the greater victims of inequality would be men who never become husbands.

By this point it should be obvious that polygamy is, structurally and socially, the opposite of same-sex marriage, not its equivalent. Same-sex marriage stabilizes individuals, couples, communities, and society by extending marriage to many who now lack it. Polygamy destabilizes individuals, couples, communities, and society by withdrawing marriage from many who now have it.

As the public focuses on a subject it has not confronted for generations, the hazards of polygamy are likely to sink in. In time, debating polygamy will remind us why our ancestors were right to abolish it. The question is whether the debate will reach its stride soon enough to prevent polygamy from winning a lazy acquiescence that it in no way deserves.

First published October 15, 2005, in National Journal. Copyright © 2005, National Journal.

A cloudy afternoon on a recent Saturday in western Massachusetts. Rain sprinkles the Berkshire hills. Strolling in twos and threes along paths between broad lawns, 80 or so wedding guests make their way to a performance barn on the grounds of Jacob's Pillow. Rustling, cheerful, curious, they take their seats. Gray light filters through high windows and casts soft shadows among the rafters. The barn is not a sanctuary, but it feels like one today.

A violinist, one of the relatives, begins a Corelli prelude, and the wedding party enters. Both grooms wear tuxedos and boutonnieres. The minister, a young seminarian in the United Church of Christ, tall in his robes, begins. Under order of the state Supreme Court, same-sex marriage is legal in Massachusetts, and today the minister will marry Jamie Beckland and Michael Pope.

"Every relationship of love is holy, sacred, and worthy of public affirmation and celebration," he says, with a touch of emphasis, slight but sufficient, on the word every. "We pray that this couple will fulfill God's purpose for the whole of their lives." Emphasis again, this time on the word whole. Not everyone in the hall picks up the inflection, but the grooms do.

Jamie is 27, originally from Wisconsin, now a development officer at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Michael, also 27, works at a private research company. They plan to move to Massachusetts, the place where Jamie lived when they met and the only state where their marriage has legal force. Jamie is taller, blond, bespectacled, thin, with the bearing of the former dancer that he is. Michael is dark, heavyset, as reserved as Jamie can be bubbly, a product not of the liberal Upper Midwest but of conservative southwestern Virginia, a state notorious for its gratuitously anti-gay legislation.

For all the differences, Jamie and Michael and their families have this in common: divorce. The newlyweds' immediate families count eight divorces between them, four on each side. Michael's parents divorced when he was 6, Jamie's when he was 10. "I think there's a whole generation of kids from broken homes who only want to be married once," Michael says. This marriage of two men, so radical by some lights, aspires to reconsecrate the deepest of marital traditions.

A few weeks before the wedding, over coffee at Starbucks, I asked Jamie why he wanted to marry. For my generation of gay men (I am 45), legal marriage was unthinkable, and emerging into the gay world often meant entering a cultural ghetto and a sexual underworld. Jamie, who could just about be my son, replies with an answer that turns the world of the 1970s and 1980s upside down. Once he realized he was gay, he says, he simply expected to marry.

"Why does anybody get married?" he asks. "I wanted the stability, I wanted the companionship, I wanted to have a sex life that was accepted, I wanted to have kids. For me, it's not a choice. A marriage evens you out."

The couple met on May 18, 2002. The next day, they exchanged telephone numbers at church (both are Christian). Within weeks, they knew it was serious. In February of this year they took a trip to Massachusetts and went snow-shoeing on the grounds of Jacob's Pillow, a dance center where Jamie had worked when they met. There, on an outdoor stage, Jamie got down on one knee. "Which was hard, because we were in snowshoes."

He gave Michael a compass inscribed, "May we always find our way together," and launched into his carefully planned proposal, doing fine for about a minute before starting to cry. Michael began laughing, Jamie pulled himself together long enough to propose, and the two kissed, their faces stung by freezing tears.

Most weddings occasion unambiguous joy, but at this one, reactions run the gamut from delight to incredulity. Jamie's mother, Laura, freely confesses to having been a "monster mom" when Jamie first told her he was gay, seven years ago. He recalls her blaming a demon that might have possessed him one day while he was using a Ouija board. Today, however, she is fighting a losing battle with her false eyelashes as the tears flow, and the tears are happy ones. "It's amazingly wonderful and appropriate," she says of the marriage, "and it breaks my heart"-not that Jamie is gay or is marrying a man, but that he is making this final transition out of childhood.

Laura's parents, Lee and Ludene, both in their early 70s, have shown up at their grandson's wedding on the advice of their priest, who counseled support for their family even if they could not condone a same-sex marriage. They say they are open-minded Catholics, but today's event has pushed them to their limit. "I feel that it's wrong," Lee volunteers. "I don't think it's real. I kind of wish it hadn't happened." He loves his grandson, no doubt about it. But "this is hard for me, to see it happen." Ludene, who believes that marriage is for procreation, struggles to find a more conciliatory note. "We're living in a different age," she says.

Jamie's two younger brothers are enthusiastic about the marriage. It never occurs to them to regard a same-sex marriage as anything but real. His father, Kim, has been supportive all along. But his paternal grandparents, Jim and Carol, are guarded as they sit on a bench awaiting the ceremony's start. "We love Jamie, and I'm not going to drive a wedge in the family," Jim says. Carol mentions that both are Christians who are close to the Bible. "This will be interesting," she says. "I'm not the judge."

Opponents of gay marriage have argued that same-sex couples, especially men, will undermine marriage by regarding it merely as a path to legal benefits, rather than as a moral and spiritual commitment. Gay couples may get married, goes the criticism, but will not act married. To judge by Jamie and Michael, there is little cause for worry on that score.

For their part, gay couples have had reason to worry that their marriages, however valid in the law's eyes, might be regarded as less than authentic in the eyes of family, friends, religious institutions, employers. After all, a marriage is a marriage not just because the law certifies it but because the community accepts and underwrites it.

Jamie's and Michael's relatives will face a question that never comes up after a straight wedding: whether to inform their friends, neighbors, and colleagues that their son or grandson or brother or nephew is married to a man. Among the parents' and grandparents' generations, most people said they would share this information selectively, or they would play it by ear, or they just didn't know what they would do. The marriage is no secret, but neither does it bask in the social sunlight that straight spouses take for granted.

Yet marriage has its own dynamic, one that deepens bonds between spouses and forges links to kin and community. From time immemorial, parents have expressed ambivalence, even dismay, over their children's choice of spouse, yet have been won over, if not to the choice, then to the marriage and the stability it provides. Michael's mother, Kathy, is from the town of Buena Vista, Va. She was raised in a strict Brethren Church but now considers herself "spiritual." She has been married and divorced twice. "This is truly not what I expected to see in his marriage," she says of Michael, her only son. But she adds: "I hope this is going to be a stabilizing factor in his life, because he's been at loose ends for a long time."

Marriage creates kin, a process in evidence today. Laura, Jamie's onetime "monster mom," toasts the couple with the words, "I'm so happy to have a fourth son." Jamie's father says, "I've seen these two together enough to know that this is the kind of relationship that marriage is about." Times may change, and marriage may change, but parents are ever parents.

