California's Proposition 8 has reignited the question of whether same-sex marriage should be legally recognized.

First, the argument in favor:

Advocates say that without legal marriage, life partners suffer unfairly. A couple can share their lives for decades, but without society's offical approval, they lack certain privileges afforded to heterosexuals.

Consider, for example, a couple who have shared a house, and one partner dies. The law generally doesn't give the survivor a legal right to inherit the house. Or what if one is stricken with a grave illness? The other partner may have no right to see the other in the hospital, or to determine medical treatment on the patient's behalf.

It's a simple question of equal rights, backers say. The laws are discriminating against a minority group. They liken it to the situation in Southern states during the era of racial segregation, when laws banned marriage between blacks and whites.

Would gay marriage hurt society? Advocates say no. How could allowing people to marry threaten commitments between individuals? If anything, they say, gay marriage would strengthen society. There have always been and always will be gays and lesbians living together, and if these relationships are legalized and recognized as marriage, they become more stable, the argument goes.

This includes the rearing of children. Some academic studies have concluded that children raised by gay and lesbian parents turn out just as well as those raised in traditional families.

Besides, supporters say, if Joe wants to marry Bob, and Sally wants to marry Karen, it's nobody else's business. They're consenting adults.

Other societies have shown varying degrees of tolerance for same-sex relationships and survived. Look at Europe, where civil unions and same-sex marriages have been in effect in a number of countries. Life seems to go on just fine, advocates say.

So what if long-standing tradition says marriage is for one man and one woman? Not all traditions are right. Tradition once supported the subjugation of women and racial discrimination. In this case, same-sex advocates might say, it's time to leave tradition behind.

But there are good arguments against gay marriage as well:

Certainly anyone who styles himself as a conservative will immediately recognize that veering from a human social compact -- a compact thousands of years old -- on very little evidence is not a conservative thing to do. It's radical.

Opponents to gay marriage say that the burden of proof is on the pro-gay side to show that no harm will follow. "But how could that be done?" they ask. After all, a 10-, 20- or even 50-year analysis might not be enough to show negative effects. A 100- or 500-year analysis might show them, but the bell would have already been rung.

Heterosexual marriage evolved in human cultures primarily for the protection and stability of women and children -- as a way to ensure the production of the next generation and to avoid poverty and social chaos. And so, the opponents of gay marriage ask, isn't the form of marriage a legitimate government interest?

They answer, they say, is yes -- the government has an interest in fostering the best possible means of producing the next generation. They cite other studies showing that children do better in a home with a mother and a father.

This is not to argue that a loving home led by homosexual parents may not be better for a particular child than a home with violent or otherwise abusive heterosexual parents. But that's not the point, opponents say. They say that public policy should not encourage any home environment that is less than ideal. Homosexuals will have family problems in the same proportion as heterosexuals, so the argument has to be made on different grounds.

Reproducing couples in general take on significant risk and responsibility in creating the next generation that is not shared, generally speaking, by homosexuals. While adoption of children by a homosexual couple might arguably be a net positive to society in a given case, opponents also note that the percentage of homosexual couples who will marry and adopt children, and then forge a positive home environment, will be small.

The ratio is so small, they argue, that one must ask whether the positive benefit to society in a few cases weighs enough to counteract what they say is the negative effect of a "normalization" of homosexual relationships -- for example, the inclusion of a message in the public school curriculum that a homosexual relationship is as acceptable as any other.

Worse, they say, gay marriage paves the way for the legal recognition of any family configuration desired by consenting adults.

Finally, opponents say, a society is defined as a group that shares certain concepts and values. Those values are not monolithic, obviously, but they define the majority at any given point in time. If society values marriage between a man and a woman, it has a collective right to impose that view as a matter of law. It's no different than any other legal restriction on behavior.

We accept laws regulating the age of spouses, the number of people who can be married, and the marriage of close relatives. Such laws don't imply that the people involved are bad or inferior, but they do reflect the community's recognition that, in the long run, such unions appear to be harmful to society.

Both sides must admit that society evolves. If the next generation is OK with gay marriage, then one might expect that changes in the framework of laws will gradually follow.

But even if American society evolves to wide acceptance of gay marriage, the question whether that evolution is good, bad or indifferent will not be answered until the new arrangement undergoes the test of time.

Meanwhile, there is only opinion. What's yours?

What is your view on same-sex marriage?