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Marriage is a public testament to your commitment. [...] When you stand before the public and say, "I am married to this person", what will that mean?

Same as it always has: commitment.

Is that what marriage means, commitment? It used to mean the lifelong commitment between a man and a woman. But divorce already took away the "lifelong" part, and most people who get married today won't stay married to the same person. "Homosexual marriage" will take away the "between a man and a woman" part (and do even more damage to the "lifelong"), leaving you with "some kind of" commitment for "some amount of time", presumably, as long as the two people love one another. And of course under hedonism, "to love", means "to have passion for and derive pleasure from the other person's company", and who knows how long that lasts. Even a word as simple as "committment" is going to mean something less than you intend.

What kind of "committment" is it? Not so straightforward anymore, is it? "Homosexual marriage" will become "same-sex marriage" and even friends and roommates will do it, after all, who says you have to have sex with someone in order to marry them? Especially since procreation will be divorced from marriage. How committed will marriage be, really?

I am the mother of two boys (11 &13). When my older son was in sixth grade, he had a female teacher from Santa Cruz. She was heavyset, wore no makeup and favored untucked plaid shirts and jeans for her wardrobe. When she was teaching the kids about "family life" she told my son that families that had a mom and dad and kids were the "old-fashioned" kind of family and that she could think of 22 different kinds of families these days. Don't our kids get enough crap heaped onto them? Do little kids really need to know about blow jobs and lesbians 24/7? As a parent I try to keep some sort of stability, innocence and "normalness" in my kid's lives even though they are constantly being bombarded with garbage. Can't the garbage be the exception for our children rather than the rule? My older son was looking up Harry Potter websites and got into a loop of videos showing graphic, teen/homosexual sex. It's sickening all the crap that is easily and unintentionally accessible by kids.

My 13 year old son and I were discussing the book "The Diary of Anne Frank". At one point he said, "Did you know she was a lesbian?" After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I asked him, "Where on earth did you get that idea?" He innocently replied, "She kissed a girl in the book." Isn't it sad that our kids are being forced to look at everything through the filter of homosexuality? How come such a tiny minority seems to have a stranglehold on the country's collective consciousness? Do you ever watch little kids on the playground and notice how the little girls are always holding hands, hugging and kissing all their friends? At what age are they going to be labeled as lesbians? 3, 7, 9, 13, 17?? At what point are they going to be forced to wonder about their orientation? The San Jose Mercury News recently published an article that giddily talked about how girls were "experimenting" with their sexual orientation at younger and younger ages. It's being presented as a choice. We have a generation of girls growing up who never have to get past that "boys are icky, they have cooties" stage. Even my 11 year old son likes to put his arm around his buddies necks as they walk to school. Can't we just stop sexualizing our kids at such young ages? Middle school, high school and Teenage-hood is confusing enough. I know it's not politically correct to call anything normal but, can't we aim for normal lives for our kids and let them know that if they fall short, they will still be loved by their family and friends that matter?

When my younger son was in second grade (7 years old) he was selling popcorn outside a local grocery store as a fundraiser for his local cub scout troop. Is there anything more adorable than an innocent little cub scout in his adorable uniform, cap and kerchief? As one lady approached, he asked her if she would like to help support the cub scouts. She snottily said "Well, I guess the scouts aren't very tolerant are they? I refuse to support them." and huffed away. What kind of society do we have for our children when cub scouts can be lambasted by adults and kids have easy access to any kind of porn imaginable?

I'm not 100% committed to this idea, but it is valuable up to a point, namely:

"Commitment" in marriage is only meaningful if there are children involved. If marriage only concerned the two adults who are planning a life together, then one can envision a set of legal documents that would spell out all the mutual obligations; for example, if one person agrees to build and clean the home and cook meals and clean clothes, and the other agrees to go out and earn an income, then some sort of agreement would have to be made, for example, to protect the home-bound person in case of adultery or illness or pre-mature death by the spouse.

But Life-long "Committment" is a fundamental part of Marriage because of CHILDREN. It may be time for opponents of Same-sex Marriage to take the bait dangled by A. Sullivan and others and to honestly admit that the fundamental purpose of Marriage is Children.