Is America heading toward viewing being gay in the same way as it views being LDS or Hispanic?

Philosopher Richard Mohr believes so. Mohr, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says that in order to gain such mainstream status, gays and lesbians need to work on breaking down the taboo as a step toward changing people's minds on an emotional level.

"With the collapse of the taboo, along with that goes a lot of the fear and hate-mongering," he says. "America is on the verge of viewing gays and lesbians as a complex religion or ethnicity."

Mohr is set to speak at Westminster College at 7 p.m. tonight as part of the college's Diversity Lecture Series.

While Mohr sees the nation taking steps toward mainstreaming same-sex marriage, several states, including Utah, constitutionally ban it. Utah's voter-approved ban also extends to marriage-like civil unions.

And Monte Stewart, president of the Marriage Law Foundation, doesn't see the definition of marriage changing anytime soon. He sees man-woman marriage validated by both religion and more secular social benefits that he says would be lost in a society of "genderless marriage."

Among those benefits, he says, is a child's bonding right, or "the right of every child to know and be reared by his or her own mother and father," with a few exceptions for best interest. Allowing genderless marriage, he says, would "retract and destroy the child's bonding right."

However, Mohr sees marriage philosophically as "the development and maintenance of intimacy through the means of everyday living. ... There's no reason not to include gays and lesbians."

Mohr says society would benefit by expanding the definition of marriage to nurture loving relationships and to protect against times of crisis.

He says the media are shifting opinion as gay characters appear on television and in the movies. And as people feel more open about their sexual orientation, more people will realize they have gay friends and family, he says.

A new report released Monday by the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, suggests that more same-sex couples are willing to "come out."

That study, based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau, suggests that the number of households headed by same-sex couples more than quadrupled from 1990 to 2006, with growth most prominent in the South and West. In Utah, the number of such households boomed from 400 to 6,500.

Gary Gates, author of the study, said while a population shift accounts for part of that growth, much of it is more likely due to people simply feeling more open about their relationships. Same-sex couples, he says, are "becoming increasingly visible in the most politically and socially conservative parts of the country."

If you go:

What: Richard Mohr lecture on "A Gay & Straight Agenda"

Where: Westminster College Vieve Gore Concert Hall, 1840 S. 1300 East.

When: 7 p.m. today

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E-mail: dbulkeley@desnews.com