It is almost 5 p.m. The minister has given his blessing, invoking Solomon's song that many waters cannot quench love. "Remember this," he says, "remember this, remember this. Amen."

Then: "Before God and all present, do you, Michael, enter into this marriage with an open mind and heart and promise to love Jamie as long as you both shall live?" Michael firmly answers yes, and then Jamie, less steadily, gives the same answer, wiping away tears as he says, "Most importantly, I will work every day at loving you better." The minister calls for the rings, and laughter relieves sniffles as Jamie, flustered, offers his right hand.

That mistake corrected, the minister makes a pronouncement that I never thought I would live to hear. "By the authority vested in me by the state of Massachusetts, I declare that you, Jamie and Michael, are joined in the covenant of marriage, with the blessing of Christ's church. You may kiss."

They do. It is done.

First published May 30, 2005, in The New Republic.

In 2003, when a bare majority of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ordered the state to recognize gay marriages, the three dissenting judges based their opposition largely on children. "It is difficult to imagine a State purpose more important and legitimate than ensuring, promoting, and supporting an optimal social structure within which to bear and raise children," they declared. "[A]t the very least, the marriage statute continues to serve this important State purpose."

Nonsense, retorted the four-judge majority: It is the ban on marriage that harms children, namely the children of the plaintiffs and of other same-sex parents. "It cannot be rational under our laws, and indeed it is not permitted, to penalize children by depriving them of State benefits because the State disapproves of their parents' sexual orientation," ruled the court.

A year ago, in May 2004, the state started marrying same-sex couples, and the country's experiment with legal same-sex marriage began.

Since then, lower courts in New York and California have ruled that same-sex marriage was required by the state's constitution (both decisions are on appeal), and cases are pending in New Jersey and Washington state. More than 40 other states, meanwhile, have preemptively banned same-sex marriage, often by amending their constitutions.

Through it all, both sides have claimed to speak for the interests of children. The Massachusetts argument has become the nation's argument.

Advocates who say that gay marriage is just a matter of civil rights are wrong. It certainly is a civil rights issue, just as it is a moral issue; but it is not only a civil rights or moral issue. It is also a family policy issue - the most important family policy issue now facing the country. Gay marriage is not a civil right worth having if it will wreck straight marriage or leave millions of children bereft. But it won't. In fact, gay marriage's denial, not its recognition, poses the greater risk to American kids.

The 2000 census counted about 160,000 same-sex-couple households with one or more children. Those children, of course, would be directly affected if their parents got married, and there seems to be little dispute that the effects would be positive. Marriage would, to begin with, give their families the additional legal security that marriage provides. The children would have, as Evan Wolfson notes in his book Why Marriage Matters, "automatic and undisputed access to the resources, benefits, and entitlements of both parents."

Marriage law is rich with provisions ensuring that if one spouse meets with death or disability, the other can carry on - for the good of the kids. Moreover, marriage itself makes couples better off. Marriages are more durable than co-habitations. Many gay couples who have wed in San Francisco and Massachusetts have attested that the act and fact of marriage has deepened and strengthened their bond - sometimes to no one's surprise more than their own.

Family stability is very important for children. On average, marriage also makes couples healthier, happier, and wealthier, which must also be good for their children.

In principle, another group of children would also be directly affected, but in a less clear-cut way: additional kids, as it were, who might be raised by same-sex parents as a result of the legalization of same-sex marriage. It seems plausible, after all, that same-sex marriage would reduce the legal and social obstacles to same-sex parenting, and so same-sex parenting might well become more common.

Is that good, bad, or neither? That depends on how good same-sex parenting is for children, and on what the children's real-world alternative would be. The dozens of studies of same-sex parenting to date have found no evidence that children raised by same-sex couples fare worse, on average, than other children.

Same-sex parents may not be a first choice, other things being equal. But other things are rarely equal. Most children come to same-sex couples not from loving opposite-sex homes but from single-parent homes, broken heterosexual marriages or relationships, foster care, foreign or domestic orphanages, or artificial insemination. If they were not with same-sex couples, most of these children either would be in more difficult circumstances or would never have been born at all. If same-sex marriage helps them find secure, two-parent homes, that seems a good thing.

Still, same-sex marriage may send powerful social signals about family structure. Which brings us to the really interesting and perplexing question: How would gay marriage affect the more than 99 percent of children who don't live in same-sex-couple households? To put the question another way: How might homosexual marriage affect heterosexual families?

In academe and among same-sex marriage proponents, the presumption has been that the effects would be insignificant or, on balance, neutral. Same-sex marriage, its advocates say, will not prove to be a big deal for anyone but gay couples. After all, same-sex couples make up only a small percentage of the population. Many Americans do not even know anyone who is openly gay. Thus, after the initial political jolt, straight couples would presumably mostly go on about their lives much as before.

But many people think same-sex marriage would have harmful, even calamitous, effects on children and families - or, as economists would call them, negative externalities: ill consequences befalling people who are not personally involved in the gay-marriage transaction. In Senate testimony last year, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney framed the claim this way:

[C]hanging the definition of marriage to include same-sex unions will lead to further far-reaching changes that also would influence the development of our children. For example, school textbooks and classroom instruction may be required to assert absolute societal indifference between traditional marriage and same-sex unions. It is inconceivable that promoting absolute indifference between heterosexual and homosexual unions would not significantly affect child development, family dynamics, and societal structures.

Why? The best version of the argument reasons that same-sex marriage would put opposite-sex and same-sex unions on equal legal footing. This might benefit gay couples and their kids, but it would also signal the law's indifference to family structure - that there is nothing special about families consisting of husband and wife (and thus, often, father and mother).

For the law to lend its prestige and muscle to the proposition that mother-father families are interchangeable with other arrangements would hasten the de-norming of the traditional family. It would, the argument goes, further erode the status of the core family structure, even as the United States faces a widespread problem with fatherlessness and single parenthood.

I think of this as the Gold Seal for Heterosexuals argument. It boils down to the claim that marriage sends powerful legal and cultural messages about social norms and that, by reserving the designation "married" for opposite-sex couples, society bestows a special seal of approval on heterosexual unions, signifying that they remain the ideal family structure.

Gay marriage would make it impossible for marriage law to prefer opposite-sex to same-sex couples. The result would be to weaken or even shatter man-woman-children as familial template. The language would no longer have a word specifically for a male-female union, and how can the culture preserve what is not even in its vocabulary?

Many gay-marriage advocates, and some courts (in Massachusetts and, most recently, in California), reject this argument out of hand as discriminatory. They are too hasty. Not all discrimination is irrational or bigoted. The Gold Seal argument does not justify opposition to civil unions and other nonmarital programs for gay couples - in fact, in its strongest and most humane form, it actively supports civil unions as a same-sex alternative that preserves marriage's special cultural status while meeting the needs of gay couples. This view may not be perfectly egalitarian, but neither is it homophobic. Indeed, it has real weight.

