Divided over gay marriage

They include: a member of alternative rock station KROQ-FM's comedy duo Kevin and Bean; a Florida newspaper columnist who "loves gays"; and a professional thinker from Palo Alto.

Some profess enthusiastic support for gay rights, including civil unions, but they draw the line at marriage. One reason is a belief that gay matrimony could open the door to legalizing polygamy and group marriage.

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"This gay wedding craze is starting to spread around the country. Today a guy in Utah married five other guys."

-- Jay Leno

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Leno's joke isn't too far off the mark, says Stanley Kurtz, a scholar at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank at Stanford University. In Utah, lawsuits to overturn the state's ban on polygamy are already winding through the courts. Although legal experts question the merits of those cases, polygamy may be losing some of its taboo status.

Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman recently wrote: "What's the difference between a polygamist and

Many gay leaders are quick to dismiss analogies between polygamy and homosexuality. "Polygamy is a choice; sexual orientation isn't," says writer Andrew Sullivan, an eloquent supporter of same-sex marriage. "Polygamy is also terrible for society. It abuses women, creates a class of unmarried males [by leaving a shortage of single females] and leaves children unclear about their parents."

Nevertheless, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, who backs gay marriage, says court decisions upholding same-sex matrimony could be interpreted to permit multiple spouses. He suggests even incest between consenting adults could end up decriminalized, despite the possibility of inbred children: "After all, we don't generally ban marriages between people who have serious genetic diseases, even if the odds of a defect in their children are much higher than for brother-sister marriages."

Some gay activists are already campaigning for such changes.

Paula Ettelbrick, a law professor who runs the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, recommends legalizing a wide variety of marriage alternatives, including polyamory, or group wedlock. An example could include a lesbian couple living with a sperm-donor father, or a network of men and women who share sexual relations.