Just a few days ago, Ross Douthat of The New York Times wrote an insightful piece on the redefinition of marriage and a few recent studies that have looked at marriage's impact on children. As Douthat points out, this is a very significant element of the issue that has been largely overlooked in the debate and all the talk about "rights," which has almost uniformly meant the sexual rights of consenting adults to do as they please. But what about children and their rights? Does society owe them any duty - such as the right to know and be cared for by their biological parents? What would the ramifications be on the psyche and identity of children if we separated biology from parenting? These are the types of questions that have gone largely unaired in the debate.

Of course, Douthat also hints that such redefinition may be a fairly natural consequence of separating procreation from marriage. If marriage is really about consenting adults' self-fulfillment and children are only an occasional (often inconvenient) by-product, then perhaps much of the ground on which advocates for the redefinition of marriage are standing was ceded years ago (on issues like no-fault divorce, abortion, unlimited access to and use of contraception, etc.). Certainly this same self-fulfillment ideology seems to be almost as prominent among traditional couples as it is among homosexual couples, which should suggest (if nothing else) that we all need to do some serious soul-searching on these issues before stepping into the arena.

And we need more people in the arena.