And that is why marriage and family law has emphasized the importance of marriage as the foundation of family addressing the needs of children in the most positive way.

Marriage is a lot of things - a source of love security the joy of children but it's also an interpersonal battlefield and it's not hard to see why: Take two disparate people toss them together in often-confined quarters add the stresses of money and kids - now lather rinse repeat for the rest of your natural life. What could go wrong?

Straight couples don't have to be monogamous to be married or married to be monogamous. Monogamy no more defines marriage than the presence of children does. Monogamy isn't compulsory and its absence doesn't invalidate a marriage.

I didn't think marriage worked. I thought everybody who was married was secretly miserable - that it was something they just put up with for their children.

There are four stages in a marriage. First there's the affair then the marriage then children and finally the fourth stage without which you cannot know a woman the divorce.

In interviews I gave early on in my career I was quoted as saying it was possible to have it all: a dynamic job marriage and children. In some respects I was a social adolescent.

The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering some of them self-inflicted. Why can't black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality birth within marriage parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework?

I didn't want to be one of those women who wake up at 63 years old and realize they've missed the window of opportunity for marriage and children.

Feminism is dated? Yes for privileged women like my daughter and all of us here today but not for most of our sisters in the rest of the world who are still forced into premature marriage prostitution forced labor - they have children that they don't want or they cannot feed.

I'm most proud of the longevity of my marriage my kids and my grandchildren. If you don't have that you really don't have very much.