Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.

I suffered from a mild case of postpartum depression after my second child and the physical challenge of maintaining an overnight shift at CBS a marriage and two in diapers made the symptoms worse and everyone in the house paid the price.

My argument is simple which is that for several thousand years in Western civilization marriage has been the union of one man and one woman. Research is overwhelming that children need mothers and fathers.

Same-sex marriage would eliminate entirely in law the basic idea of a mother and a father for every child. It would create a society which deliberately chooses to deprive a child of either a mother or a father.

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.

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.