is the director of family formation studies at Focus on the Family and the author of "Marriage on Trial: The Case Against Same-Sex Marriage and Parenting"

Many people think the battle over Prop 8 in California was about treating same-sex couples fairly by extending them access to the rights, benefits, and protections of marriage. It was not.

What birthed Prop 8 was the Golden State's Supreme Court verdict in May 2008 that marriage must include same-sex couples. But it wasn't because these couples were being denied the rights to the legal "goodies" of marriage. The court recognized that every legal benefit of marriage was already guaranteed by law to single-sex couples via domestic partnerships. The sticking point was simply that this identical arrangement wasn't called marriage. It ruled this unjust.

This ruling cast the scarlet "B" of bigotry upon all citizens who believe marriage is between a man and a woman, but also those who would extend benefits to homosexual couples. President Obama holds this very position. Is he a bigot? According to this court he is, and that demonstrates why this knee-jerk accusation of anyone who opposes gay marriage is so ridiculous.

But this was never really about the equal protection of homosexuals seeking marriage. No marriage law in the United States specifically bans any adult - gay, straight, or plaid - from marrying. Marriage law makes this right and responsibility open to all adults equally. However, marriage law in all but six states prohibits citizens from redefining marriage to fit their own desires, be it number of spouses in a marriage, number of marriages held at one time, or the sex of the spouses. These indisputable facts indicate that the real issue for same-sex marriage advocates is actually definition, not access.

The few countries and states where gay marriage is legal had to redefine marriage to do so. This new definition does not require the two halves of humanity, as had been the case in all diverse cultures throughout time - regardless of religion, law, or culture. The U.S. Supreme Court recognized that there are reasons why marriage developed as a relationship between men and women in its Loving v. Virginia ruling, which overturned state laws banning interracial marriage. Marriage, the court said, is "fundamental to our very existence and survival." The court recognized that human culture requires natural marriage.

Marriage is about the fundamental essence of humanity. Are male and female only needed in marriage and family if either is desired by the adults? This would seem to make the mystery and essence of your femininity and my masculinity pretty thin in human experience. It also changes the nature of parentage.

Do the male and female who gave their distinct and necessary procreative bodies to create the new child have any special and essential place in the raising of that child? Or can anyone do the job?

Same-sex marriage prohibits us from saying there is anything uniquely special about a child being raised by her mother and father! Both become merely ornamental. When Canada adopted its same-sex laws, it also changed the legal nature of parentage by literally erasing "natural parent" from the books and replacing it with "legal parent." No assumption of parentage in Canada can be made on biological generativity. Instead, parentage is based on who is able to establish legal rights to the child through the courts.

But isn't a child's right to be loved, cared for, and raised by his or her natural mother and father a most fundamental human right? The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child says it is. Is the United Nations bigoted? At its core, same-sex marriage is not really marriage at all, but a deconstruction of our historic and universal understanding that humanity is one nature embodied in two mysteriously powerful forms - male and female - and that the family and every human child need what both provide.

To understand how the value of male and female exists beyond bringing forth the next generation of teachers, inventors, leaders, healers, employers, protectors, and Social Security providers, think about how different your workplace or neighborhood would be if it consisted only of males or females. I ask this of journalists who call on this subject regularly: "How different would your newsroom be if it were male- or female-exclusive? Would that have no effect on the quality of your work?" They get the point. How can marriage and parenting be immune from a poverty of male or female?

I often tell my 15-year-old daughter as I drop her at school that she looks lovely today. She beams. Would these words have the same power if spoken by a mother's lesbian partner? Any daughter knows the power of a father's affirmation and the pain of its absence. My vocation is working for a world where as many children as possible are raised by their own married mother and father, which a wealth of social, psychological, and medical science consistently indicates is the surest way of elevating every important measure of a child's overall well-being. Unfortunately, every same-sex family, by definition, moves us further from this important goal. And creating intentionally motherless or fatherless families - gay or straight - is no one's constitutional right.