The debate on gay marriage is full of conjecture and assumption on all sides. In preparing for a recent panel discussion on gay marriage, I looked for resources that could help me cut through the various facets of marriage and its history. I found those resources in The Meaning of Marriage.

This book is a collection of essays that take different approaches to marriage and its recent development in the United States. As a complex social institution, all too often discussion on marriage is over-simplified depending on the area of expertise (or for that matter, the agenda) of the author. This book overcomes those problems by presenting a wide range of thinkers from a variety of fields to present their views on marriage. It takes approaches from the law, philosophy, sociology, history, economics, and religion and puts them into a concise volume.

The essays themselves are easy to access and digestible, even for readers not fluent in the fields the author is coming from. The authors are well-known and respected in their fields of study. They provide fresh intellectual ammunition that seems lacking in the gay marriage debate by answering and providing a framework to discuss what marriage has meant, what it means, and what it should mean.

Many of the essays shed light on the philosophical underpinnings of marriage that make it possible to overcome the various rhetorical traps gay marriage advocates use to deconstruct the traditional view of marriage. The legal analyses bring to the fore some of the disturbing and absurd trends in marriage law that has virtually made marriage into nothing more than any relationship between two people who share property. For instance, recent court decisions have stated that sex is not required nor an essential component of marriage. Lastly, the sociological discussions take apart the recent studies that gay marriage advocates like to use to defend their viewpoints even though those studies are fatally flawed.

The collection is a timely work that presents the history and theory of marriage in a cogent manner that makes discussing marriage policy not only possible, but can provide a framework for actually coming to a serious policy other than the typical libertarian "do-whatever-you-want" nonsense that ends up going nowhere.

The essays:

1. "Sacrilege and Sacrament," by Roger Scruton
2. "What About the Children? Liberal Cautions on Same- Sex Marriage," by Don Browning
3. "Changing Dynamics of the Family in Recent European History," by Harold James
4. "Why Unilateral Divorce Has No Place in a Free Society," by Jennifer Roback Morse
5. "The Framers' Idea of Marriage and Family," by David F. Forte
6. "The Family and the Laws," by Hadley Arkes
7. "What's Sex Got to do with It? Marriage, Morality, and Rationality," by Robert P. George
8. "Soft Despotism and Same-Sex Marriage," by Seana Sugrue
9. "(How) Does Marriage Protect Child Well-Being?" by Maggie Gallagher
10. "The Current Crisis in Marriage Law, Its Origins, and Its Impact," by Katherine Shaw Spaht
11. "Suffer the Little Children: Marriage the Poor, and the Commonweal" by W. Bradford Wilcox