Remaking the American family

President Bush leapt off the fence and into the fray last week as he endorsed a federal constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage and preserve matrimony as a privilege available only to one man and one woman. "After more than two centuries of American jurisprudence and millennia of human experience, a few judges and local authorities are presuming to change the most fundamental institution of civilization," Mr. Bush said. "Their action has created confusion on an issue that requires clarity."

The confusion is mushrooming. Riding hard behind the matrimonial mess is an onslaught against the traditional definition of family. For example:

Say hello to America's newest version of "family": same-sex parents with kids from divorce, adoption, or artificial insemination-and more recently, multiple co-parents related to their children through tangled biological intersections. Such arrangements have until now existed mainly outside the public eye. Now, goaded by gay activists (and concerned liberals like San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom), courts, legislators, and public officials are stretching the definition of family beyond the historical bonds of blood, adoption, and matrimony.

These days, gay activists say, all you need is love.

But serial misinterpretation of love, both gay and straight, has damaged the institution of the traditional family. In the 1960s, sexual "love" became everyone's "right." That led to disease, poverty, mental and emotional illness, and a wholesale loss of respect for women. Cohabitation began shedding its stigma, leading to a revolving-door family structure that often left children fatherless and economically deprived.

By the early 1970s, men and women who had married, but no longer felt "love" for their spouses, could divorce and seek "love" elsewhere. That plunged women and children further into poverty, resulting in a single-parent-family boom that according to Bureau of Justice statistics landed thousands of fatherless boys in federal prison. As state after state allowed husbands and wives to legally jettison each other for convenience's sake, the Supreme Court decreed that women-for "love" of self or career-could jettison inconvenient babies. That led to the death of more than 40 million children, many of whom would by now be having families of their own.

America's four-decade assault on the meaning of family has spawned statistics like these:

Mike McManus lays much of the blame for such dismal demography directly on the doorstep of the church. "Churches are doing almost nothing," said Mr. McManus, whose Maryland-based group Marriage Savers promotes marriage preparation and restoration. "Our churches have not been disciplined ... they've had no standards." Many pastors, he said, prefer to refer troubled couples for counseling rather than prepare betrothed couples for the often-troubled road of marital union. It's another misinterpretation of "love," he said: attracting "seekers" and retaining members at the expense of upholding biblical standards that prohibit divorce and detail the roles of husbands and wives beyond romantic love.

Marriage Savers is working to reverse that trend. The group has since 1996 helped pastors in 184 cities adopt "community marriage policies." Churches in a given community agree not to marry couples unless they complete four months of premarital preparation. Pastors also agree to train "mentor couples" within their own congregations who can help coach other husbands and wives through troubled times. The plan seems to be working: According to a two-year study by the Institute for Research and Evaluation of Salt Lake City, the divorce rate in counties with the agreements has fallen 17.5 percent since 1996, compared with 9 percent in similar counties that did not have such policies in place.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration last year announced its "Healthy Marriages Initiative," which earmarked $120 million in public funds to strengthen marriages through community-based programs. Other groups also are fighting to prevent poor marriages and repair marriages gone sour. University of Colorado-based PREP focuses on improving communication between spouses, while a Washington, D.C.-based group called "Smart Marriages" helps couples approach matrimony as a skills-based relationship.

As such groups fight to preserve traditional marriage and family, sociologists, historians, and pundits warn against both the catalogued and unforeseen consequences of America's newest family experiment, the same-sex-parented household. For example, the chief predictor of crime in a neighborhood is the percentage of homes without fathers. According to national health statistics, children from homes without fathers are five times more likely to live in poverty, three times more likely to fail in school, two to three times more likely to develop emotional and behavioral problems, and three times more likely to commit suicide.

The same-sex-marriage movement has yet to counter such statistics. Nor has it answered the questions such research logically raises, like: Do two moms equal one dad? Can two dads replace a mother's love?

History and research say no.