[King Prout]

"Taking all of this available information into account, the Legislature could rationally conclude that a family environment with married opposite-sex parents remains the optimal social structure in which to bear children, and that the raising of children by same-sex couples, who by definition cannot be the two sole biological parents of a child and cannot provide children with a parental authority figure of each gender, presents an alternative structure for child rearing that has not yet proved itself beyond reasonable scientific dispute to be as optimal as the biologically based marriage norm. ... Working from the assumption that a recognition of same-sex marriages will increase the number of children experiencing this alternative, the Legislature could conceivably conclude that declining to recognize same-sex marriages remains prudent until empirical questions about its impact on the upbringing of children are resolved. ...

That's the most crucial paragraph in the excerpts.
I have taken, whenever I am challenged on my opposition to equating homosexual liaisons with marriage, to stating rather forcefully: "Marriage is for the children, stupid!"
For some reason, this tends to shut dims/leftists up, at least temporarily. I guess all those long years of Clintonian iterations of the root mantras from which I derived my rebuttal has intilled in them an insuperable Pavlovian reflex of submission.

[longtermmemmory]

Which is why the media is pushing the generic "parent" in lieu of Mother and Father. A child has two (or more) parents of any of the GLBerT class not just one male father and one female mother.

DOMA should include that as a matter of law a child has ONE mother and ONE father. A step father can't adopt a step child if the natural father refuses or does not have his parental rights terminated in a court of law. Same applies for step mothers. We need to educate again that men are fathers and women are mothers AND that each is a different and the differences are needed for a child.