But what if the main cultural effect of same-sex marriage were not to signal indifference to family structure, but to signal a preference for marriage over non-marriage? Then the social externalities of gay marriage would be predominantly positive.

It is not true, as some same-sex marriage opponents have often said, that children need a mother and father. Children have a mother and father. That is how we get children. What children need is a married mother and father. The question is whether gay marriage would improve or damage their prospects.

Getting people to marry is hard. Just having sex is more fun. Just shacking up, as it was once called, is easier. Marriage is under threat, all right. The threat, however, comes not from gay couples who want to get married but from straight couples who either do not get married or do not stay married. A third of American children are born to unmarried parents. The divorce rate has doubled since 1960, and the marriage rate fell 40 percent from 1970 to 2000. Cohabitation rose 72 percent in the 1990s. Twenty-eight percent of young couples aged 18-29 are unmarried.

"The future of marriage may depend," as an analysis of that last figure by the Gallup Organization remarks, "on whether young people simply delay marriage or sidestep it altogether." Society generally and children especially have an interest in encouraging these couples to get and stay married.

One way to do that is to signal, legally and culturally, that marriage is not just one of many interchangeable "lifestyles," but the Gold Standard for committed relationships. For generations, both law and culture signaled that marriage is the ultimate commitment, uniquely binding and uniquely honored; that everyone could and should aspire to marry; and that marriage is especially important for couples with children.

Same-sex marriage may be the first opportunity the country has had in decades to climb back up the slippery slope and say, quite dramatically, that marriage - not co-habitation, not partnership, not civil union, but marriage - is society's first choice. An American gay couple in their eighties got married in Canada in 2003 after 58 years together. Asked why they bothered, one of them replied, "The maximum is getting married." That is a good pro-marriage signal to send.

If you take this view of the cultural message of same-sex marriage, then there may be significant benefits for children, gay and straight alike. Gay children, of course, benefit directly from knowing that their future holds the prospect of marriage, with all the blessings that go with it.

Straight children benefit when they look all around and see marriage as the norm. If a child sees that Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the neighbors to the left, are married, and that Mrs. and Mrs. Jones, the neighbors to the right, are married - that sends a positive and reassuring message to children about both the importance of marriage and the stability of their community. Every marriage signals the cultural primacy of marriage and adds to the social capital available to adults and children.

The converse is also true: the fewer the marriages, the weaker the institution. If marriage is not universally available, it cannot be universally expected. Which brings us to the potential negative externalities of not having same-sex marriage. If, say, the Constitution were amended to forbid same-sex marriage, three things would happen - none of them good for marriage.

First: Both law and custom would busy themselves setting up new nonmarital structures to accommodate same-sex couples. The innovations would range from full-blown Vermont-style civil unions (marriage in all but name) to halfway-house programs like California's domestic partner program to patchwork corporate "partner benefits." Many existing domestic partner programs, corporate and governmental, are already open to heterosexual couples. Insofar as that pattern continues, we will have set up a whole new structure of non-marriage for heterosexuals.

Even if partner programs could be restricted to gay couples, they would still signal culturally that marriage is just one of many choices on a menu of lifestyle options. Children would grow up learning that some people have marriages, some civil unions, some partnerships, and so on. It is hard to see how that could do marriage any good.

Blocking both same-sex marriage and alternatives like civil unions - as some states are now doing - is even worse, because it will ensure the legal and cultural recognition of co-habitation as the equivalent of marriage. Courts, and eventually politicians, will look at same-sex couples who have been together for ten or 20 years and say, "This couple looks and acts married. They talk the talk and walk the walk. We don't let them marry, but we also surely can't pretend they're just unrelated individuals in the eyes of the law."

On the cultural side, every happily unmarried gay couple will be a walking billboard for the joys of co-habitation. And, even in principle, there is no way to exclude heterosexual couples from co-habitation. Over time, the lines between co-habitation and partnership and marriage will become impossible to defend - or even to discern.

Second: By definition, banning same-sex marriage would ensure that all same-sex couples with children raise their kids out of wedlock. Obviously, that is no way to reconnect marriage with child-rearing. Just the opposite: Every parenting gay couple will be an advertisement for the expendability of marriage. After all, how important can marriage be for children if some children's parents are forbidden to marry?

Third, and not least: To most Americans over age 65 or so, same-sex marriage is a contradiction or an abomination; but among Americans under 30, many or most (depending on which poll you consult) see the ban on same-sex marriage as discrimination. For members of this younger generation, nondiscrimination is the polestar in the firmament of values. They do not want to be associated with what they perceive as anti-gay discrimination any more than their parents do with sexism or racism.

To brand marriage as the discriminatory lifestyle choice risks condemning it to cultural obsolescence. That may seem far-fetched now, but, only a few decades ago, it seemed far-fetched to say that men would shun clubs that exclude women. Indeed, San Francisco's decision last year to grant same-sex marriage licenses was an anti-discrimination protest. Ditto for the granting of licenses in New Paltz, New York. Benton County, Oregon, stopped issuing marriage licenses altogether in March 2004, saying it did not want to be associated with a discriminatory institution.

Here, then, is the problem with the Gold Seal for Heterosexuals argument: not that it is discriminatory, but that it rests on the wrong kind of discrimination. Marriage's health depends far less on society's preference for heterosexuality over homosexuality than on society's preference for marriage over non-marriage, and we must now choose between those two preferences. Because marriage is a unique commitment, society has a powerful stake in preferring it to alternative family arrangements; but discriminating in favor of marriage will not continue to seem fair if millions of American couples are forbidden to marry.

And so marital discrimination in favor of heterosexual couples will erode or even end society's ability to discriminate in favor of marriage itself. Textbooks will talk about "unions," and anniversaries will become celebrations of "partnerships." Same-sex marriage opponents who worry about losing our unique word for "male-female union" ought to worry at least as much about losing our unique word for "family."

First published December 27, 2004, in The Wall Street Journal.

President Reagan, ever the optimist, loved a story about a boy who yelps with delight at a pile of dung, digging into it eagerly with both hands. "With all this manure," says the boy, "there must be a pony in here somewhere!" Nearly two months after the election, gay Americans and supporters of same-sex marriage - count me among both groups - are digging hard, but still no pony.

When people ask how I feel about the election, I tell them that this must be what it's like to be worked over in a dark alley by a couple of loan sharks. Gay couples and their children (more than a fourth of households headed by same-sex couples have kids, according to the 2000 census) need the legal protections and the care-giving tools - not, mostly, "benefits" - that marriage uniquely provides. Gay individuals, coupled or not, need the prospect of marriage, with its sustaining promise of a destination for love and of a stable home in a welcoming community. In 13 states the dream of marriage has, for gay Americans, receded far over the horizon.

On Nov. 2, 11 out of 11 states passed constitutional referendums banning same-sex marriage. Another two such amendments had already passed earlier in the year. Many of the amendments also ban or impinge upon "civil unions" and domestic-partner benefits: programs that provide some of the perquisites of marriage for same-sex couples. As striking as the amendments' clean sweep were the lopsided margins by which they prevailed. The public was not just firm, it was vehement.

