Civil unions are a failed experiment.

I didn't say that. Lynn Fontaine Newsome did.

Newsome is president of the New Jersey State Bar Association, and she was testifying in September about the effectiveness of the civil union law in New Jersey.

Needless to say, she doesn't think they are working well.

Nor does Ed Barocas, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, who said, "By creating a separate system of rights . . . the civil union law has failed to fulfill its promise of equality."

And in the end, neither does the New Jersey Civil Union Review Commission itself, which concluded last week that the idea of civil unions confuses the public and establishes a "second-class status" for the gays and lesbians who are bound together under them.

Civil unions are a failed experiment. We have tried them, and they have failed.

This is important, because state governments are often considered labs for the federal government. The idea is, try something out on a smaller scale in the various states. If it works, consider it on the federal level. If it doesn't work, try something else.

New Jersey is instructive because of the sheer number of problems the law has had in its year of existence. The State Supreme Court instructed that gays and lesbians must be treated equally, leaving it up to the legislature to determine how.

The legislature, in turn, granted gays and lesbians civil unions instead of marriage.

New Jersey has 2,329 couples in civil unions and 56 who have affirmed unions from other states; the New York Times reports that 568 couples have complained to Garden State Equality that they have not, in fact, been treated equally.

Those complaints have ranged from human resources computer systems having no category for "civil unions" to military members who are afraid to be "unioned" lest they be outing themselves under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," to companies directly violating the law because they didn't understand that unions granted the same state rights as marriage.

Happily, not only do we have a few failed civil union experiments (Vermont experts testified as well), but we have one very successful equal marriage experiment: Massachusetts.

The Massachusetts experts who testified said that their state had none of the issues of New Jersey.

Before the provocative results of these experiments, many of us felt that civil unions might be a fine idea. Like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, we thought - just give people their full rights and call it anything you want. Who cares if it's called marriage? A word is just a word. If labeling this packet of rights "civil unions" is what it takes to bring equality to gays and lesbians, then for heaven's sake, call that packet "civil unions."

Unfortunately, the experiment of New Jersey proves that the words matter very much.

Civil unions really are perceived as separate and unequal, both by the people who get "unioned" and by the lawyers, officials and civil servants who need to deal with the tangles civil unions create.

Additionally, though, New Jersey gives us an inefficiency argument that might help sway fiscal (if not social) conservatives. Why force thousands of businesses to change established forms, computer programs and policies to accommodate civil unions, when forms, programs and policies are already in place for marriage?

Wouldn't just calling gays and lesbians "married" be easier for everyone concerned?

In a way, it's great that New Jersey decided on civil unions first, because they took the time to review the policy. Civil unions in New Jersey gave people a chance to see what a world with heterosexual marriage and homosexual civil unions looks like - by watching New Jersey struggle with it, we've gotten a chance to kick the tires and look under the hood, to discover the certainty that this vehicle won't move anyone forward.

Now we have proof. Marriage is more than just a word that will make us "feel" equal - marriage is a word that will actually move us toward equal. Which means we can no longer be contented by presidential candidates who tell us that they will give us all of the rights without the word.

I mean, just imagine the tax payer dollars that would need to be paid to change thousands of federal forms to include "civil unions" when "marriage" is there already and is a word everyone already understands.

Civil unions are a failed experiment. There is no need to try it on a national level - it has already been tried and failed. We need federal marriage.

In 1968, Spence Silver, a 3M research scientist, accidentally created an adhesive with properties that were then novel. It was spherical; it had the thickness of a paper fiber; it did not dissolve; it did not melt; each individual sphere was very sticky. But when many spheres were brought together onto a tape backing, they didn't adhere very well.

For five years, Silver pitched his discovery to folks at 3M, but no one thought much of his creation. Finally, in 1973, an application was found: movable bulletin boards. But it was hardly an earth-shattering application.

Enter Art Fry, a new-product development researcher at 3M. He had learned about Silver's adhesive, and he thought to himself: If I could put some of that adhesive on the back of a piece of paper, I could create a more reliable bookmark for my church hymnal instead of the scraps of paper that keep falling out. He brought his idea to 3M. Some initially tried to kill the project; why compete with something that already exists and works so well already? But Fry and others persisted. They eventually went to Richmond, Virginia, to see if they could sell this notion of scrap paper with an adhesive edge. People were interested, and in 1980-a dozen years after Silver's discovery-3M launched the Post-it Note.

With all the hue and cry about civil union and its alleged inferiority, I ask myself: Do the people who accidentally created this new adhesive have any idea how powerful their invention is? I don't think they do.

