  Throughout my various holiday visits with relatives, the issue of homosexual individuals in the church and in same sex marriages was very prevalent.
The zeitgheist seems to have also caught up urlLink Will Safire , who I could take or leave. He voices the typical version of this dialogue that says disallowing s-s-m seems to be a breach of civil rights, while allowing it doesn't hurt anyone on either side. This link, like all NYT links, will die soon, and requires registration. Wish I could help you there, but they're on to that now.
Since I've wrapped myself around this conversation so many times in the past days, expect more than a few articles to be on the topic. As a matter of disclosure, I'm totally for s-s-m, but begrudgingly because I don't think the government should have anything to do with marriage anyway. There's already common law marriages that make living together a legal marriage for tax purposes, and that should certainly include same gender couples. Let's just make marriage a religious institution alone. 
