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For the sake of democratic self-governance, I was relieved when the California Supreme Court upheld the will of the voters to amend the state constitution to define marriage as they wished. Progressives have tried to use the courts to bypass the rough and tumble democratic process for social change, but such resort to judicial fiat erodes the culture of self-governance.

It is particularly galling for the losers, to be sure, that in an election that went overwhelmingly Democratic, it was African-Americans who turned the tide in favor of the ban on same-sex marriage, rejecting the analogy between the civil rights struggle and gay liberation.

Yet neither do I celebrate the court victory for those claiming to defend traditional marriage. Culturally conservative Christians (I count myself among them, though on the liberal end of this spectrum) are deceiving themselves if they think that to "save marriage," they have to draw the legal line in the sand against same-sex unions.

The reason why this is so is that contract marriage replaced covenant marriage in the law of the land with the passage of no-fault divorce laws in the '60s and '70s. With this, the legally binding vow of exclusive fidelity ("till death do us part") was abandoned. In many ways, the battle has already been lost.

To "save marriage" from same-sex unions when marriage has already been transformed into a private contract is to save little from the classical Christian understanding, the gravamen of which is, in Jesus' words: "What God has joined together, let none tear asunder."

One has to wonder, indeed, whether Christians have looked the other way on a matter that is arguably of far greater importance to their Lord (i.e., the prohibition of divorce, as in, e.g. Mark 10:2-14) than homosexuality.

Whether our culture's recent privatization of the core form of human community is ultimately healthy is eminently debatable.

Emory University legal scholar John Witte thinks not: "America's experiment with the private contractual model of marriage has failed on many counts and accounts -- with children and women bearing the primary costs. From 1975-2000, a quarter of all children were raised in single-parent households. One-quarter of all pregnancies were aborted. One-third of all children were born to single mothers. One-half of all marriages ended in divorce. Two-thirds of all African-American children were raised without a father. Mother-only homes had less than a third of median income of homes with a regular male present, and four times the rates of foreclosure and eviction. Teenagers who grew up in broken homes proved two to three times more likely to have behavioral, learning and socialization problems than teenagers from two-parent homes.

"More than two-thirds of juveniles and young adults convicted of major felonies from 1970 to 1995 came from single- or no-parent homes."

This litany is significant evidence from social science of an unwholesome correlation between contract marriage and the sorry fate of contemporary children.

What then? Christians, along with other people of good will, ought rather to advocate for social reasons (as above) marriage law reform that better protects children and strengthens the two-parent family, realizing that at present what Christians have called "marriage" and what the state today calls "marriage" ain't the same thing.

The Christian understanding of marriage includes not only the teaching that this union is between a man and a woman, but that this covenant union is sexually exclusive, for life, and for the sake of children such that the violation of the vows very much involves fault.

The same Professor Witte argues that legal recognition of covenant marriage, voluntarily undertaken, is what Christians would have to advocate publicly, if, with integrity, they wanted legally to save marriage as Christians have understood it -- but even that as a free option, not a universal requirement.

What about registering both civil unions (understood as contract) as well as marriages (understood as covenant)? That does not settle the question of same-sex unions, but it does clarify what substantively is involved in any future claim by Christians to be supporting, defending or protecting marriage.

I conclude with two questions. Could not the gay marriage movement be understood as a socially conservative one, that is, as aimed at an ordered and publicly accountable sexual life analogous to Christian marriage?

Should Christian churches refuse to perform weddings with blessing of God that would not be registered as civil covenants, with provision for fault in the case of infidelity, neglect, abuse, etc.?