I immediately called the command center of the Department of Justice to let them know that my wife was on a plane that had been hijacked. I mainly wanted them know there was another hijacked plane out there.

Well, she managed to - Barbara was capable of doing practically anything if she set her mind to it. In retrospect, I'm not surprised that Barbara managed to get collect calls through.

I wanted it not to be true. I wanted it not to be her plane. I wanted it - I wanted, if it was her plane, to have somehow survived because she was in the back of the airplane. But we know that doesn't happen, not with those sorts of things.

No one aspires as a child to grow up and enter into a domestic partnership. But they do aspire as children to grow up and be married.

Another argument, vaguer and even less persuasive, is that gay marriage somehow does harm to heterosexual marriage. I have yet to meet anyone who can explain to me what this means. In what way would allowing same-sex partners to marry diminish the marriages of heterosexual couples?

The plane took off at 8:10 in the morning - or that's when it was scheduled to take off. And that's when I believe it took off. I had been in my office at the Department of Justice. Someone told me that there had been the two strikes that occurred at the World Trade Center.

The very idea of marriage is basic to recognition as equals in our society any status short of that is inferior, unjust, and unconstitutional.