So now what? In the near term, the new state amendments will initiate a round of court tussles as gay organizations and couples bring suit against some or most of the new state amendments. Any couple can sue (two lesbian couples in Oklahoma already have), so anything could happen; but the organizations, if wise, will focus their challenges on the amendments that seem to ban civil unions or domestic-partner benefits. That's good politics, spotlighting the unnecessary and vindictive overbreadth of some state amendments. It is also the more winnable battle, since the public's vehemence on Nov. 2 will make judges wary of overturning bans on gay marriage per se. My guess is that some amendments will run into trouble on technicalities (as Louisiana's, passed in September, has already done), and a number will be narrowed inscope, but most if not all of the bans on same-sex marriage will stand.

How the election will affect the proposed U.S. constitutional ban on same-sex marriage - which failed to win the requisite two-thirds majority in either house of Congress earlier this year - is harder to read. The triumph of all 13 state amendments, plus the Republicans' net gain of four very conservative senators, will increase enthusiasm for a national amendment at the "grasstops" level (that is, among politicians, activists, and other conservative leaders). On the other hand, the passage of those same 13 amendments, plus the fact that all but seven states have now banned same-sex marriage statutorily or constitutionally or both, plus the prospect of President Bush's appointing the next several Supreme Court justices - all of that subtracts urgency from the issue, probably reducing enthusiasm for the amendment at the grass-roots level (that is, among voters, who are typically reluctant to tamper with the Constitution). I would bet more on the latter vector, but who knows?

The consensus has shifted rapidly, meanwhile, toward civil unions. The 2004 exit polls showed 35% of voters supporting them (and another 25% for same-sex marriage). Particularly after the Nov. 2 debacle, civil unions look to many gay-rights advocates like the more attainable goal. It is not lost on them that Vermont's civil-unions law and California's partnership program have proved surprisingly uncontroversial. For their part, social conservatives increasingly, if grudgingly, accept civil unions as deflecting what they regard as an attack on marriage. John Kerry endorsed civil unions, and in October Mr. Bush accepted them, saying, "I don't think we should deny people rights to a civil union, a legal arrangement, if that's what a state chooses to do."

This year may be remembered as the time when civil unions established themselves as the compromise of choice. For an indicator, watch whether there is an outcry if state courts narrow the scope of the new amendments to allow civil unions and other partner programs. My guess is that few people will fuss.

One reason is the long-term trajectory of public opinion. The fact that 60% of voters support some legal provision for same-sex unions represents a sea-change. Still more significant are the issue's demographics. Americans of middle age or older overwhelmingly oppose same-sex marriage, which they view as a contradiction, if not an abomination. Among people under 30, the situation is reversed; in a Los Angeles Times poll in March, fully three-fourths of under-30 respondents favored gay marriage or civil unions, with the larger group (44%) supporting marriage proper. Young Americans tend to view the ban on same-sex marriage as simple discrimination, and non-discrimination is their ethical pole star.

Not even a U.S. constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, I think, would hange their view. Indeed, a federal ban would lead many of these younger people to shun marriage as a discriminatory club that they'd prefer not to join. Cultural change, as George F. Will likes to remind conservatives, is autonomous. People who hope to settle this issue peremptorily, either with a constitutional ban or a Supreme Court mandate, are dreaming. The public's realization that gay people cannot reasonably choose straight unions has shattered the cultural consensus on marriage, and building a new consensus, whether around gay marriage or civil unions or something else, will require years of political skirmishing and individual soul-searching. As Robert Frost said, the only way out is through.

The public is right to want to avert another abortion-style culture war, right to want to move deliberately (in all senses of the word), and right to resist being hustled toward an all-or-nothing national policy. The best chance of averting a culture war is to localize the issue by leaving it to the states, letting them go their own way at their own speed. Between the court-ordered legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts, the elation and outrage over San Francisco's gay weddings, and the crushing repudiation of same-sex matrimony on Nov. 2, Americans have been whiplashed in 2004. What the country needs is time to sit and think.

Mercifully, we may now get some time. Republicans' continued control of Supreme Court nominations makes it nearly unimaginable - and it was always unlikely - that the court will overrule the states on gay marriage. The Supreme Court recently sidestepped an opportunity to intervene in Massachusetts' gay marriages, and the election returns will give lower federal courts second thoughts about butting in. The enactment of those 13 state amendments demonstrates that popular sovereignty is alive and well in the states. I am dismayed by the amendments' passage, but I can't complain about the process. Nov. 2 showed that our federalist system is working exactly as it should, and it made the case for federal intervention weaker than ever.

First published August 15, 2004, in The New York Times.

What happened to Governor McGreevey - that is, James E. McGreevey, the Democratic governor of New Jersey, who announced his resignation on Aug. 12 because he was secretly gay and had "shamefully" conducted an extramarital affair - was strange, to say the least. Pundits wondered whether there would be broader ramifications for gay civil rights, same-sex marriage or American politics. I doubt it. A rich and seemingly unique concatenation of homosexuality, adultery, suspicions of political featherbedding, and rumors of extortion and sexual harassment made the McGreevey scandal look like an aberration.

What happened to Mr. McGreevey - the man, not the governor - was not strange at all. It was familiar to almost every gay American of Mr. McGreevey's generation. Marriage, not homosexuality, lies at the heart of it.

Mr. McGreevey is 47. I am 44. We have in common being among the early members of the post-Stonewall generation. We came of age in the 1970's, when overt expressions of anti-gay animus were becoming unacceptable in polite company. The worst of official repression was past. Vice-squad raids and scandalous arrests and federal witch hunts were not central fears in our lives. There was still plenty of unofficial discrimination and ugly and ignorant rhetoric, and we all feared the low-grade terrorism known as gay-bashing. But on the whole we were free, as no previous generation had been, to get on with our lives.

There was one thing, however, we knew we could never aspire to do, at least not as homosexuals. We could not marry.

By that I mean not just that gay couples could not marry. Self-acknowledged gay people - coupled or single, adult or adolescent, open or closeted - also could not hope to marry. The very concept of same-sex marriage had yet to surface in public debate. We grew up taking for granted that to be homosexual was to be alienated and isolated, not just for now but for life, from the culture of marriage and all the blessings it brings.

Social-science research has established beyond reasonable doubt that marriage, on average, makes people healthier, happier and financially better off. More than that, however, the prospect of marriage shapes our lives from the first crush, the first date, the first kiss. Even for people who do not eventually choose to marry, the prospect of marriage provides a destination for love and the expectation of a stable home in a welcoming community.

The gay-marriage debate is often conducted as if the whole issue were providing spousal health insurance and Social Security survivors' benefits for existing same-sex couples. All of that matters, but more important, and often overlooked, is the way in which alienation from marriage twists and damages gay souls. In my own case, I did not understand and acknowledge my homosexuality until well into adulthood, but I somehow understood even as a young boy that I would probably never marry. (Children understand marriage long before they understand sex or sexuality.) I coped by struggling for years to suppress every sexual and romantic urge. I convinced myself that I could never love anybody, until the strain of denial became too much to bear.

