 All right, thank you. I am delighted to introduce three amazing panelists, each of whom has written about same-sex marriage from a different perspective, and those perspectives will become clear as each of them talks. I should note that the last time I was at New America, I was on a panel with someone who was opposed to same-sex marriage. There are three different perspectives on same-sex marriage are all very, very supportive. It's just sort of different takes on the very supportive same-sex marriage. It's, of course, timely to be talking about same-sex marriage because according to the Pew Research Center's latest poll, 72% of Americans say legal recognition of gay marriage is coming. And even people who are opposed to it still believe overwhelmingly that it is on its way. OK, so starting here with Martha Ertman, Martha Ertman is a law professor at the University of Maryland and, excuse me, for going into the personal. But she and Karen were married 2009. 2009 in Massachusetts. But by the time we got back to DC, DC recognized that it changes very fast. While you were enraged. Almost. And she is also, she's interweaving the reason I feel, OK, bringing up the personal. She's interweaving her personal experiences with a book that she is currently writing that's called Love and Contracts, The Heart of the Deal. Liza Mundy, who is, well, she's written many, many different things in addition to the rich or sex and everything conceivable and Michelle, one of the reasons that she stands out for being on this panel is that most recently in the June issue of the Atlantic, she wrote a really, really fascinating article on same-sex marriage. And in which she talks about, it's called the Gay Guide to Wetted Bliss. Research finds that same-sex unions are happier than heterosexual marriages. What can gay and lesbian couples teach straight ones about living in harmony? She is also a short fellow at the New America Foundation on Leave from the Post. Jonathan Rouch is a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, although I guess you're known for many, many other reasons beyond that. You recently wrote Denial about living in the closet for the first 25 years of your life. And I just was browsing, looking at it on Amazon. And it was described as equal parts Oliver Sacks and George Orwell with moments of Woody Allen. So a really interesting combination in talking about those issues. So to build on some of the themes from the last panel, I think this panel is going to be quite happy because everybody is approaching same-sex marriage from a supportive perspective as well as thought-provoking. So to focus on the thought-provoking, in thinking about same-sex marriage and the reasons why same-sex marriage has been so important to many people within the LGBT community as well as outside of the LGBT community. Suzanne Goldberg, who's now a law professor at Columbia, suggests that there may be three different interests in same-sex marriage. First, the reasons to advocate for, and she by the way does not call it same-sex marriage. She just says marriage because once same-sex couples are married, they're no different from any other couples who are married. But she suggests three different interests. First, when you're married, you have access to a whole series of different material benefits. Second, marriage establishes equal status between same and different sex couples. And third, and this actually gets to Liza's article, it is possible that when same-sex couples are able to marry, as they now are in, I guess, about a dozen jurisdictions, that they may be able to transform the institution of marriage, interestingly enough. An argument made from both the right and the left. So given these three interests, having access to material benefits, equal status, transforming marriage, I want to turn it to the three of you to talk about why the right to marry is so important. Let's start with why the right to marry is so important and can same-sex marriage transform marriage as an institution? Anybody? All of you have got it. I think Liza and Goldberg is wrong in general. Marriage does not bring benefits. Remember when you got married, the truck full of money that pulled up on your front lawn? Marriage brings responsibilities and tools for executing those responsibilities. And those are the responsibilities to look after another person for life and your kids, if you have them. Marriage is primarily about building family. And I think the reason the marriage movement began in 1970, six months after Stonewall, the first gay couple tried to get married. Is because we want family and the benefits of family and the things that we've been talking about all morning. I grew up in a divorced household and saw what happens when a family comes apart. I came of age in the 80s. And one of the reasons I was in such denial was watching what gay culture looks like in a world without family, without marriage, when sex is between strangers in the bushes or in bathrooms and your friends are dying. And you can't even get in the hospital room. Often you can't even get in the country with the person you're caring about. And we came out of that and said, you know, family is good. And we want that stability and safety. Last thing, which did I mention that I have this new book out, ebook. But something I emphasize, and it's not a policy book, it's a memoir, is that one of the reasons I spent my first 25 years, not just in the closet, that doesn't begin to capture it. But twisting my entire personality into one massive personality disorder, in order to deny, even to myself, the possibility I might be gay is that from a very early age, long before I knew sexual attraction, part of me understood that I