So let me offer an application for their creation. Since October of 2001, I've been proposing a different way to move forward in our struggle toward marriage equality. The dominant voices from our community have demanded marriage for gays, and marriage has been the rallying cry ever since we came so close in Hawaii. But some of us want to see something that is at once more radical and more conservative: civil union for all.

It's clearly more radical, because no nation on earth has ever abandoned civil marriage and adopted an alternative. In a debate with an advocate of same-sex marriage, my proposal of civil union for all was dismissed as being so much wishful thinking. We will always have civil marriage, I was told. Really? This same advocate cautioned against filing marriage lawsuits too soon, for fear of suits that may be unwinnable in the courts of law and public opinion. All the while, she cited Hawaii- the suit most gay legal thinkers thought was premature-as the beginning of the current push for gay marriage.

Fifteen years ago, few of us fully envisioned the possibility of gay marriage. Dismissing civil union for all out of hand similarly represents a failure of imagination on the part of leaders in the gay community and elsewhere. After all, civil marriage cannot trace its lineage to the beginnings of ancient civilization. So who's to say that a nation might not one day adopt civil union for all?

And what better nation to do this than the United States? American exceptionalism is part of our birthright. If any nation is poised to reinvent legal relationships on a large scale, it is our great and innovative land. Liberty, justice, and civil union for all.

The other complaint I hear from the champions for same-sex marriage is: We didn't get civil union by asking for civil union. I was up here in Vermont when we got civil union, and to be honest, none of us were all that happy that we didn't get marriage. But at the same time, few of us conceived anything like civil union. It's awfully hard to ask for something that does not yet exist. Who would know to ask for a Post-it Note that hadn't yet been invented? Now that we have civil union for gay couples, it's not so unimaginable to ask for civil union for all couples, is it?

And this is what makes my proposal conservative. By saying that all couples, gay and straight, get a civil union, we solve a number of issues simultaneously. Take polygamy, for example. The defenders of traditional marriage wail that polygamy is right around the corner if society allows same-sex marriage. We all know, though, that marriage has long been associated with polygamy, and granting or denying same-sex marriage won't affect that history one whit. Civil union, in contrast, has no history. So let's define it: two people who are unrelated by blood and above a certain age are eligible for governmental recognition of their relationship and the benefits and obligations that come from that recognition. Poof! No polygamy.

And talk about the separation of church and state! Has anyone you know pontificated about the sanctity of civil union, about the need to protect traditional civil union? Of course not.

The champions of same-sex marriage think they can finesse the church-state issue by talking about civil marriage and how no religious body would be forced to conduct a gay wedding. These gay leaders have no idea how integral marriage is to the theology of many religious persons in the United States and elsewhere.

Time for some self-disclosure. I was formerly the chaplain of a conservative Christian college. I know the religious right fairly well. For many Christians, it's not just the sanctity of marriage colliding with strictures against homosexuality. Marriage is a mirror that reflects the relationship that Christ has with the Church. And if this metaphorical marriage consecrates two men or two women, who gets impregnated with the Spirit of God? The religious objection is far deeper than simply maintaining the status quo. It subconsciously (and sometimes consciously) reaffirms the distinction between the sexes and the traditional subservience of one gender to the other.

Who can forget how gender-bound our understanding of marriage is? Think of the sentences that are forever wed to the wedding ceremony. "I now pronounce you man and wife" (i.e., master and property). "You may kiss the bride" (more preferential treatment for the groom). For the life of me, I do not comprehend why gay people, of all people, want to buy into this history. Call one another "husband" and "wife" if you choose, but notice how straight couples are beginning to abandon this language in favor of something more egalitarian. There are no gendered expectations in civil union; it skirts the sex-specific baggage of religious marriage. In my book, that's an improvement.

Time for some more self-disclosure. I'm black. And am I the only one to notice that black clergy stayed pretty much out of this struggle until gays won the legal right to use the M-word? In Massachusetts, the Black Ministerial Alliance did not make their voice heard until after the advisory ruling that said that civil union would not do. That was when they stood in opposition, and not a moment before. Those of us who are black and gay often feel that we have to choose which community we will call home. As the battle for the M-word escalates and as more black clergy speak out against same-sex marriage, I know of one black gay man who is feeling torn between two communities he loves and treasures.

Call me deluded, but I happen to believe that most of the black clergy who are rallying against same-sex marriage would give civil union a pass. We don't know if they would, though, because we haven't asked them. Instead, we cluck our tongues at these unsympathetic black leaders: don't they recognize prejudice when they see it? But maybe we're so blinded by our dogged pursuit of the M-word that we don't see there are other ways of securing equality for all.

So here's my pitch. Civil union won't work if it's only for gays and straights can get married. That's called segregation, and segregation is illegal in America. And I certainly am not opposed to marriage for all. I just happen to prefer civil union for all.