Others coped differently. Some threw themselves into rebellion against marriage and the bourgeois norms it seemed to represent. Some, to their credit, built firmly coupled gay lives without the social support and investment that marriage brings. And some, determined to lead "normal" lives (meaning, largely, married lives), married.

At what point Mr. McGreevey realized and acknowledged he was gay I don't know. I do know that many gay husbands begin by denying and end by deceiving. Perhaps that was so in his case.

Opponents of same-sex marriage sometimes insist that gays can marry. Marriage, they say, isn't all about sex. It can be about an abstinent, selfless love. Well, as Benjamin Franklin said, where there is marriage without love there will be love without marriage. I'm always startled when some of the same people who say that gays are too promiscuous and irresponsible to marry turn around and urge us into marriages that practically beg to end in adultery and recklessness.

For most human beings, the urge to find and marry one's other half is elemental. It is central to what most people regard as the good life. Gay people's lives are damaged when that aspiration is quashed, of course. Mr. McGreevey can probably attest to that. But so are the lives of spouses, of children. Mr. McGreevey can probably attest to that, too.

The country is still making up its mind about same-sex marriage. Massachusetts has it. Most states have pre-emptively banned it. On Aug. 12, the California Supreme Court invalidated about 4,000 same-sex marriages performed by the city of San Francisco, but gay-marriage advocates hope that this is a temporary setback. Through litigation now working its way through the system, California's highest court may yet overturn the state's gay-marriage ban.

The McGreevey debacle suggests why all Americans, gay and straight alike, have a stake in universalizing marriage. The greatest promise of same-sex marriage is not the tangible improvement it may bring to today's committed gay couples, but its potential to reinforce the message that marriage is the gold standard for human relationships: that adults and children and gays and straights and society and souls all flourish best when love, sex and marriage go together. Nothing will ever make the discovery of homosexual longings easy for a young person. But homosexuality need not mean growing up, as Jim McGreevey and I and many others did, torn between marriage and love.

First published on June 13, 2004, in The Washington Post.

On July 1 Virginia takes a big step backward, into the shadow of Jim Crow.

I do not write those words lightly or rhetorically. Although I'm an advocate of same-sex marriage, I have taken care not to throw around motive-impugning words such as bigotry, hate or homophobia. I have worked hard to avoid facile comparisons between the struggle for gay marriage and the struggle for civil rights for African Americans; the similarities are real, but so are the differences.

Above all, I have been careful to distinguish between animus against gay people and opposition to same-sex marriage. No doubt the two often conjoin. But millions of Americans bear no ill will toward their gay and lesbian fellow citizens, yet still draw back from changing the boundaries of society's most fundamental institution. The ban on gay marriage in 49 states (Massachusetts, of course, being the newly minted exception) may well be unfair and unwise, as I believe it to be. Yet people of good conscience can maintain that although all individuals are equal, all couples are not.

If I seem to be splitting hairs, that is because Virginia - where my partner and I make our home - is not splitting hairs. It has instead taken a baseball bat to civic equality, thanks to the so-called Marriage Affirmation Act.

The act - really an amendment to an earlier law - was passed in April, over Gov. Mark R. Warner's objections, and it takes effect July 1. It says, "A civil union, partnership contract or other arrangement between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges and obligations of marriage is prohibited." It goes on to add that any such union, contract or arrangement entered into in any other state, "and any contractual rights created thereby," are "void and unenforceable in Virginia."

When gay marriage came up, Virginia was among the first states to preemptively ban it, in 1997. Moreover, Virginia is the only state to forbid even private companies, unless self-insured, from extending health insurance benefits to unmarried couples. That provision affects cohabiting straights but works a far greater hardship on gay couples, who cannot marry.

Those steps, however, impinge on the power of third parties (corporations and the government) to recognize gay couples. In the Marriage Affirmation Act, Virginia appears to abridge gay individuals' right to enter into private contracts with each other. On its face, the law could interfere with wills, medical directives, powers of attorney, child custody and property arrangements, even perhaps joint bank accounts. If a gay Californian was hit by a bus in Arlington, her medical power of attorney might be worthless there. "Sorry," the hospital might have to say to her frantic partner, "your contract means nothing here. Now leave before we call security."

Some of the law's sponsors have denied intending such a draconian result, and courts may interpret the text's vague and peculiar language more narrowly. Nonetheless, the law as written is a threat to all Virginians and indeed to all Americans, gay and straight alike.

Before Thomas Jefferson substituted the timeless phrase "pursuit of happiness," the founding fathers held that mankind's unalienable entitlements were to life, liberty and property. By "property" they meant not just material possessions but what we call autonomy. "Every man has a property in his own person," John Locke said.

It is by entering into contracts that we bind ourselves to each other. Without the right of contract, participation in economic and social life is impossible; thus is that right enshrined in Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution. Slaves could not enter into contracts because they were the property of others rather than themselves; nor could children, who were wards of their parents. To be barred from contract, the founders understood, is to lose ownership of oneself.

To abridge the right of contract for same-sex partners, then, is to deny not just gay coupledom, in the law's eyes, but gay personhood. It disenfranchises gay people as individuals. It makes us nonpersons, subcitizens. By stripping us of our bonds to each other, it strips us even of ownership of ourselves.

Americans have a name for the use of law in this fashion, and that name is Jim Crow. It is not a name much called for anymore, but the Marriage Affirmation Act - could that name be any more inapt? - is the genuine article.

The law may be found unconstitutional or narrowed through interpretation, but judicial review could take years. Far better, in any case, would be for the legislature to salvage its good name by repudiating and repealing the law.

The legislature needs some help in recognizing its error. Dyana Mason of Equality Virginia, a gay advocacy group, notes that the new ban is beginning to attract some outside notice. A nascent movement to boycott Virginia has formed. A few newspapers, including the Washington Post, have editorialized against the law.

That is a start. But when Rhea County, Tenn., tried to ban gays from living there, it became a national laughingstock and hastily backed down.

Obstructing gay couples' private contracts is no less vindictive and abusive, and it deserves the same nationwide opprobrium - especially among conservatives who distinguish between denying marriage to gay couples and denying civil rights to gay individuals. If Virginia's attack on basic legal equality does not offend and embarrass conservatives, what anti-gay measure possibly could? And if this law is not snuffed out, what might be next?

First published on May 15, 2004, in National Journal.

In "The Pink Panther Strikes Again," when Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau blunderingly demolishes a grand piano, a horrified onlooker exclaims, "That's a priceless Steinway!" Replies Clouseau: "Not anymore."

More than a few Americans now find themselves wondering whether marriage is that piano. On May 17, the state of Massachusetts begins issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, under orders from the state's Supreme Court. For the first time, gay marriage enjoys clear statewide legality. Voters will get the last word in a statewide constitutional referendum, but the earliest that can happen is in 2006.

In the United States and the rest of Western civilization, marriage has always been between a man and a woman. As Clouseau said: Not anymore.