could never get married and have a family. I didn't know why. This was years before dating and all that. I just knew this was the case. And that every single day, anything like an attraction or a romantic interest would push me further from a life in family and a destination for my love. The availability of marriage changes the gay and lesbian psyche, I believe, from the very earliest stage in life by letting us know there is a place in the community for us and there is a place, there is a family and a person out there waiting for us. And from the first crush and the first kiss and the first date, that is just hugely important in having a right side of life. And no, I don't think we'll transform marriage. I think it'll transform us for the most part. I'm a professor, so I have to say it's complicated and things go in both directions. And I also would take the invitation that I think that Jonathan started with and other panelists have said, which is to speak in an emotional register. Because families are, of course, a combination of rational and emotional factors. And family law is a mix of trying to come up with rational rules that govern a lot of emotional and social questions. So the one thing, I actually think Suzanne Goldberg is right about a lot of things, but there is more to say. And in particular, the part that I think is worthwhile saying is that is the emotional and social thing that happens. So if you're living in a jurisdiction like California right now where you could enter a domestic partnership and get all the rights and duties both of marriage, but it's just not called marriage, what does that mean? And so I took this panel as being a conversation. If in fact we're moving toward either civil unions in Illinois and marriage in Massachusetts, or maybe the same thing all over the country, what does the word marriage do? So what does it mean when you can have all the rights and all the duties in your state and maybe at the federal level, depending on what the court does with the marriage cases in the next few weeks? What does that mean? And I would speak from personal experience. I'm about to turn 50 this summer. I came out in college. I was at a women's college, so it was a lot more fun to come out. And lesbians didn't have the experience with AIDS that gay guys had in the 80s, so a very different situation. But I have the very good luck of having a midlife marriage. And for those of you who have had midlife marriages, you know what life was like before, and it is sweet. So when I am 45, I marry this smart, savvy Jewish lawyer. I'm not Jewish. So when I marry her in Massachusetts in 2009, I marry into a Jewish family. Now, I didn't come out of the box at 45. I had other relationships. I lived with one person for 12 years. And whenever we talked about each other's families in my cohabiting relationship, we use scare quotes. And because we were both lawyers, we refer to them as outlaws instead of inlaws. And there's a jokey quality, because you're not quite really family. In this book that I'm writing, I've really struggled about how to talk about a range of families. And Jonathan was suggesting that marriage is the pinnacle. And I think it is the thing that more people want and more people do than anything else, and law should honor that. But I also think that love comes in different packages. And when he mentions AIDS in the 80s and early 90s before the drugs kicked in and became available, there were caregiving networks that were deeply family-like. I'm not sure what law does with that, and scholars are working on that. What I would say is having now married into a Jewish family, I'm still not Jewish, but I'm the one who makes sure that there's a holla at six o'clock on Friday night. And I'm the one who wants our nine-year-old to know the Jewish prayers in case he wants to be Jewish, whether he is going to be, I don't know, we also go to the Unitarian Church on Sundays. So it's much more choice, and that choice, I think, is really where I think I see family law going. And there, and society, there are just more options. And there's more visibility. And I think what we're moving toward, and what I hope we're moving toward, is a morally neutral range of relationships where marriage still has a special fizz. And it's because you are really promising, I'll stick with you for better or worse. And there's something to that, socially, economically, financially, legally, and that matters. But I also think it's special because every culture, but one on the face of the earth has marriage. And to signal out, to single out one group of people, and say there's something so creepy about you that you cannot enter this status, that socially carries a big burden. What am I supposed to say now? What are you guys? Yes, okay, no, I actually will argue. I'll be contentious and argue a little bit. And just to say, actually, to be personal, I too have divorced parents. I actually learned one time when I was interviewing Betsy Stevenson, and she was saying that the height of divorce was in 1979, which I didn't know, that's when my parents divorced. So I come from the generation who experienced, I think, widespread divorce. Parents, and I'm in a heterosexual marriage, and I have two teenage children. And I do argue in my landed peace that same-sex marriage will change marriage. I argue that marriage is a changing institution. It has been stable, it still exists, it's existed for centuries, but it's changed enormously. It used to be something where children could be betrothed to each other in order to unite noble houses or great estates. In some parts of the world, children still are betrothed, but in general, we reject that now. No fault divorce changed marriage