A straight woman asked me: what about straight people who want to say they're married? I asked her: who's stopping them? Gay couples have been using the M-word for quite some time now; we've not waited for the government to give us permission. No one is thrown in jail for saying they're married or civilly united or whatever they choose. Indeed, the champions of same-sex marriage infantilize gay couples by making us feel we are incomplete until Big Brother calls us married. Hogwash. And to those who accuse me of harboring internalized homophobia, I say: look in the mirror, sweetheart. I don't need the M-word; why do you need it?

What I do need that I don't have now are the 1,138 benefits that the federal government gives to straight married couples. (You do realize that all those fabulous couples who got married in Massachusetts since May 17, 2004, don't have these benefits, don't you?) I need it to be portable, so that it is recognized from state to state. And the idea that only marriage will give us this is laughable. Besides, there's portability and there's portability. Will the married gay couple from Boston be recognized as married in Baghdad?

Last bit of self-disclosure. I am a practicing Episcopalian. And while I live in Vermont, I've followed closely the story of the Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Episcopal bishop of the neighboring diocese of New Hampshire. Robinson was once asked for his take on gay marriage. "If gay and lesbian people are full citizens of the country and state in which they live, they should be accorded the same rights as other couples. I don't think it matters whether you call it marriage or civil union as long as the responsibilities and the benefits are the same." Now, what would a man who had a heterosexual marriage, fathered two children, divorced, joined his life to that of another gay man well over a decade ago, conducted many, many marriages as an Episcopal priest, signed many, many marriage licenses as a deputy of the state, counseled couples prior to marriage, in marriage, and before divorce, and now oversees the Episcopal church in New Hampshire: I mean, what would he know about marriage?

All the same, Robinson may concede more than I want to concede. I would not be content with civil union for gays and civil marriage for straights. It's all one or the other for me. So like Monty Hall (remember him?), I say: Let's make a deal. Make it civil union for all, and we'll drop our insistence for marriage. And if the other side won't settle for civil union, then I guess I'll have to settle for marriage.

But I really would prefer civil union for all. After all, we gay people created it. It's a cultural makeover not even Queer Eye for the Straight Guy could engineer. It's simple and elegant at the same time. It takes religion out of the picture. It's new and improved. So let's make it ubiquitous as well.

Like that little piece of scrap paper with the weird adhesive on its edge. Who would have thought in 1980 that the Post-it Note would become so common? I didn't. And who imagines today that civil union for all could become universal? I do.

The late food critic Craig Claiborne used to tell a story of a woman who received a ham but didn't own a saw. Although she had never cooked a whole ham, she knew that her mother always prepared hams for cooking by sawing off the end, and she assumed it had to be done this way.

So the woman called her mother for instruction. The mother explained that she learned to cook from her mother, who always did it that way-she had no idea why. So the mother called the grandmother and asked: "Why did you always saw the ends off of hams before roasting them?"

"Because I never had a roasting pan large enough to hold a whole ham," came the surprised reply.

Such is the case with some of our moral beliefs. We hold them because our parents did, who held them because their parents did, and so on, even though no one is quite sure of the original rationale, and those who try to articulate it tend to fumble around a lot. It's certainly true of much opposition to homosexuality, which frequently boils down to "we just don't do things that way." Even those who claim to base their opposition in the bible often don't know what it says or why it says it.

Recently, I've become interested in a related but distinct problem: not people's forgetting WHY they object to homosexuality, but their forgetting THAT they do. More precisely, their forgetting that many people around them do. I was thinking of this recently as I sat waiting to lecture at a university in rural Illinois and anticipating The Shrug.

"The Shrug" is how I characterize the reaction many college students have to GLBT issues these days. It gets voiced in various ways: "I don't understand what the problem is." "Live and let live." "Do people really still have an issue with this?" So many of these kids knew openly gay students in their high schools, and they assume that homosexuality is now a non-issue.

If only they were right.

The same day as my talk, I received an e-mail from a student at my own university recounting an unpleasant (but not uncommon) experience in one of her psychology classes. The topic of homosexuality had come up, and a barrage of negative and ill-informed comments ensued: being gay is a mental illness; it's a result of child sexual abuse; it's a biological error. The professor did little to correct the students' misinformation, and even exacerbated the problem with degrading references to the gay "lifestyle." This, in an institution of higher learning in a major urban center.

Of course, that incident pales in comparison to what happened the day before, when fifteen-year old Lawrence King was fatally shot in a California classroom for being gay. Try telling King's friends that homosexuality has become a non-issue.

