SSM DEBATE AT TULANE U: From the New Orleans Times-Picayune

...To several conservatives, like Katherine Spaht, a family law expert at Louisiana State University Law Center, and Jeffrey Ventrella of the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal advocacy group, the emergence of same-sex marriage threatens to further undermine traditional marriage, which is already in crisis.

But to liberals on the question, like David Gelfand, a constitutional law expert at Tulane, same-sex marriage is both a fundamental human right and a pragmatic acknowledgment that increasing numbers of gay and lesbian couples are living and often rearing children together. ...

Spaht, who helped draft Louisiana's covenant marriage law, found in the Supreme Court's sodomy ruling "an almost unbridled concept of personal autonomy" that seemed to her to undermine the law's customary view of family life, which expects fidelity and mutual duties from married couples.

Ventrella, another conservative, repeatedly argued that the same judicial respect for personal autonomy that opens marriage to gay men and lesbians now also leaves courts powerless to limit marriage to only two people.

For him and several others, marriage is a human institution that predates the law, that has benefits for society such that society has always regulated it to some extent.

But Gelfand saw the issue more in terms of fundamental human rights that the government cannot reduce without compelling reason, and as an emerging civil right. He compared the emergence of gay rights to the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, saying it will necessarily create a period of social turbulence before it is settled.

Moreover, the courts are only recognizing the reality of changing social structures, he said. Several panelists said most states long ago permitted gay and lesbian couples to adopt. And in vitro fertilization and surrogate motherhood gives same-sex couples another technique for having children. ...

Indeed, marriage is but a human institution and needs to evolve with people's needs, said Isabel Medina, a Loyola Law School professor.

Calling for more debate, she said she is so far unpersuaded that the emergence of same-sex marriage will damage traditional marriage, or that traditional, two-parent marriage particularly benefits children.

More important than that traditional family structure is the availability of good health care, good education and other social goods, she said.

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