His talk will be available next week in the archives section of ce.byu.edu/cw/fuf/archives.

"He said the very things I was looking for at this conference," said Margaret Yorgason of Provo. "He put things in social terms that were powerful."

Warner called same-sex marriage "a replacement kind of marriage that would weaken all marriage because it no longer would be undergirded by tradition . . . And hence marriage, redefined as a legal union of any two people, will inevitably become more casual and impermanent, and this will remain true even if some same-sex couples stay together until death."

He warned that the pressure to extend rights such as health insurance to same-sex partners does not require marriage. He also disputed arguments by the same-sex marriage lobby that granting marriage to gay couples wouldn't damage man-woman marriage.

Warner argued gay marriage would devalue the word "marriage."

"If marriage is extended to mean the legal union of any two adults, the traditional order of marriage will thereby be set completely aside, as far as the state and the general public are concerned. A different order, which imposes drastically diminished expectations and therefore offers drastically diminished potential growth, will replace it."

Finally, he attacked arguments that those in heterosexual marriages, with their increasing rates of divorce and infidelity, no longer live so differently from those in same-sex relationships.

"The deterioration has taken place in people's fidelity to the order of marriage," he said. "It has not been a corruption of the order of marriage itself."

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