Second opinions.

"As you all very well know, marriage is under vicious attack now, I think from the forces of hell itself. And ... I believe with that destruction of marriage will come the decline of Western civilization itself."

--Focus on the Family chairman James Dobson during his daily radio show, Family News in Focus, May 30

"I remain puzzled that gays and lesbians are not taking their battle for true equality to the streets in huge numbers. That could be part of the reason that the newspapers have not taken up their cause as a priority [in their editorials]."

--From a June 6 editorial by Joe Strupp in Editor & Publisher, the trade magazine for the U.S. newspaper business

"A vote for this [antigay marriage] amendment is a vote for bigotry--pure and simple.... It's a vote to impose discrimination on all 50 states, denying them their right to interpret their own state constitutions ... [and it's] inconsistent with our values and our humanity."

--Sen. Edward Kennedy in a Boston Globe editorial, June 5

"Only Harper Lee can say whether Harper Lee was gay, or whether, as [her friend Truman] Capote suggested in a letter, she was 'unhappily in love with a man impossible to marry' (possibly her married literary agent)."

--Margot Mifflin, in her June 6 Salon.com review of Charles Shields's Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, the first biography of the reclusive author of To Kill a Mockingbird