When President Bush stated Tuesday that "marriage cannot be severed from its cultural, religious and natural roots" without weakening society, some advocates viewed his choice of words as an embrace of an old stereotype: That gay couples would undermine the institution because they value sex over lasting, emotional bonds and they don't understand lifelong commitment.
But how to square that with the widespread image of thousands of gay newlyweds, many of whom have been together for years and even decades?
The equation doesn't add up, advocates for gay rights say, and a growing body of research supports their claims that gay couples can and do stick together -- and legalizing same-sex marriage will only contribute to the creation of more stable relationships.
"There are studies that find that the majority of gay men and lesbians want enduring relationships," said Esther Rothblum, a psychology professor at University of Vermont who is conducting her own study on couples united in civil unions in Vermont in 2000-2001, the first year after the legislation was enacted there. Moreover, while very few longitudinal studies on gay legal unions exist, "my guess is that, again, what you're going to find is that lesbians and gay men who get married are going to stay in relationships longer than the ones who don't," she said.
On average, the 400 couples in Rothblum's civil union study had been together for 11 to 12 years by the time they made it official, she said. Their relationships were comparatively shorter than those of their straight, married siblings, but for good reason, Rothblum said.
"Heterosexuals get more socialization to marry. They are much more likely to have children and it's easier to break up relationships if you don't want children," she said. "Heterosexuals also have legal marriage and up to that point gays and lesbians did not."
But Bill Maier, vice president of the conservative evangelical organization Focus on the Family, said "the research seems to indicate that (long-term relationships) are very rare and that promiscuity is still very common. ... Men tend to be less into commitment."
Not so fast, said Darren Spedale, a law and business student at Stanford University, who studied divorce rates in Denmark in 1996-97, seven years after same-sex registered partnerships were legalized. He found that 17 percent of gay partnerships ended in divorce compared with 46 percent of the straight relationships.
"Same-sex couples who enter into marriage-type relationships have obviously given it much more thought. ... A lot of them, in general, have had longer relationships previous to tying the knot," which decreases the likelihood of divorce, said Spedale, who is completing a book on the subject.
Gay couples don't have to contend with family pressure or unexpected pregnancy, said Ted Guggenheim, 35, who married his partner of 17 years last week. "It's truly about love."
Dale Bullock founded Bonds Limited, an organization devoted to bringing together gay couples seeking lifelong, monogamous relationships. Over the past decade, he's made 228 matches. One hundred sixty of his couples are male; all but seven are still together.
San Francisco is full of gay couples who "believe they're capable of manifesting a happy marriage," he said. "These are the lines of people we see at City Hall."
Caitlin Ryan, a researcher at San Francisco State University, said that most of the lesbian, gay and bisexual youth in a study she's conducting, said they would like to have families, long-term relationships and children.
But many conservatives disagree.
Most gay men "are not interested in monogamous relationships, which is the traditional definition of what marriage is," said Gary Glenn, president of American Family Association of Michigan.
In Rothblum's study, gay men were more likely to be non-monogamous than straight couples or lesbians, but she and others say there are numerous explanations for those findings.
"Let's say, for example, that you're raising a child and you tell that child I'm going to legislate against you to become college educated because you aren't smart enough. How many children are going to get a college education?" said Bullock, who agrees that gay couples seeking monogamous relationships are still the minority.
"Historically, the media hasn't focused on long-term relationships among gay men and lesbians, even though they existed," Ryan said. "I think that has an impact on believing you could have a relationship like that." Increased visibility, including the thousands of gay newlyweds, offers young people "a sense of possibility that didn't exist before," she said.
In any case, gay advocates say that non-monogamy is hardly restricted to gay couples. Some add that the consensual, non-monogamous agreements some gay couples have are honorable and preferable to the typical straight version of affairs and cheating.
If promiscuity were limited to gay men, then prostitution wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar business," said Renate Stendhal, author of "True Secrets of Lesbian Desire: Keeping Sex Alive in Long-term Relationships."
As for conservative complaints about longevity among gay couples, "It makes me laugh because half of all heterosexual couples in America divorce," she said. "One should look at so-called normal, straight couples and see that there is no longevity there at all."