However, I think the gay marriage debate is changing that and having the very useful function of educating all Americans about what it means to get married, and the serious obligations that it entails. Hopefully, though this debate, all Americans will have a greater respect for marriage. When you understand what marriage really is, you realize how degrading the casual and unconsidered marriages of many celebrities and reality TV shows really are.

Dwight Duncan, associate professor of law at Southern New England School of Law
State and federal definitions of marriage provide a legal template for society's conception of marriage. Up until now, the federal government and the 50 states have agreed on the male-female understanding of marriage that has reigned for millennia throughout the world. With the Massachusetts decision in Goodridge set to go into effect May 17, the conception of marriage as a unique, special relationship open to procreation and mother-father parenting will necessarily morph into something more like what Robert Louis Stevenson called "friendship recognized by the police." It ain't the same thing. There will be a consequent decadent effect on culture, with recreational sex and procreational sex put on the same plane. School sex education programs will have to not discriminate between the two. A preview of things to come is the New York private school that cancelled its Mothers' Day celebration on the grounds that it discriminated against a student whose parents were both men.

Andrew Koppelman, professor of law and political science at Northwestern University
The law has a powerful influence on culture. Often, when something is legalized, attitudes toward it change. That's happened with gambling, divorce, and interracial marriage, just to pick three otherwise unrelated examples. So if same-sex marriage were legalized, that would certainly help to change the way society views same-sex couples.

Thomas Kohler, professor at Boston College Law School
Law unquestionably affects the way people regard marriage, and nearly any other question a society faces. Law plays a pedagogical role in society: it tells us in a very public way what sorts of behavior are acceptable and indicates the kinds of activities that simply will not be tolerated. Law is one of society's most important teachers. One can take as examples the nation's civil rights laws, which have helped to change opinions about race and sex roles.

Law doesn't exist in a vacuum. It may shape our beliefs and our mores, but it also reflects and depends on them as well. Here, divorce laws serve as a good example. The considerable liberalization of divorce laws during the 1970s did not alone cause the meteoric rise in divorces that occurred during that decade, and continued throughout most of the 1980s. An ongoing change in the culture preceded the adoption of "no-fault" divorce laws by many states. However, the adoption of these laws gave official sanction to the idea that marriage is a potentially transient relationship, one that should be easily dissolvable, and that the prime concern should be the happiness of the adults.

Changing the definition of marriage will not affect most existing marriages, but they will affect the next generation and what they think marriage means. It will affect the ways schools teach children about family relationships, conduct sex education, and the like. It also will teach people that those who hold other views -- and these chiefly will be religious minorities -- are bigots whose beliefs, no matter how principally held, go beyond the pale of what is socially acceptable.

Gary Buseck, legal director at the gay rights group Lambda Legal
As noted two questions below, it has not been part of our American legal tradition for the federal government to be involved in the definition of marriage unless there has been discrimination in access to marriage that violates fundamental constitutional principles. Rather, it has been the role of the states to manage the civil institution of marriage. That said, it is also true that the various ways in which the states regulates marriage, e.g., the rules surrounding divorce, arguably have an effect on the institution of marriage, on how society thinks about the institution of marriage and thus on how society views married couples.

However, in the present context of marriage for same-sex couples, the question of "definition of marriage" is narrower, i.e., what couples are allowed access to the institution. Therefore, this question seems to ask whether citizens ("society") will be influenced to view married couples differently if the state broadens access to marriage to include same-sex couples.

Given how marriage is currently structured legally and how Americans currently understand marriage culturally, it seems highly unlikely that allowing access to marriage for same-sex couples will alter in any way how our society views married couples. Both our law and our culture view marriage today as a union of two equal individuals forming a social unit of committed support and obligation often, but not always, with children. Add same-sex couples to the rank of "marrieds" means simply more married couples and therefore an institution that is stronger because it is open to all.

Peter Sprigg, director of marriage and family studies at the Family Research Council
Government does not create marriage-it merely recognizes the importance of that deeply rooted human social institution. However, government recognition of marriage, along with the provision of certain legal rights, benefits, and even subsidies that accompany it, provide a strong incentive to participate in this institution. Marriage, as social science has clearly shown, provides great benefits to the individuals who participate in it, to their children, and to society as a whole, and this justifies the public role in regulating and even promoting it.

An example of how changing the legal terms of marriage can affect the institution in a negative way can be seen in the impact of no-fault divorce. The "no-fault" system (which should really be called "unilateral" divorce, because it does not even require mutual consent) has resulted in a weakening of society's commitment to the permanence of marriage, with negative consequences that have become quite clear over the last thirty years.

Civil marriage remains society's ultimate stamp of approval upon a sexual relationship. Indeed, that is probably the real reason why homosexuals seek this legal status. It is not because they want to participate in marriage as it has historically been understood, by engaging in sexual fidelity, procreation and a lifelong exclusive relationship. Instead, they seek an official public declaration that homosexuality is the full equivalent of heterosexuality. However, neither the nature of homosexual relationships nor their consequences bears out such a conclusion.