in terms of recognizing that it no longer had to be a lifelong and permanent union. The married women's property rights act, giving women the right to own property and marriage or own the right to their wages, that changed marriage. So I think marriage is going to continue to change. It sounds like it's going to continue to exist. And I would say, why wouldn't same-sex marriage change marriage? And the argument that I make is, in any number of ways, I mean, listening to these heartfelt and incredibly informed testimonials to why marriage is important, I think this is the first time culturally that we've heard this argument made in 30 or 40 years as to why marriage is valid and important. And what I saw in my reporting for the Atlantic, and I wouldn't overstate this, but yet it's something that I saw in churches in DC and Maryland that can perform same-sex marriages now, and not all churches can because not all denominations permit it yet, but the churches here who are doing it are seeing what you might call a marriage promotion effect or a social contagion effect. I mean, we know that happiness now is socially contagious. We know that divorce might be socially contagious. And what these churches are seeing is that marriage might be socially contagious. So I interviewed a pastor in Maryland who had gotten used to doing no marriages a year or one marriage. And she has eight marriages this year. Three of them are same-sex marriage. Five of them are heterosexual marriages. So they're anecdotally reporting more marriages, that people, that their congregations are excited. They love going to same-sex marriages. Rob Hardee, who was, I think, your pastor, made the great analogy that we like seeing love that overcomes obstacles. That's the sort of driving narrative of romantic comedies, be they Shakespeare or Hollywood. And what we're getting to see now is love that has overcome obstacles and is coming together. We feel really good about that. So that's one thread. But I think also what the studies show is that in same-sex relationships, there is more domestic, there's more egalitarianism sort of division of labor. And so because couples have to figure out from the start who's gonna do this, who's gonna work, who's gonna earn, or are we both gonna earn, who's gonna cook, who's gonna do this, there's not the sort of falling back on stereotype that still exists in heterosexual marriage. I mean, we know that women, even when they're working, they still do more housework in their relationships. And when I would make this argument, often people in same-sex relationships would go, yeah, that's true, but it's not gonna trickle over. I mean, even if it's true that these unions are more egalitarian, and that's not always easier. It's not always easy to have to kind of hammer out who's gonna do what. But the idea maybe they'll just exist in parallel, but I was very interested to interview priests and ministers and therapists who argued, well, actually, I counsel married couples differently now because I counsel same-sex couples. So the Dean of the National Cathedral in Washington made this argument to me. I counsel same-sex couples. I see them hammering out from the start. You know, what are we gonna do? Who's in laws are we gonna spend the holidays with? Who's gonna do what? And seeing what he called the radical egalitarianism makes him push heterosexual couples harder on who's gonna be responsible for contraception? Oh, it's gonna be the wife. Why should it be the wife? Why shouldn't it be both of you? Who's gonna handle the money? So he feels like he's challenging heterosexual couples in a way that he hadn't before because of his experience counseling same-sex couples. So those are the arguments that I make that actually I think that it will change marriage. Just a clarification before we move on. I love that, and I love that about the article. The question you asked was, will same-sex marriage transform straight marriage? And there's a lot of space between transforming and influencing. Wow, interesting. I think it will influence, and I think the influences will, and I've long argued, will largely be for the better. One reason will be supporting the cultural norm of marriage. But I don't think what you're seeing with these couples is they desire to somehow transform the whole institution. I think they're joining it, improving it, and working out some of the wrinkles. I also think there's an interesting question about cause and effect. So there's a story you could tell that because of these handsome gay guys getting married, everybody's, you know, it's a trend. I like trend better than contagion because contagion sounds like an illness and a trend just seems like, ah, doesn't everybody wanna do that? It looks so good and shiny. So my question is about cause and effect. One of the things that's been coming up on all these panels are big macro changes in the economy. With the growth of the service economy, there aren't so many jobs for working class guys in the manufacturing economy and marriage reduces, and then in the richer sex, there's so much talk about the renegotiation of the basic deal between spouses and more guys are doing more home-making and more women are doing more of the wage earning. And I wonder whether there's something that the legal scholar Derek Bell called interest convergence coming into play. That one reason that these heterosexual marriages are so interested in straight marriages because there are very few of us. There are between 130 and 150,000 same-sex marriages. There are 60 million cross-sex marriages. So how can 150,000 people influence 60 million one possibility might be the 60 million is on their way. They're looking for a good reason to