I'm all for the Federal Marriage Amendment, but we shouldn't pretend that even it is likely to prevent some pretty sobering changes in our culture down the road a bit. For the problem isn't so much that we have the wrong views on homosexual marriage; the problem is that, as a society, we have the wrong views about where we get our views. So, only a tiny minority in our society today really has any well-defined, specific idea why they're against homosexual marriage. And when the shallow thoughts and trivial convictions of the other folks pass away -- even many who say they oppose homosexual marriage -- they'll give way all too easily to a totally alien mindset.

That alien mindset is what we should really be worried about. And it is much closer than we tend to think.

This mindset is a point of view that does not simply seek permission to engage in certain kinds of behavior. It seeks instead to ensure that everyone else in society also engages in that same behavior, or at least gives it tacit approval.

Under the influence of Christianity and Western legal thought, expressed in church canon law and English common law, marriage for much of Western history was conceived in a covenantal model....In practice this meant that your marriage was not just about you. It was about a complex network of relationships that had an impact on the community. Society supported marriage, marriage supported society. Moreover, as anyone who has been married beyond the honeymoon stage knows, sometimes the institution carries you. You don't always feel totally "in love" with your spouse. There are some days and seasons you would take a flier, but the institution sustains you, and by and large we are better for it. If you think feeling totally in love is what marriage is about, yours will be a short-term venture.

And, in fact, that is increasingly what marriage has become in modern, Western society. The covenantal understanding of marriage has been replaced by the choice model and understanding of marriage. In the choice model marriage is not an institution with rights and responsibilities, it is simply a contract between autonomous individuals for the purpose of maximizing personal fulfillment, sexual and otherwise.

If it's merely a private arrangement between two people for their personal fulfillment, then there is really no reason for either church or state to be involved or even to call it marriage. Call it "Hollywood" or "fun and games" or "serial monogamy." But if we're going to call it "marriage," let it count for something, something big and bold, something like promises to keep. In my experience, many people who are gay or lesbian understand and live out the deeper meaning of such promises.

America went to the movies this month. Some came away with an Aristotelian catharsis, and others came away with true repentance. Some saw Jesus, while others, like the dwarfs in C.S. Lewis's The Last Battle, swore there was nothing there at all. And the responses to the movie were uncannily the movie playing itself out, with the divisions between men depicted in the film mirrored in the divisions between men in theaters and the press. For Jesus will always do that: "Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division" (Luke 12:51).

It is really quite nervy to argue that a federal law ought to be overturned by the courts but decline to provide evidence to support the claim. The plaintiffs obviously know that the privacy claim is bogus. No names, addresses or any other identifying information will be attached to the medical records. It will simply state that Patient X was 20 years old, and was 23 weeks pregnant. Relevant aspects of her health profile will be included, like blood pressure, previous C-sections and other pieces of history. But unless the Department of Justice has at least those facts, it cannot possibly determine how to frame its response to this evidence.

It isn't really surprising that Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry are attempting to hide the facts. They've been doing so ever since the existence of the procedure became known. They first claimed that no such procedure existed. When that collapsed, they argued that the fetus was killed by the anesthesia administered to the mother. When anesthesiologists protested, they admitted that this wasn't true -- but that the procedure was so rarely performed it wasn't worth talking about. And when that lie was exposed, they urged that it was only done to save the life of the mother or in cases of severe fetal deformity. None of those statements was true.

Senator Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, has been toying with the idea of introducing an alternative to the Federal Marriage Amendment. Instead of banning same-sex marriage altogether, his amendment would leave that question, and questions about quasi-marital benefits for same-sex couples, to state legislatures. Until this point, the Hatch amendment has read, "Civil marriage shall be defined in each state by the legislature or the citizens thereof. Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to require that marriage or its benefits be extended to any union other than that of a man and a woman." If Hatch moves ahead with it, the words "and its benefits" will probably be added after "civil marriage" in the first sentence, to ensure that civil unions as well as same-sex marriage is a matter left to the state legislatures.

While there is certainly a great deal to be said about homosexual marriage, I have come to believe that this issue is merely an epiphenomenon, the visible manifestation of some deeper trend. To be precise, I think that what is under way here is a program to purge the very notion of sex [ie male and female] from all our laws. This is not just a campaign to permit men to marry men, and women women; it is a campaign for the abolition of sex. Nor is it the homosexualists who are in the vanguard here, but the transsexualists -- persons who wish to be not the sex Nature, in forming their bodies, intended them to be, but the other one.