More than two dozen other states are rushing to write gay-marriage bans into their constitutions. Some of the bans are inspired by panic, or by dislike of homosexuality. But even many people of goodwill toward their gay and lesbian fellow citizens blanch at redefining society's most basic institution. Gay marriage, to them, seems risky.

They have a point. Gay marriage is risky. But not trying gay marriage is riskier.

To many of its supporters, gay marriage is a civil-rights issue: Marriage is a right, and every couple should have it. To many of its opponents, gay marriage is a moral issue: Homosexuality is wrong, and society should not condone it. Well, gay marriage is a civil-rights issue and a moral issue, but it is also, perhaps most importantly, a family policy issue. Right now, Americans are deciding the shape of marriage - the basic legal and social framework of family - for years to come. Risk, therefore, is just as relevant as rights or as right and wrong. What, then, is the balance of risks?

Begin with what we know for a fact: Something like 3 to 5 percent of the population - all gay and lesbian Americans - are locked out of marriage, which is life's most stabilizing and enriching institution. Even after accounting for differences between the married and unmarried populations, married people are healthier, happier, more prosperous, more secure; they even live longer. To shut millions of Americans off from those benefits is to inflict a very real harm.

Moreover, many same-sex couples are raising children: several hundred thousand, at least, and possibly more (there are no firm figures). Presumably, those children would be better off with married parents.

So same-sex marriage would benefit gay people and the children they are raising. That much meets with little dispute. But what about the rest of society? Here the debate turns to what economists call "externalities": harms or benefits to society at large that flow from private decisions.

Opponents of same-sex marriage insist it will bring grave, perhaps catastrophic, negative externalities that will hurt millions of American families. They have yet to explain, however, precisely how allowing same-sex couples to marry would damage anyone else's marriage or family. More plausible is a second common view, which is that same-sex marriage will have little or no impact on straight families. No-fault divorce changed the terms of marriage for heterosexual couples, which was plainly a big deal. The only thing that same-sex marriage does, by contrast, is to expand by a few percentage points the number of people who are eligible to marry their partner.

Less often noticed is a third possibility: positive externalities. Today, a third of all American children are born out of wedlock, cohabitation is soaring, and nearly half of marriages end in divorce. Marriage's problem is not that gay couples want to get married but that straight couples don't want to get married or don't manage to stay married. At long last, gay marriage provides an opportunity to climb back up the slippery slope by reaffirming marriage's status as a norm - not just as a right but as a rite, the gold standard for committed relationships. Gay marriage dramatically affirms that love, sex, and marriage go together - that if you really care, you marry. No exclusions, no excuses.

So gay marriage entails potential social benefits as well as potential risks, even apart from the unquestioned benefits for gay couples. And there is a further element, as important as it is overlooked. Banning gay marriage entails its own risks to marriage. And those are not small risks.

Because society has an interest in seeing same-sex couples settle down and look after one another, and because gay couples' friends and family care about their well-being, committed gay couples are winning increasing social support. One way or another, legal support will follow. Banning gay marriage guarantees that the country will busy itself creating gay-inclusive alternatives to marriage (which will be tempting to heterosexuals) and bestowing legal rights and social recognition on cohabitation (which is open to heterosexuals by definition). The result will be to diminish marriage's special status among a plethora of "lifestyle alternatives" - the last thing marriage needs.

Moreover, the gay exclusion risks marginalizing marriage by tainting it as discriminatory. A March Los Angeles Times poll finds that more than 80 percent of young people (ages 18 to 29) favor anti-discrimination protections for gay people. More than 70 percent believe gays should receive the same kinds of civil-rights protections that are afforded to racial minorities and women. More than half favor gay adoption, three-fourths believe that "a gay person can be a good role model for a child," and more than 70 percent can "accept two men or two women living together like a married couple." Seventy percent describe themselves as sympathetic to the gay community (versus 43 percent of people 65 and older). And three-fourths support gay marriage or civil unions - with the plurality favoring marriage.

In other words, America's young are much more hostile to discrimination than to gays or gay marriage. They will increasingly view straights-only marriage the way their parents have come to view men-only clubs: as marginal, anachronistic, even ridiculous. This is not conjecture; it is already beginning. San Francisco regarded its decision to marry gay couples as a protest against discrimination, and Benton County, Ore., recently stopped issuing marriage licenses altogether, on the grounds that it wanted no part of a discriminatory institution.

"We are genuinely running the risk of making marriage uncool," Frank Furstenberg, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist, said last month, in an Associated Press article about straight couples who are boycotting marriage to protest discrimination. Today, such couples are rare. But in ten years? Twenty?

So there are risks, large risks, on both sides of the equation. Banning same-sex marriage is no safe harbor. Given that fact, it is irresponsible not to try gay marriage, at least if protecting marriage is the goal. Banning same-sex marriage nationally, as President Bush and many conservatives would do, is hardly a conservative approach; it risks putting marriage on the road to cultural irrelevance. On the other hand, national enactment would be an irreversible leap into the unknown. There ought to be a way to try same-sex marriage without betting the whole country one way or the other. And there is. Try gay marriage in a state or two. Say, Massachusetts.

Massachusetts is one of only a handful of states where gay marriage can legally happen (most states have enacted pre-emptive bans). Its law prohibits marrying out-of-state gay couples, so the experiment will be local. Massachusetts is gay-friendly, allowing same-sex marriage a fair trial. And it gives the final say to the voters, not judges or politicians or bureaucrats. In short, Massachusetts is the perfect laboratory for an experiment that needs to happen.

Starting May 17, and probably for years to come, America will no longer have a uniform national definition of marriage. That is nobody's first choice. Conservatives wish the issue had never arisen and hope, unrealistically, that a constitutional amendment will put the cork back in the bottle. Many gay-marriage proponents wish, just as unrealistically, that the courts could settle the issue quickly by fiat.

But neither a constitutional amendment nor a Supreme Court order could resolve what is, at bottom, a fundamental schism in the social consensus: Older people see same-sex marriage as a contradiction, and younger people see opposite-sex-only marriage as discrimination. Reconciling marriage with homosexuality, equality, and society's needs will be messy, but, as Robert Frost said, the only way out is through. Massachusetts is as good a starting place as the country could have hoped for.

First published Summer 2004 in The Public Interest. Adapted from a talk given at the American Enterprise Institute, April 15, 2004.

The official topic of today's discussion is: "Should conservatives support same-sex marriage?" The unofficial subtitle, at least of my talk, is: "Everything I Know About Gay Marriage, I Learned at the American Enterprise Institute." Though I'm now at the Brookings Institution, my first think tank appointment was at AEI. It was here as a guest scholar that I learned so much from so many of the leading lights of conservatism, and I'd like to think that many of my arguments for gay marriage are, in fact, conservative arguments.

