The UN agencies have all expressed their doubts about abstinence and fidelity, pointing out that women in southern Africa often do not have the power to say no and that married women are more likely to be infected with HIV, via their unfaithful husbands, than unmarried women.

"There is an urgent need to rethink the ABC approach," said Thoraya Obaid, executive director of the UN's Population Fund, at the launch of a report which outlined the dire plight of women in southern Africa, who make up 57% of those now infected and unable to protect themselves.

People's views on gay marriage, as on earlier issues such as interracial marriage, evolve. The reasoning of court rulings, such as the one handed down last year in Massachusetts, will spur Americans to think about gay marriage in ways they hadn't -- as an issue of equality, as the desire to create a socially and legally sanctioned family, as a wish to be accepted as ordinary citizens taking on rights and responsibilities.

Thinking in those ways about gay marriage makes clear how convoluted are GOP arguments that a gay-marriage ban "supports marriage and the family."

Gay unions exist. Gay families exist. Granting them legal status would not destroy the institution of marriage, nor would it hurt existing socially sanctioned families.

There is no good scientific evidence that preaching abstinence protects people from HIV infection. And this administration’s ideological obsession with marriage could actually put young girls at even greater risk. Marriage is not protective for young women in Africa. Young women who get married are at higher risk than young women who stay single.

The gay rights movement has protected and expanded freedom for all by getting the government out of our bedrooms. A tempting solution to the gay marriage controversy would be to extend that triumph one more step and get the government out of our marriages. Let churches and other private institutions define marriage however they wish. Gay marriage and traditional marriage would have the same legal status, and yet there would be no official sanction or approval of gay marriage. Both sides would have what they say they want. And what principled conservative could object to this major retrenchment of government authority in our lives?

Unfortunately for this notion, the concept of marriage is enmeshed in the details of government -- in the tax code, in inheritance and child custody laws and so on. In practice, it cannot be extracted. And even in theory, what lawyers call a "bright line" -- speeding means more than 55 mph; you're either married or you're not -- is often needed to keep the rules from becoming impossibly complicated.

But the notion of "privatizing" marriage remains a good one. And the concept of civil union may be a promising approach. Right now, civil union is just an evasion for politicians trying to sidestep the gay marriage controversy. But it could be a model for a different official attitude toward marriage.

Considering the volume of work Congress has yet to do before members leave town, the Senate's insistence on considering a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage is telling....Everyone knows that, in the Senate, the proposed amendment is well short of the votes needed to send it on to the states; even making it to a vote on the merits is highly unlikely. The reason the Senate is moving forward is politics of a particularly crass and ugly sort: Gay marriage has become a national electoral issue....Precisely because of the weight conservatives have put on this issue, today's vote, despite its preordained outcome, has become deeply important. It requires senators to take a public stand on a question of deep principle: Are they willing to warp the entire American constitutional structure to prevent people who love one another from marrying?

The combination of this proposal's radicalism and its consideration in the middle of an election year commands a strong rebuke from those members who retain enough shame to oppose a constitutional amendment whose express purpose is to deny equal treatment to U.S. citizens. Even opponents of gay marriage, about which people of conscience legitimately disagree, should balk at this measure, which would prevent a democratic majority in any state ever from recognizing it. A strong vote against the Federal Marriage Amendment would send a powerful message that amending the Constitution is not a solution for every non-problem that generates a bad cause.

Excuse me, but it is now routine -- even on Fox News Channel, I just heard -- to talk about "banning" homosexual marriages. Isn't language being misused here? Can you ban something that has never existed? The way marriage is currently, and has traditionally, been defined restricts legal marriage to one man and one woman, both of sound mind, not close blood relatives, neither currently married to someone else. I suppose you could say that that "bans" all sorts of unions: mine with my sister, yours with your town softball league, Jonah's with Cosmo, and so on. But is it really proper to speak of these restrictions as "bans"? Who ever thought like this until about a year ago?...

