 Gallagher rejects Corvino’s view, contending that “[t]he critical public or ‘civil’ task of marriage is to regulate sexual relationships between men and women in order to reduce the likelihood that children … will face the burdens of fatherlessness, and increase the likelihood that there will be a next generation that will be raised by their mothers and fathers in one family, where both parents are committed to each other and to their children” (Corvino and Gallagher: 96). She argues that “gay marriage is a profound change to the meaning of the word ‘marriage’… . [b]ecause] it disconnects marriage from its grounding in the human reality that male-female sexual relationships are different from other kinds of relationships” (101).