Too many people on the Right are panicking instead of thinking when it comes to same-sex marriage. The president of the United States, unfortunately, is someone I put in that category. But it seems to me that if you apply the kinds of principles that I first learned at AEI, and which folks like AEI's president Christopher DeMuth have done so much to advance over the last 20 years, I think you reach two conclusions, or at least I do. The first is that same-sex marriage is an idea that conservatives ought to support. The second is that even if you still reject gay marriage in principle, a national ban on same-sex marriage, which is what the president and many other conservatives are advocating nowadays, is a very unconservative approach.

Winning the Trifecta

My book Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America is largely about why same-sex marriage is what I call the "trifecta of modern American social policy ": a win, a win, and a win - good for gays, good for communities around them (that is to say, the straight world), and, above all, good for the institution of marriage as a whole. If gay marriage is enacted, gay couples will get the legal protections of marriage, but that's hardly the most of it. They also get a more profound love, a destination for love that enriches their lives whether they ultimately get married or not - the knowledge that romantic attachment properly points toward something larger than itself.

They also get the enormous personal benefits that marriage alone conveys: Married people are healthier, happier, more prosperous, and more secure. They suffer from less incidence of drug addiction and criminal behavior. They even live longer. Those are things to which gay citizens ought to have access, and in all of these ways, gay Americans will benefit from integration into the culture of marriage.

The straight world gets another irreplaceable benefit: the stability that comes from knitting people into families. Indeed, that is what marriage uniquely does: It creates family. I have a cousin right now who is 60 years old, married, and suffering from cancer. Her husband is caring for her throughout the difficult experience of chemotherapy, not just physically but emotionally. Without her husband, I doubt she would be alive. There is simply no substitute for the love and care of a spouse. Even though my cousin's marriage is nonprocreative, I do not think anyone can reasonably say that society has no stake in their union. Since her husband is caring for her, the rest of society does not have to.

Above all, the institution of marriage itself is a likely beneficiary of same-sex marriage. This is an opportunity to bolster the ethic and the culture of marriage at a time when society has been abandoning these things. The fundamental principle for all Americans, straight or gay, ought to be that sex, love, and marriage go together, automatically. If you're a straight family with kids, and if a gay couple lives next door, you should want to see them upholding the ideal of marriage. That's good for your kids. (It's also good for their kids, if they have any.) At a time when heterosexuals are increasingly treating marriage as purely optional, this is a rare opportunity to arrest our slide down the slippery slope away from marriage and to recommit ourselves to marriage.

The problem today is not gay couples wanting to get married. That is not the threat to marriage. The threat to marriage is straight couples not wanting to get married or straight couples not staying married. Same-sex marriage is potentially a dramatic statement that marriage as such - not cohabitation, not partnership, not anything else - is the gold standard and the model to which all Americans should aspire. Everybody should be expected to make marriage their aim. That doesn't mean they necessarily have to marry, but that it is the noble and right thing to do.

Every Individual Counts

Here is an important point conservatives should be able to understand and, in fact, do understand in many other contexts: We live in a world of great uncertainty and unintended consequences. We lack a lot of information. The wisest person or committee in the world cannot get everything right and will often make unintended mistakes. How do we make policy in such an uncertain and often surprising world? Modern conservatism has developed some important principles for how to do so, and I'll discuss three of them.

The first principle is that individuals count. Conservatives often remind us never to lose sight of the individual. That doesn't mean you consider only individual welfare, but you must consider it, and you must reject a crude utilitarianism that simply sees individuals as means to an end rather than as ends in themselves. Conservatives are generally the first to object to those collectivist policies that relegate individuals to the status of mere human bricks or timber. If you would not confiscate someone's income for the common good, for example, why confiscate their marriage? How many of you would give up your marriage to make someone else's family stronger? And if you're not married, how many of you would give up the opportunity to get married to make someone else's family stronger?

Maggie Gallagher, the president of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, has written as follows: "Will same-sex marriage strengthen or weaken marriage as a social institution? If the answer is that it will weaken marriage at all, we should not do it" (emphasis added). What's missing in this calculus are the enormous benefits that marriage can bring to 10 or 15 million homosexual Americans who are now locked out of the culture of marriage, which makes individuals happier, wealthier, and more secure in life. Being deprived of marriage, or even the prospect of marriage, is thus a severe hardship for gays.

Now, it is true that we must balance social costs against individual benefits. I don't deny that for a moment. That's why we have, for example, securities laws. People will do things that are good for themselves but bad for society. What I am arguing is that Gallagher's way of looking at the problem, which is all too common among conservatives on this one issue, cannot be the correct (or truly conservative) approach. It cannot be right to say that all of the good that is accomplished for 10 to 15 million gay people doesn't count against any harm incurred by society. That, it seems to me, is not recognizing the value of gay lives. It's sacrificing their rights and interests for a collective good.

It's the Outcome, Stupid

The second conservative principle I learned at AEI is respect for market forces. How many times have I heard conservatives criticize liberals for mistaking the intention for the deed? Conservatives rightly remind us that tighter regulation of campaign finance, gun ownership, or energy prices does not stop social change. Rather, it distorts the channels through which change runs, often causing adverse unintended consequences. Just saying that you want to make something scarcer, for example, doesn't make regulating or banning it the right answer.

Exactly the same thing applies to same-sex marriage, though here the forces at issue are social market forces - arrangements that people are making in their personal lives, in their social lives. These forces can be managed - and should be managed - by society, but they cannot simply be stopped. The fact is that same-sex unions, of one sort or another, are here for good. They're not simply going to disappear. Societal recognition of some kind will increasingly follow these committed relationships. Given these new social facts, American society has a strong interest in recognizing the nobility of the commitment these couples are making. And marriage is the best institution we have to accomplish that.

The ban on gay marriage favored by many conservatives won't stop societal recognition from flowing to these couples eventually. What it will do is shut marriage out of a new social market. It will effectively convey that this new market, this new demand for recognition, can have anything except marriage. And, of course, if that demand cannot be met by marriage, it will be met by something else.

Blocking Change Is Dangerous, Too

This leads me to the third principle I learned at the American Enterprise Institute, which is the importance of managing risk rationally. Suppose it is argued, as many on the Left do, that welfare reform or education and Medicare vouchers are terrible and dangerous policy ideas - so dangerous in fact that they should never, ever be tried, even on the smallest scale. The extreme opposition of liberals to such sensible reforms is akin to the "precautionary principle" favored by some environmentalists, which opposes any change that is not proven in advance to be safe. Well, the precautionary principle turns out not to be conservative at all. It is, in fact, radical, because it looks only at the risks of change and not at the risks of blocking change, which are often greater. We should keep this in mind when thinking about the pros and cons of same-sex marriage.

There is a significant downside potential of denying same-sex marriage, something the American conservative movement has not fully recognized. The first kind of risk - which is actually closer to a certainty than a mere risk - lies in creating and subsidizing alternatives to marriage: "civil unions," as they're called, or various forms of "domestic partnerships." Absent gay marriage, these various forms of nonmarriages will become legally and socially sanctioned in the years ahead. They will offer halfway houses between marriage and nonmarriage, which will, in many cases, depending on how they're designed, offer the benefits of marriage without the responsibilities, the rights without the obligations.