I suppose you might argue that the *intent* of the FMA is to "ban gay marriage," even thought that isn't its wording. Even that is questionable, though. What supporters of the FMA want is to *maintain* marriage in the form in which it is currently understood, and to shield it from assaults by homosexuals, polygamists, incestuous couples, and anyone else who might seek to change the institution.

Republicans think they have an advantage in the "mainstream" war on the issue of gay marriage. But they may have tossed it away this week. In proposing a constitutional amendment to define marriage only as "the union of a man and a woman," the GOP's goal was to put Democrats on the cultural defensive and to inspire religious conservatives who form the core of modern the party today. Instead, the White House and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist have exposed divisions among Republicans and, through a well-meaning procedural mistake, allowed the Democratic ticket to wriggle free of the need to cast a potentially harmful vote on the matter.

The article begins with a married woman confiding to her circle of friends that she is having an affair. In between huffing gin vapors, she spills the details about "heavy petting" and "the kiss that would just launch a thousand kisses." The tone is consciously tantalizing, designed to make female readers lean forward conspiratorially, and male readers fantasize about swooping in and poaching the unfulfilled wife....

What's striking about the article is not that the rate of cheating by women is approaching that of men but that our so-called hard-news outlets are depicting the trend with so little depth or introspection.

The Newsweek article, for example, provides almost no counterbalance regarding personal or moral responsibility. Mostly, the article is just a second-hand retelling of stories about voluptuously contoured, middle-aged married women getting mounted in dimly lit locales. The article suggests issues about our bodily needs. But mostly it just invites the reader to peek over the windowsill and enjoy the vicarious gratification of other people's sexual stealth and subterfuge.

the fundamental definition of marriage is no mere policy issue. We're talking about the very integrity and meaning of one of the primary elements of civil society.

Nor is this a matter for state-by-state experimentation. Society isn't harmed when high-tax states live side by side with low-tax states. The market adjusts to the inconsistency. Not so with marriage. A highly integrated society such as ours -- with questions of property ownership, tax and economic liability, inheritance, and child custody crossing state lines -- requires a uniform definition of marriage.

In a free society, certain fundamental questions must be addressed and settled for the good of that society. States can't impair the obligation of contracts, or coin their own money, or experiment with forms of non-republican government. We learned the hard way that the nation could not endure half slave and half free.

If marriage is a fundamental social institution, then it's fundamental for all of society. As such, it is not only reasonable but obligatory that it be preferred and defended in the law and, if necessary, protected in the U. S. Constitution.

The road to infidelity is paved with unmet expectations about sex, love, and marriage. A woman who is 40 today grew up during the permissive 1970s and went to college when the dangers of AIDS were just beginning to dawn. She was sexually experienced before she was married and waited five years longer than her mother to settle down. She lives in a culture that constantly flaunst the possibility of great sex and fitness well after menopause.

Invading Iraq was the right thing to do, President Bush said Monday, because even though weapons of mass destruction remain unfound, allowing the country to possibly transfer weapons capability to terrorists was not a risk he was willing to take.

"Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, we were right to go into Iraq," Bush said during a trip to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The trip was designed to showcase a victory in the Bush administration's campaign against weapons of mass destruction.

In 1996, Congress overwhelmingly passed the Defense of Marriage Act, and President Clinton signed it into law. That legislation defines marriage, for purposes of federal law, as a union between a man and a woman, and declares that no state is required to accept another state's definition of marriage. Yet an activist court that strikes down traditional marriage would have little problem striking down the Defense of Marriage Act. Overreaching judges could declare that all marriages recognized in Massachusetts or San Francisco be recognized as marriages everywhere else.

When judges insist on imposing their arbitrary will on the people, the only alternative left to the people is an amendment to the Constitution -- the only law a court cannot overturn. A constitutional amendment should never be undertaken lightly -- yet to defend marriage, our nation has no other choice.