Those trying to derail this bill, or at least gut it, understand what's going on here. And so do those proposing it. Every such proposal is one more flank attack on the central proposition underlying the legalization of abortion: that the unborn have no claim on life that the state need respect.

Protect the unborn victims of assault and murder, and who knows where it might end?

Every time abortion is challenged, even tangentially, consciences stir. Just as, in antebellum America, the constant agitation of the slavery question exposed the immorality of slavery itself.

The Peculiar Institution was threatened even when the abolitionists of the time were seeking only to limit it -- in the territories, in interstate commerce, in the nation's capital -- rather than outlaw it altogether.

Q. Do you support a constitutional amendment to prohibit gay marriage?

A. I certainly understand that something needs to be done to stop mayors and judges and others who are disregarding the law. But I think the procedure to correct these problems lies within the Constitution itself, which doesn't need to be amended.

You cannot correct every moral deficit created by the courts by constitutional amendment. If we make a constitutional amendment that says marriage is between a man and a woman, what stops a court from saying that means a man can marry his sister, thereby making incest legal? The problem is the courts.

Those who make a public pledge to abstain until marriage delay sex, have fewer sex partners and get married earlier, according to the data, gathered from adolescents ages 12 to 18 who were questioned again six years later. But the two groups' STD rates were statistically similar.

The problem, the study found, is that those virginity "pledgers" are much less likely to use condoms.

Aside from Planned Parenthood and NOW, it is endorsed by such mainstream "pro-choice" groups as National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The abortionist appreciation "holiday," according to the web site of the umbrella group that founded it, Refuse and Resist, entails such as activities as "local appreciation day events," and asking people to use their "imagination, creativity and dedication to help create a climate" where abortionists "can hold their heads high."

It stands to reason in my mind that it is not a matter of if, but a matter of how soon the haters act on their intentions. It is plainly obvious to me that the contempt for all things God centered "must needs be." Evil like mold and mildew needs a certain climate -- atmosphere if you will -- in order to exist. Nor does evil approve of limits or restraint. It is precisely for these reasons that all things of God must be reduced to secularisms or eliminated. Because it is then and only then that man will be able to act upon his most baneful desires.

It happened when God was removed from schools, it happened when God was removed from the sanctity of life. It will happen if we permit the continued attacks on our holy days. While the historical "Truth" of Christmas and Easter cannot be changed, it won't have to be if mankind ceases to remember it.

Dr Stephen Unwin has used a 200-year-old formula to calculate the probability of the existence of an omnipotent being. Bayes' Theory is usually used to work out the likelihood of events, such as nuclear power failure, by balancing the various factors that could affect a situation.

The Manchester University graduate, who now works as a risk assessor in Ohio, said the theory starts from the assumption that God has a 50/50 chance of existing, and then factors in the evidence both for and against the notion of a higher being.

If through civil unions (as endorsed by Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry) gay couples can obtain the benefits of marriage, what difference does the word marriage make?

Quite a bit, say a number of Christian leaders who support civil unions but oppose same-sex marriage. They see civil unions as a means of economic justice -- but not just for homosexuals. In fact, they would rather see such legislation avoid mention of sexuality altogether.

"It may well be that for the sake of public justice we need to recognize different kinds of households, but I would never start that by primary reference to so-called gay households." said Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, professor of psychology and philosophy at Eastern University. "[Civil unions] could include things like single people looking after aging parents. It could include, as in my own family, two bachelor brothers and a sister who ran a farm their whole life." Defined this way, she says, civil unions would actually preserve the uniqueness of marriage.

Andrew, I know, agrees with me that civil unions for heterosexuals would be catastrophic. These kinds of "marriage lite" arrangements exist in France, Canada, and other countries. They encourage young people to make a very bad choice: to enter into pseudo-marital relationships that lack the stability and security of real marriage. In Canada, the case I know best, the average non-marital cohabitation lasts only five years.

While these arrangements tend to be short, they last long enough to produce children -- children who almost certainly will grow up without a father, with all the risks that follow from that. So the damage done by civil unions is not confined to the unwise young people who enter into them. The real price is paid by their children.