Politics in a democratic society being what it is, many of these nonmarriage arrangements will be open to heterosexuals over time if not immediately. In fact, the majority of domestic partnership programs already in place in this country - under the auspices of corporations and state and local governments - are already open to opposite-sex couples. Often, opposite-sex couples are the majority to take advantage of them. And even if these alternatives to marriage were not eventually made available to heterosexuals, their very existence would validate the impression that marriage is just one relationship life style among many others. Such alternative arrangements will inevitably erode the special status that marriage still enjoys.

So perhaps, as is often argued by some conservatives, the only choice is to reject even such halfway houses to marriage as civil unions - no gay marriage, no civil unions, no nothing. This would be even worse, because it would mean that the vessel into which gay commitment will flow will be cohabitation. Every gay couple will become a potential advertisement for the possibilities of life outside of marriage. Over time, judges, legislators and society as a whole will accommodate gay couples by conferring marriage rights and social recognition upon cohabitants. And, of course, there is nothing that can prevent straight people from cohabiting as well.

A second important downside risk to be considered is that nondiscrimination, for better or worse, has become a sacred principle in American public life. It has become part of the nation's civic religion. By banning gay marriage outright - saying not here, not anywhere, not ever - marriage as such may come to be viewed in the public's mind as a discriminatory institution. It once seemed farfetched to say that men would shun elite clubs that discriminated against women, and thus a lot of clubs continued to discriminate against women. Well, of course, nowadays, men-only clubs are rare. They're increasingly marginal in society, and most men wouldn't join one. This is the last thing we would want to see happen to the institution of marriage. Just recently, Benton County, Oregon, stopped issuing marriage licenses, on the grounds that it wanted no part of a discriminatory institution. Over time, as the national consensus moves toward equality for homosexuals, there is a serious risk that marriage will be stigmatized and marginalized if it is legally demarcated as a discriminatory institution.

A Truly Conservative Solution

So what's a truly conservative approach to the social challenge of gay marriage? We're fortunate that we live in a country that is ideally suited to tackle this kind of problem. In the United States, with its federalist system, marriage traditionally falls within the boundaries of state law. It seems clear that the conservative solution to this issue is to try same-sex marriage in a state or a couple of states that are ready to have it. Let's find out how it works, and see what happens. It is unlikely that the world will end. In fact, the experiment may prove successful and spread for that reason. By taking the federalist approach, the public will get a real sense of what it is doing - without, importantly, imposing a single policy on the whole country.

Same-sex marriage should be viewed as an opportunity to shore up the institution of marriage. Flatly banning it cannot possibly be the conservative answer. Thus it is regrettable that, on the issue of gay marriage, some of my conservative friends sound very much like the National Education Association on the subject of school vouchers - unwilling to concede any need for any change, averting their eyes from the plight of the unserved and the misserved, asserting that reform can entail only hazards and no benefits, insisting that even one experiment anywhere ever is one too many, and unwilling to offer alternatives other than wishing the whole issue would go away. My challenge to conservatives today is to stop making gay marriage the exception to their conservative principles.

First published on March 7, 2004, in The New York Times Magazine.

In endorsing the passage of a constitutional amendment that would restrict marriage to the union of men and women, President Bush established himself as the country's most prominent advocate of same-sex marriage.

To be more precise, he established himself as the most prominent advocate of the best arguments for gay marriage, even as he roundly rejected gay marriage itself. Consider the words that he spoke in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Feb. 24.

"The union of a man and woman is the most enduring human institution ... honored and encouraged in all cultures and by every religious faith." Correct. Marriage is indeed the bedrock of civilization. But why would the establishment of gay matrimony erode it? Would millions of straight spouses flock to divorce court if they knew that gay couples, too, could wed? Today, a third of all American children are born out of wedlock, with no help from homosexual weddings; would the example gays set by marrying make those children's parents less likely to tie the knot?

Children, parents, childless adults and marriage itself are all better off when society sends a clear and unequivocal message that sex, love and marriage go together. Same-sex marriage affirms that message. It says that whether you're gay or straight - or rich or poor, or religious or secular, or what have you - marriage is the ultimate commitment for all: the destination to which loving relationships naturally aspire.

"Ages of experience have taught humanity that the commitment of a husband and wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society." Correct again. And the commitment of gay partners to love and serve each other promotes precisely those same goals.

A solitary individual lives on the frontier of vulnerability. Marriage creates kin, someone whose first "job" is to look after you. Gay people, like straight people, become ill or exhausted or despairing and need the comfort and support that marriage uniquely provides. Marriage can strengthen and stabilize their relationships and thereby strengthen the communities of which they are a part. Just as the president says, society benefits when people, including gay people, are durably committed to love and serve one another.

And children? According to the 2000 census, 27 percent of households headed by same-sex couples contain children. How could any pro-family conservative claim that those children are better off with unmarried parents?

"Marriage cannot be severed from its cultural, religious and natural roots without weakening the good influence of society." By "roots," Bush had in mind marriage's traditional definition as male-female. But at least as deep as marriage's roots in gender are its roots in commitment. Marriage takes its ultimate meaning not from whom it excludes but from what it obliges: "To have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part." For gay people to join other Americans in embracing that vow only strengthens "the good influence of society."

Yes, letting same-sex couples wed would in some sense redefine marriage. Until a decade ago, no Western society had ever embraced or, for the most part, even imagined same-sex marriage. But until recently, no Western society had ever understood, to the extent most Americans do today, that a small and more or less constant share of the population is homosexual by nature. Homosexuals aren't just misbehaving heterosexuals. Fooling straight people into marrying them is not an option. Barring them from the blessings of marriage is inhumane and unfair, even if that is a truth our grandparents did not understand.

So today's real choice is not whether to redefine marriage but how to do so: as a club only heterosexuals can join or as the noblest promise two people can make. To define marriage as discrimination would defend its boundaries by undermining its foundation.

"Government, by recognizing and protecting marriage, serves the interests of all." Correct yet again. A marriage license uniquely bestows many hundreds of entitlements and entanglements that publicly affirm the spouses' mutual responsibility and that provide them with the tools they need to care for each other. Far from being just a piece of paper, a marriage license both ratifies and fortifies a couple's bonds. And marriage, like voting and other core civic responsibilities, is strongest when universal. It best serves the interests of all when all are eligible and welcome to serve.

"Our government should respect every person and protect the institution of marriage. There is no contradiction between these responsibilities." Indeed, there is not. Allowing and expecting marriage for all Americans would show respect for the welfare and equality of all Americans, and it would protect the institution of marriage from the proliferation of alternatives (civil unions, domestic-partner benefits and socially approved cohabitation) that a continued ban on same-sex marriage will inevitably bring - is, in fact, bringing already.

The logic of Bush's speech points clearly toward marriage for all. It is this logic, the logic of marriage itself, that Bush and other proponents of a constitutional ban defy in their determination to exclude homosexuals.

"In all that lies ahead, let us match strong convictions with kindness and good will and decency." Amen. And let us have the courage to follow where our convictions and our compassion logically lead.