do it and we're a nice reason to do it. Cause I would love, I talked to her when she was doing the, to Liza when she was doing the article and I thought really, really, are gay people really that powerful? And I said, really, I'd love to be this powerful but I don't think we are. I read her article and she convinced me. That in fact, there's a link but I think it might be going in both directions. That heterosexual marriage is already changing and as two grooms on the top of a cake or two brides on the top of a cake, just give a shorthand for people to talk about changing gender roles. And in fact, some of the arguments in some of the brief supporting same-sex marriage are that marriage has already changed dramatically for many of the reasons that Liza was listing beginning or primarily because of women's increasing status in marriage but then in terms of no-fault divorce, et cetera. So marriage itself as an institution has changed dramatically and then the question, thank you Jonathan for that nice transformation versus Liza's carefully written subheading of what can same-sex couples actually teach what Martha's calling cross-sex couples? So I mean, I'd like to ask sort of a little bit more about... Not at all cross about it. I guess Suzanne called them different sex couples. Different sex, yeah, yeah. So I mean, I'd like to explain more about what can be, what can those of us in different sex marriages learn from same-sex marriages? Yeah, and I would just say when I was doing my interviewing I talked to Gary Gates, who's at the Williams Institute at UCLA and he made that argument to me. No, it's not gonna change marriage. Marriage had to change first. Society had to change first before we would be admitted to it. So all that social work, all that change about what is a family had to happen before to prepare the way. So that argument was made and he was quite eloquent about it. You know, I think in terms of what else we're gonna learn, I mean, one of the interesting, now that we're doing studies that show sort of are some phenomena maybe different in cross-sex households, opposite sex households and same-sex households, but some will be the same. I mean, we talked about divorce and one of the things we didn't talk about is the fact that in heterosexual marriages, women are more likely to initiate divorce than men are. And so why is that? I mean, that's really interesting to know, even if they're gonna be economically disadvantaged in the divorce. And so research from Northern Europe where same-sex marriage has been in place longer than it has here is showing that lesbian couples are more likely to dissolve than gay male couples. So is it that women actually are just really picky about their relationships? Are we the threat to marriage, actually? And so as we're able to kind of build this scholarship, it will be interesting to figure out. But also I think, as I say in the piece, if at the end it turns out that sort of the struggles are actually the same and the arguments are quite similar and the difficulties and the joys are similar then, maybe we learn that everything that we've been sort of thinking the past 30 years about the war between men and women and the sort of, you just don't understand, et cetera, that maybe it's just two people trying to live together for a pretty long period of time. And it's true, I think the data, and you could tell me if the latest is true on this. At the last I checked, if you look at the percentage of households where one person is working full time, they're raising children, that one person is working full time and the other is at home full time, there's, it's 25% of both same sex couples raising children and different sex couples raising children. So that it is that there's some 25% of people who have enough money and the resources to do it and somebody who's willing to have that stark version of the wage earning and home making. Specialization. Specialization in same sex households with children. Right, and so in that sense, that's not going to be that different, but there are different norms. So it makes me think of growing up gay, coming of age gay, equality is sort of in the air we breathe. So to have a relationship that feels hierarchical is kind of would go against the grain, I think of most gay folks day to day life. And so it might be that norms of equality come in through the rhetoric. But again, I think it's only if the 60 million are in the mood to hear the message that it'll be heard. Cause we're, I'd love to think we were that powerful. I just don't think we're that powerful. I suspect our influence may be at its peak right around now because as we start marrying and settling down and becoming a routine part of life, I'm not sure we'll get all that much attention. We'll just become married couples like everyone else. One thing I took away from your article, Liza, is that a lot of what was seeming to make these same sex marriages thrive was careful consideration of many of the details and an egalitarian spirit. So here's a politically incorrect question to which I don't think we know the answer yet. One thing we could learn from that is that straight couples can copy that and benefit from it. Another thing that might turn out to be the case though is that same sex male marriages don't have heterosexual men in them. I don't think... Yes, some of them might, but they've only got a lot. I don't think we know yet how transferable the dynamics of gay people and gay relationships are going to turn out in a straight world. I think that's a very open question. Yeah, I'll just say just two things to that. One interesting, pepper Schwartz sociologist was one of the first people who thought, you know what, if I