Marriage definitions vary widely throughout the U.S.

America's struggles to define marriage are all over the map.

It's more than just differences from California to Connecticut and from Idaho to Iowa — it's also how those definitions continue to be refined across the country.

Marriage definitions have been crafted or confirmed in courts, legislatures and voting booths. And in some cases, those definitions have been reversed in a matter of months.

With the exception of the Defense of Marriage Act passed a dozen years ago by the United States Congress, the definition of marriage — either the traditional union of a man and a woman or the more recent allowance of uniting same-sex couples — is an issue left for each state to answer for itself.

Gay-rights advocates point out that five states have legalized same-sex marriage through court decisions or legislative actions in the past five years, while another 10 states allow either civil unions or domestic partnerships for same-sex couples.

Meanwhile, proponents of traditional marriage point to their own successes — 41 states now have statutes or constitutional amendments that define marriage as between a man and a woman.

And in each of the 31 states where the question of defining marriage has been put to a public vote, the winning majority has favored traditional marriage.

That includes California last year and Maine this month.

In the former, voters in November 2008 approved Proposition 8, a state constitutional amendment reversing California's high court ruling five months earlier that legalized same-sex marriage. And Maine voters earlier this month repealed the same-sex law approved by that state's Legislature in June.

But the battle at the ballot box — or in the courts or legislatures, for that matter — is far from done.

In California, the secretary of state's office recently cleared five potential initiatives seeking to repeal the amendment defining marriage as between a man and woman. Proponents have started gathering petition signatures in hopes of at least one of the initiatives making onto the state's 2010 ballot — even though a recent Los Angeles Times/University of Southern California poll found that 60 percent of those surveyed didn't want to revisit the issue in 2010.

In the District of Columbia, the D.C. Board of Ethics and Elections recently announced that a measure prohibiting same-sex marriage cannot go on the next ballot in Washington D.C., saying it conflicts with the city's Human Rights Act. However, the same council is considering a same-sex marriage measure.