King's murder is an extreme example, and every decent person recognizes that it's a tragedy. Unfortunately, these same decent people often miss the subtler (but nevertheless powerful) tragedy of everyday homophobia. They ignore how the closet continues to undermine human dignity-even among educated, friendly, "enlightened" people. They underestimate homophobia's deep personal and social costs.

I don't wish to deny the tremendous progress we've made. We are, like the woman with the ham, asking the right questions and uncovering deep-rooted fallacies. The taboo is crumbling. But this success has a way of obscuring the fact that we're not there yet. Instead, we enjoy a sort of mezzanine-level acceptance-close enough to rub elbows with the highbrow folks in the front, but not so close as to avoid the riff-raff in the cheap seats.

The current presidential race provides a nice example. The Democrats are openly courting the gay vote, and even Republicans are warming up to civil unions and other more modest measures. This is progress! On the other hand, in a year where we've had a plausible African-American, female, and Mormon candidate for president, no one imagines that a gay person could get even close-not anytime soon. This is reality.

This dual position presents gay-rights advocates with a challenge. On the one hand, by treating homosexuality as a "non-issue," we help to make it so. We model the environment that we want, and we hope that the reality soon catches up to the rhetoric. On the other hand, by treating it as a non-issue, we gloss over the many ways in which we fall short. We unwittingly promote the myth that being gay is a cakewalk. It isn't-yet.

Jorge, my super, sat on my couch the other afternoon, having tea and pie. My building's heat was out again, but this time the problem was serious: the boiler had cracked. Jorge was waiting for a mechanic of some kind to come, and so I invited him in.

"You don't have children?" he asked. I knew he had five, all of whom still live in Ecuador.

I shook my head.

"You need children for a family," he said.

"I want children," I said.

He nodded and shrugged a shoulder. "Well, it's OK," he said. "In America, it's OK. You have children at 30, at 35, older. Plenty of time here to have children," he said.

We went on to other things, but part of me has fixated on that idea since. Plenty of time to have children? Can that be true?

I never thought I would have biological clock panic, but I am, a little. Partly it's because a couple months ago my age tipped toward 40 - I'm 36. But mostly it's because

1. I really do want children and always thought I'd have them and

2. as of this month, nearly every single one of my close female friends either has children, is pregnant, is trying to get pregnant, or is trying to adopt or thinking seriously about adopting. How did this happen?

Nineteen months ago, when I moved to New York, none of my Chicago friends had children, and none of my New York friends did, either. Most of my friends with kids were college friends who lived in other states, and whom I communicated with mostly through Christmas cards or reproductions of sonograms.

In Chicago, I was living a youthful life. I played flag football. I went to performance art. I hung out with friends. Children seemed very, very far in the future.

But then, toward the end of my time there, I dated a great girl who adored her many nieces and nephews. I fell in love with them and with her simultaneously; for the first time I understood the small joys a daily life with children could bring, and the deep closeness and respect and love you can feel for someone who partners with you in raising them.

She - they - were my only Chicago regret.

Since our time together ended, I've been thinking more and more about having kids myself. And then single women I was close to started having - or trying to have - children on their own, or adopting - or beginning the process.

Now, almost every conversation I have with a friend has babies or children in it. On the one hand, I now feel very comfortable with adoption, which means Jorge is right - I do have plenty of time to have children.

On the other hand, I feel very, very ready to have them. I've got a solid career and a lot of energy and happiness. Plus - and I hope this sounds the way I mean it to - I kinda want to raise kids during the same period my friends are raising them.

I already feel like my life is revolving a bit around children. Having them (or adopting them) myself while my friends are sharing experiences and babysitting and kid's clothes and strategies seems perfect.

Yet - I don't want to be a single mother. I'm sure I can do it. My own mother did it very well, and thousands of women raise wonderful children on their own. Also, single motherhood can always happen unexpectedly, for a variety of reasons - even if I were partnered, it could happen to me. But I would rather start raising kids within a loving partnership, for my own sanity.

At the moment, I feel very, very far from such a thing, and I've realized something lately - I actually want children more than I want to be partnered. And the idea of finding a partner to have a child is just as distasteful as having a child to save a partnership.

So what will I do?

For the moment, I'm just waiting. I'm listening to my friends as they explore their options. I study various fertility processes. I flip through adoption websites. I read up on adoption law, and what would happen if I had a child first and then found a partner who wanted to adopt my child later. I advocate for full marriage rights for gays and lesbians, so that the whole process will be easier. I go on dates with women who have children, because if it worked out, that would kill two birds.

I want to raise children - I'm not particular about whether I give birth to them or not. A dear friend tells me, "You can make that happen. That will happen. You have time."

Time, she says. I have time. And Jorge, too: "Plenty of time here to have children," he said. I try to relax in the fact of that. But as I watch the children of my friends get older so quickly, time seems race by.