study straight relationships and same sex relationships, I can learn something about what's true of men and women or what's true of straight versus same sex. And one of the things she found is that many of the, and this was true in my reporting too, many of the men who were in same sex relationships had come from straight marriages because they had entered into straight marriages, I think out of a desire for family, out of maybe not being out yet. And when she asked the guys in the same sex relationships, well actually, they were helping each other with housework. Did you help your wife with housework back when you were in the straight marriage? And she said they invariably said no. And so there was more egalitarianism going on when men were partnered with men than when men had been partnered with women, which I thought was interesting. And I think just again to sort of make the argument that people are paying more attention than you think, another interview I did for this piece was with a woman in a heterosexual marriage whose husband is a litigator and they have two small children. She was in a PhD program and her, and this is very familiar to all of us, her husband was working such insane work hours as a litigator in a major Washington practice that she finally dropped out of her PhD program to be a stay at home mom. She was very, you know, very attentive to her children but also clearly very conflicted about her choice. And she is friends with a lesbian couple and they're both attorneys. And one has made the decision to stay home as well. And so on the one hand, she felt because there's so much anxiety around these choices and so much competition in terms of parenting. She felt vindicated because this progressive lesbian, you know, egalitarian couple had made the same specialization decision that she had. So that made her feel good about herself but she also felt as though within their specialization they were more egalitarian. So the working attorney was coming home earlier and more present when she was home. So she felt like their family was sort of functioning better. So she was feeling simultaneously vindicated because they had made the same choice but anxious because she actually felt like their family was more chill than hers. So it was just, it was really interesting to have that conversation. And those will be the interesting conversations. So people are watching. If in fact the court and the rest of society goes where we think it will be where same sex marriage gets recognized and then it becomes just plain marriage, then we have marriage and everybody else. And so one way to do that is to think not so much. I do think the label same sex is gonna drop the way interracial dropped shortly after the loving decision in 1967 and it will just be marriage. And what I would argue for is that marriage could be treated like plan A. Most people do it. Most people want it. It's the most common option. But lots of people opt for plan B. The most, the second most common couple household is a cohabiting household. So that we will have a place where perhaps because of the equality rhetoric that comes into marriage, that there will be more openness to giving cohabitants more of the definition of family. There won't so much be an idea that there's one family, one kind of way to be a family and everybody else is just a stranger. Just for the record, to put a different perspective on the table, I very much hope that that does not happen. I think there's a lot of evidence now that supports the proposition that particularly for kids but also for grownups, marriage brings something important to the table that cohabitation doesn't. It brings a whole set of social networks and expectations that fortify that relationship and a whole lot of social resources with it. They're stronger than cohabitations. They're more durable, married people are healthier and happier and better off financially. You can do longitudinal studies on the same people and get this. So although there are a lot of things we need to do for a lot of family structures, I think it's important that marriage should remain on a pedestal. I have no problem with being on a pedestal but you can have a sliding scale. So it doesn't have to be pedestal in the basement. It can be pedestal and then some stairs and then, I don't know what the basement's gonna be. But I think that what it is is I teach contracts and in contract law we talk about reasonable expectations. People shouldn't have to become experts in the law. The law should be what most people reasonably expect it to be. So similarly, you could reasonably expect marriage is going to give you this many rights and duties and cohabitation I think you would reasonably expect gives you some, but not all. And then with your babysitter, you probably don't have a lot. You have fair labor rules, but not family. And I think that's really where I don't think it's an on-off switch and that's where I think we get into trouble. I'm actually against sliding scales because they're too easy to slip down. I'd like to see a fairly clear distinction between this one very special promise people make with all that we invest in it. You know, the ceremonies and the vows and the rings and the family and the in-laws. That's a very special promise to care for someone for life. And I think we need that social infrastructure that says, yeah, there's lots of other things but those really are plan B. Plan A is really special. So I'd like to see some real demarcation there. But maybe we're talking about degrees and extents here. It's actually, I mean it's fascinating to think about whether or not, I mean, how we should think about the plan B, the non-marital status. But I will also say that as we were preparing for the panel, I had a conversation with Martha in which I talked about, well, we don't really care if people get married or divorced, and she said, oh no, marriage is incredibly important for many of the reasons, Jonathan, that you were identifying. I think it's time to go for questions, which I'm assuming just because I saw you first. Oh, sorry, a microphone is coming towards you. Oh yeah, I'm allowed to, I'm sorry, this is one of her stuff. I've been reading some interesting articles about online dating, and I've noticed that they're pretty heteronormative. I mean, I'm straight and I met my boyfriend on JD, but then I have a lot of guy friends who meet their boyfriends on Grindr, which you would think wouldn't result in like. I'm surprised they have boyfriends. Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah. But then they actually have these very stable, long-term relationships in college and things with people they met on Grindr and stuff, and that's not talked about as much. And I was wondering if there's been a discussion that any of you are aware of about what the impact of meeting your long-term partner or eventually your spouse on an online dating website has on the duration of the marriage, because some articles say that like, if you online date, you always think there's something else out there that might be better and that you have the other options, you're less likely to stay with someone. So I'm just interested in sort of that and that I mean obviously kind of dovetails with the previous panel too, so. There was something in the post yesterday in the health section on precisely this issue of are online dating relationships just as stable or more stable? And yeah, I mean there's the research shows that they might be more stable, but then of course, as is always true whenever you're talking about research. Yeah, there's, yeah, good, good. Confession, no, that's all. I interviewed one married couple for my piece who had met online dating, but that's purely anecdotal and they seem to have quite a stable relationship going forward. I actually think that the way, the part I find particularly compelling on the online world is the way family is getting redefined on the online world. So I first heard about this in Israel, but also there was an article in the New York Times several months ago about online registries to find a co-parent. So if you wanna find a dad and you're a single mother and you wanna find someone who's tall, who's interested in math and science and easy to get along with, there's more and more of that. And so I think that because people can find each other, the internet allows a venue for forming all different kinds of partnerships and then the law's job and society's job is to figure out what bucket to put those partnerships in. There may also be an adjustment problem just as we're sort of, I mean, the internet is changing or has changed our lives and so just as we used to meet at college reunion gatherings, now we just meet on the internet and so there's an argument that nothing should be any different just because of how you've met through that kind of a matching service. Yeah, Wendy. I just, I had two comments. One thing that you were talking about, will same-sex marriage sort of challenge ideas of hierarchy in marriage? And what I've found is that a lot of straight couples get married and they don't have the same expectations for marriage but they don't know it because they haven't discussed it and it isn't just about who's gonna do the dishes, it's about things like independence versus interdependence, how important work is versus family, how much time we spend with our kids. So I think that these same-sex marriages might make straight people start to say, wait a minute, what do we agree on? What are we expecting here? In a broader way and not just hierarchy. So I think that that could be a really positive influence. And the other comment I wanted to make is that there's a marriage researcher Andrew Shirland that somebody else mentioned and he talks about marriage losing its, that it has a status and it's sparkly but it doesn't have a lot of real world value because you can live together, you can have children, you can have sex, you can support yourself, all these things that don't require marriage. And so he's sort of saying, I don't know, will it last at all other than as a status symbol because we don't need it. But it's really interesting to me to hear both of you talk about, well, this family. And this didn't, I haven't seen this in his work. Like that then you feel connected to a family and that you don't get that family support and social support unless you're married. It's just not something I've heard that's interesting. And he also talks about marriage, that marriage has become a marker of prestige. So if you put it too much on a pedestal and sort of worship and it's this incredible relationship, it has to be everything. And that people don't enter into it if they don't think that they can afford to enter into it. The idea of being sort of young and foolish and just starting out, then you think, well, I can't get married yet because I'm not worthy of this grade. So he sort of, I think, cautions against the idea of putting marriage on a pedestal because then people think they have to be arrived successful, affluent people before they can actually partake of it. Another cautionary note there is remember when we talk about gay couples doing all this understanding and negotiating, we can't just drift into marriage. To get married and be gay in America is a very, very big deal. And most of these couples have been together for a long time. They've had to negotiate relationships