Gay lifestyle advocates had hoped to add New Jersey to the five states that have legalized same-sex unions. The gay advocacy marketing plan includes the creation of an atmosphere of “inevitability” around the issue of gay unions. New Jersey rebuffed their bid to add that state to a recent string of successes: Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont.

The New Jersey Senate voted down the bill 20-14 on January 7, 2010. Despite the state’s 2006 gay civil union law, the preservation of legal marriage as a bond between one man and one woman is a crucial victory for American families. “This is the last hope the gay marriage movement has of legislatively approving gay marriage any time in the foreseeable future," said Maggie Gallagher, leader of the National Organization for Marriage. Note her care to specify “legislatively.”

New Jersey’s victory—in a Democratic majority state Senate— sends a direct message to all Americans: Gay marriage is hardly “inevitable.” Forty state legislatures have enacted laws that protect marriage as the union between one man and one woman.

The culture war has ravaged what all societies of all eras have recognized as the first unit of society. Strong nations are structurally dependent upon strong families. Weaken families and you imperil the inner structure of the nation. Americans understand this principle intuitively, even when they lack the rhetorical skills to debate the matter with their more liberal peers. That intuition is reflected in poll after poll since the mid-1980s. It is also reflected in the reality that wherever a state has legalized same-sex unions, it has done so without a general vote by citizens.

Gay advocates study the same polls. Their political strategy has been to seek “rights” via the state courts and to bypass the American voter. Thus, within hours of their defeat in the Senate, supporters of “gay marriage” vowed to take their fight to the New Jersey Supreme Court. Many good souls are professionally engaged in the defense of marriage.

Yet this is a battle that must be waged by every citizen. Defenders of marriage need a tactical weapon to improve the general public’s ability to articulate what marriage is and is not.

The layman requires a brief but coherent response to the claims by advocates that gay unions are “rights” and that such unions can strengthen the institution of marriage. Creative minds should be enlisted to assist in crafting one or two-line rebuttals that anyone can remember. The effective responses need to be simple enough to stick in the mind after a five-minute encounter at the office water cooler. They must be responses that are anchored in the universal human experience.

The fundamental idea put forward by gay marriage advocates is that if marriage creates stability for families, then committed same-sex pairs will add to the national stability. This is the argument Daily Dish columnist Andrew Sullivan has made—and it was effective enough to reel in Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne who admits this line of thought converted him from a supporter of domestic unions while an opponent of gay marriage to a supporter of gay marriage.

Mr. Dionne notes: “What moved me were …arguments for gay marriage put forward by the writers Jonathan Rauch, Andrew Sullivan and New York Times columnist David Brooks. They see society as having a powerful interest in building respect for long-term commitment and fidelity in sexual relationships and that gay marriage underscores how important commitment is. Prohibiting members of one part of our population from making a public and legal commitment to each other does not strengthen marriage; it weakens it.”

No, it does not. Some states–including New Jersey and California—have domestic partnership laws that confer on these “public and legal commitments” all the legal benefits of marriage—everything except the word “marriage.” These public commitments acknowledge that the gay pair intends to make their union permanent. Thus, all “rights” have been granted. Adding the word “marriage” to the menu will not increase their intent, which, in any case, is not something the law can judge.

Then, why aren’t the gay and lesbian communities content with domestic partnership laws that grant them every benefit that married persons have? No one can claim they are the subject of discrimination when they have the same benefits. What sticks in their craw is a word that they cannot change even if they wrest it free of 10,000 years of human history: Marriage.

Marriage itself is not a right. If it were, the government would have the authority to force someone to marry anyone who had been unable to find a willing partner. If what is meant by “right” is that two homosexual persons who declare their commitment have a legal claim on the same legal goods that the law provides to heterosexual couples, domestic partnership laws provide that. Logically, then, gay pairs who intend to publicly commit themselves are deprived of nothing. They have the same actual rights as married persons in those states where domestic partnership laws were passed.

What is missing in the view of the gay advocates is parity of definition—not parity of rights. They want their pairings to be defined exactly the same as heterosexual couples are. But, it is not the same. It cannot be the same. And even where courts have ruled in its favor, it does not make it so, precisely because the content of marriage is beyond the purview of any court.

Marriage joins the two halves of the human species into one unified human bond that produces new humans. Though a marriage can at some point be less than a harmonious bond, it is a bond, nevertheless, that still encompasses the totality of what it is to be human. A man alone or a woman alone or two men or two women cannot achieve the physical and emotional union of two halves, that is, the fullness of humanity, into one bond. The complementarity of the two sexes is not simply physical mechanics; it embraces the totality of what it is to be male or female. Studies prove that male and female brains are different, as are their various immune systems, hormonal systems and nervous systems.

The lifetime sharing of these differences, yet living as one unit, is not duplicated in any other form. This is nature’s decree. Marriage precedes any other social institution. It predates all forms of government and it is beyond the scope of any legal system. To deny this reality is a futile exercise in social engineering.