Marriage is unique, Jonathan Rauch says. After decades studying what he calls the bedrock of civilization, he wants to keep it that way. That's why Mr. Rauch champions gay marriage as the trifecta of social policy: a win-win-win which is good for gays, good for straights and good for America. The country, he asserts, does not suffer from too much marriage but too little.

Banning marriage, he says, means you're going to get a lot of sex in the bushes. What he wants to move toward is a culture of responsibility. When one is married, he says, the rest of the community -- which is always the third party to every marriage -- knows what you've promised to do. You get the status, the benefits and the obligations that go with those promises you vow to uphold.

At the core of what America professes is the idea of "...the pursuit of happiness," Mr. Rauch points out. Nothing, he is convinced, is more essential to this idea than the ability to choose someone, marry them, and make a home and a family with them. This is so essential, he says, that extending this fundamental opportunity to all Americans -- not locking anybody out -- is part of the nation's maturation.

Then there are the children to consider, he notes. There is no doubt that as successful as single-parent households can be, he believes that creating a stable, secure environment for children is one of the ways in which marriage is irreplaceable.

There are others.

Mr. Rauch puts marriage at the center of a culture of responsibility. Oddly enough, he finds that getting people to accept this notion of gay responsibility is harder than getting them to accept gay rights. Anti-discrimination laws are fine with a lot of people, he says, but they stop short of three hot spots that remain: child-rearing, serving the nation in the military and marriage. All three, he says, involve declaring that gay people are of sufficient standing in their nation and their community, responsible enough, to look after other people, to shoulder these fundamental burdens. Of these, he believes, marriage is the most fundamental of all.

Mr. Rauch says he treasures marriage so much that he wants to get gay marriage right. Put America's great experiment in democracy to work, let each state make it's own decision about this kind of marriage, just as states make all the rest of our domestic laws. One state and 5 (or more) Supreme Court judges should not make a decision for all the other states, he believes, any more than an Amendment to the Constitution should change where domestic law has been made since before the country was a nation at what is now the state level.

Gay marriage, Mr. Rauch concludes, is not really about sex or gender, it's about what he calls "coupledom." Ultimately, it's not about the gender of the person we love, he insists, it's about the fact that the human heart needs marriage. "To have and to hold, for better or worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, ‘'til death do us part" -- that's what matters.

[This Program was recorded April 20, 2004, in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.]