"Today 20 states have constitutional bans to gay marriage, and voters in seven other states will vote on amending their constitutions to ban gay marriage this November.

Meanwhile, legislatures in more than three dozen states have passed laws banning gay marriage. Even gains in Massachusetts could be short-lived. Earlier this month, the very court that granted gay marriage in Massachusetts three years ago ruled unanimously that a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages can be put before voters for enactment.

And a federal court in Nebraska upheld that state's constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, considered the broadest and most restrictive of those passed so far.

It was a bad month for gay-rights advocates."

"Viewed historically, marriage has been a universal institution, found in every known human society, and focused first and foremost on the procreation and rearing of children. This statement certainly holds true for The United States and for the State of Washington. While legal marriage surely performs other tasks-such as creating stable households and arranging for the transmission of property-even these are primarily directed toward one goal: the protection of progeny and the binding of the generations.

Civil authority in America, as elsewhere, has intervened in the spousal contract of union because the former represents the potential child or children, the first object of marriage, and because civil authority has accepted the implicit promises made by the spouses to create and to rear that child in a stable home."

While divorce rates have moderated somewhat in recent years, they remain relatively high, leading some to conclude that marriage remains a risky proposition. Yet, confirming studies conducted in the United States, a study in Australia identifies risk factors that correlate with marital separation and divorce, suggesting that young people who commit themselves to certain behaviors can indeed look upon marriage as a marvelous adventure that will deliver what it promises.

Looking at the 2001 wave of data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, an annual panel study of more than 9,000 men and women, sociologists at the University of Queensland found that premarital cohabitation, as well as premarital childbearing, significantly increase the odds of marital breakup. While cohabitation increases the odds of divorce by 41 percent for men and 31 percent for women, out-of-wedlock childbearing increases those same odds by 63 percent for men and by 2.3 times for women (p<.01 for all variables). On the other hand, the birth of a first child within marriage had just the reverse effect: reducing the odds of marriage breakdown by 85 percent (p<.01 for both men and women).

Exerting the opposite effects on men and women were levels of education. Compared to their peers who had finished college, men with lower levels of education face significantly greater odds of divorce (from 30 to 65 percent higher odds, depending on education level) while women with less education - especially those with "year 12 or less," a correlation that reached statistical significance (p<.05) - face lower odds of divorce.

The researchers also found that religiosity yielded a negative correlation with divorce. Respondents who expressed that religion is not important, relative to those who expressed that religion is very important, face 33 percent greater odds of separation or divorce (p<.01 for both men and women).

These findings make it difficult, as some sociologists like to claim with other behavioral and health risk factors, that all people stand equally at risk of divorce. Instead, the findings reveal how divorce is all wrapped up with other life choices that men and women each make both before and after they wed.