We would be more American on the day we permitted same-sex marriage than we were on the day before.

The most urgent domestic challenge facing the United States at the close of the 20th century is the re-creation of fatherhood as a social role for men.

Even with all its problems, I will support marriage as an institution until something better comes along.

Children have a primal need to know who they are, to love and be loved by the two people whose physical union brought them here. To lose that connection, that sense of identity, is to experience a wound that no child-support check or fancy school can ever heal.

More broadly across time and cultures, it seems, one perennial piece of advice to father has been the importance of acting tenderly toward their children. The New Father, it turns out, is an old story.

We’ve been fighting about gay marriage for what, 15-20 years now. Is there any evidence that fighting gay marriage is contributing to a greater appreciation among the broad society of the marital institution? Is there any evidence that the re-institutionalization of marriage is happening as a result of opposing gay marriage? And the best answer I can give to that is 'no.'

To recover the fatherhood idea, we must fashion a new cultural story of fatherhood. The moral of today's story is that fatherhoodis superfluous. The moral of the new story must be that fatherhood is essential.