Girl meets guy. Girl and guy fall in love. They profess undying love to one another. They want to commit to one another in public. They want their love to be given an official stamp of approval. They want this from the Church, or the State, and usually both. They, and we, call this marriage.

Is that all marriage is, two people falling in love and wanting it to be publicly approved and recognised? If it is, then we might as well open it up to all-comers, including homosexual couples. Indeed, why restrict it to two people? After all, the Muslims don't.

But marriage isn't simply public recognition of a private love. It is also, and has always been, a social institution, meaning something that transcends the private dimension and has a profoundly social dimension, which makes its healthy function the business of everyone.

The overwhelming reason why marriage evolved, or was ordained by God if you're of a religious frame of mind, is because of this social dimension. It is this, and nothing else, that has led to all kinds of social, financial and legal benefits being attached to it.

Practically none of these benefits would attach to it if it was purely and simply about the love two people have for one another. In fact, if that's all it was, the State and society would have practically no interest in it at all.

The interest society has in marriage stems from the fact that children are almost always produced by a marriage. Children give marriage enormous social implications. Children give any relationship social implications.

If children are badly raised by their parents, it has social implications. If the one parent is not present in the life of a child, or eventually walks out not to come back in any meaningful way, it has social implications. If neither parent is present, it's even worse.

And so society makes a deal with us. It says to us that if we will marry for the sake of children, it will protect that marriage through the law. It will give it social approval and, conversely, it will give less approval to other relationships. It will also give us financial incentives to get married.

But now it looks like the deal is off. We are on the point of abolishing marriage as a social institution.

We have long since ended the near monopoly marriage once had over sex. That alone was a devastating blow because sex was a huge incentive to getting married, rivalling even love.

Then we began to spread around the social approval that was once attached almost exclusively to marriage much more evenly. Now we don't really care whether a couple is married or not, even when they have children. That too removes an incentive to getting married.

After that we introduced a liberal form of divorce, which makes it easy to end a marriage. Worse than that, it allowed one person to walk out on the marriage unilaterally against the will of the other person.

Now we are about to spread around the financial benefits of getting married by spreading around its tax benefits. There's a certain justification for this, especially in the area of inheritance, but stretch it too far and another incentive to getting married will fall by the wayside.

The upshot of all these developments is that soon marriage will exist in name only. It will be a religious or civil ceremony for sure, but it will have been stripped of practically all its unique benefits.

What's quite amazing is how easily all this has happened. There was a tremendous battle over divorce, and we had to introduce divorce in some form, but since then the relative advantages of marriage have been stripped away one by one, almost by stealth.

The consequence of this is that we have effectively declared we don't really care if two people have children but don't want to raise them together. We have said that we don't really care if two people who have children won't publicly commit to one another for the sake of the children - we'll give them the benefits of marriage anyway.

In Britain, America and elsewhere in the Western world marriage has been turned into a word without meaning. We are about to do the same thing here, even though the deleterious consequences of its decline, especially for children, are already painfully clear.

One of the consequences of the Bush victory in the US presidential election could be the repeal of Roe Vs Wade, the famous Supreme Court decision of 1973 that led to the legalisation of abortion across the US.

In the unlikely event that Roe Vs Wade is repealed, what would it mean? The one thing it would not mean is that abortion would suddenly become illegal throughout America. Prior to Roe Vs Wade, it was up to each individual state to decide what its abortion law should be. Some had been restrictive laws, some very liberal ones.

If Roe vs Wade was repealed, things would revert to this situation: New York would presumably permit abortion on demand up to birth; Georgia would probably permit it only when the life of the mother was under threat.

One of the big objections to Roe Vs Wade wasn't simply that it made abortion available in all 50 states and on very liberal grounds, rather it was that the Supreme Court had seen fit to set at naught the individual laws of 50 states.

In other words, the Court had taken the decision out of the hands of state legislatures and, therefore, out of the hands of the people. In other words, Roe Vs Wade was deeply undemocratic.

Lovers of The Da Vinci Code do not like people pointing out that, judged as a piece of history, the book is rubbish. They protest that it is a work of fiction and, therefore, should not be judged as history.

The trouble is that this is precisely how many of its readers are judging it. This being so, it's fair enough to point out its innumerable errors.

- dquinn@unison.independent.ie