in a world without any social support or guidance at all. That may change as we get into a world where gay people too can just sort of drift into marriage. Right, so the first cohort is gonna be people who probably even in long-term relationships have been waiting for this day. And then the demographics may change. Yeah. Dan? I don't know, question or comment, but someone who's in the same sex marriage had been with my husband for 11 years who happens to be Jewish and I'm obviously Christian. What I have found is that the population at large, I find very supportive. Where I don't find support often is in the gay community. In the fact, in the sense that we both have a colonial house in Connecticut with a dog and that's what we want. And we want a monogamous relationship. We want all of that. And I just sometimes hear and I have to defend myself not to society but to the gay community that I haven't just taken hook line and sinker, the heteronormative norm that's been shoved down my throat. Maybe there's part of that, but can't I have that too? And I just feel like sometimes the gay community is not. Can I ask you, would it be a fair guess that most of the people who hit you with that stuff are older and not younger? Yes, absolutely. This is generational. Definitely. When I say gay marriage is certainly transforming us. It transforms us, I think. It's a big deal. It's the stonewall generation and older thought, why would we want any of that? That's what we're rebelling against. And when I did a book tour, Promoting Marriage, I found myself again and again, facing this generation, trying to justify why marriage is a good thing. I never have those conversations with gay and lesbian people in their 20s and 30s. They don't even ask that. Yeah, in the peak. Also someone who's been wonderfully persistent and a gray sweater in the back. I don't know if you could see them. We only have two minutes. Why don't people just, why doesn't everybody keep up your hands and we'll just go around and you can ask questions and we won't respond? Yeah, okay. Good. I just had a serious concern with this idea about putting marriage on a pedestal. In my experience, marriage is put on too high of a pedestal in that a lot of people are in very unhappy, contentious households where their spouse might be abusive or they're extremely unhappy or they're not living the life that they wanna lead. I was just interested, why is it, so when we think of gay marriage, sometimes we think about realizing this pinnacle of achievement and happiness. And I just was wondering, do you think that the challenges for gay individuals getting married are the same as those for straight individuals getting married and are those challenges and are those struggles the same? Okay, let's go to the next. You said, Jonathan, there was somebody very persistent. There it is, put that hand in there. I don't know if you could see it from where it is. Couple of comments. One is that, I was wondering if you, what the panelists think about whether gay marriages have to be, same sex marriages have to be model marriages, having gone through all this struggle and to get the right to marry, do you then have to stay married? Do you have to have a great marriage? Do you have to have an ideal marriage? It's sort of the flip side of what you're saying about how gay marriage might actually improve the institution of marriage. The woman who plays the coach on Glee, I can't remember her name, the actress, I saw in the paper this morning she's getting divorced and I had this response like, oh, if somebody else said they were getting divorced, I just think, well, so what? But somehow or other I thought, well, gee, that's too bad. And I just sort of, there was an extra residence to it. The other thing is, I think that going back to what Jonathan was saying, marriage is great if you can find a partner, but some people don't always find partners and they still want to have a family. So we have lots of women and increasingly men who are having children who are becoming co-parents. My son who's gay has never had a long term relationship but he wanted to have a child. He has a daughter through with a co-parent and it's not working out ideally for complicated reasons but the daughter is great and he's delighted and he has a family. So I just think we need to also understand that the variety of families doesn't always involve marriage. We're out of time, but maybe if people, if they're like two hands that are really persistent, really quickly, speak really fast. Yeah. Just want to drill down on what Martha said. We often see social dynamics that are actually economic dynamics, right? That marriage as an economic institution was sort of almost necessity in the 13th century. Less so now. Where are we going? How do those two curves relate to each other? Marriage and the economy and economic structure in the next 50 years. There's one more. Yes. Good. Thank you. Really great panel. I was wondering if you could provide a bit of historical perspective on marriage. And I was thinking of Barbara Ehrenreich's book Hearts of Man where she argues that not only were the 40s and 50s filled with the social conventions that girls had to stay at home until they got married, whereas men were forced to enter in heterosexual marriage even if they were not heterosexual out of fear of being accused and extreme homophobia. I want to... Well... Do you want a quick response here where we wrap it up? We're completely, we're way over time, so I want to thank all of you for all of your questions and I want to thank the three of you for a really, really great and wonderful and fascinating and heartfelt panel. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.