When Dean Hara married his longtime partner, former Massachusetts Rep. Gerry Studds, he wasn't thinking about the rights, benefits and protections of marriage that advocates always talkabout.
"We usually talkabout plot--you might say that comedy ends in marriage but that it's about frustrated love and overcoming obstacles to romantic pairing, " says Witmore.
But they kept their marriage together, and a lot of the Republicans who have condemned them and who talkabout their platform of family values, interestingly, didn't keep their own families together.
"There has been a realisation among college-educated Americans that marriage is actually a pretty good idea, even if they don't like to talkabout it in public, " argues Bradford Wilcox.