My friend is gay. She's a physician who has lived with her physician partner for 17 years. The other day, she said to me, "I feel disenfranchised. My partner is discontinuing her practice and losing her health insurance. Even though we've been together all these years, my HMO won't insure her on my policy. But, they'll insure other couples, even if they aren't married."

She shares her dismay with thousands of gay couples who feel their right to fair treatment is being trampled, who live in long-term, deeply loving relationships that are just as strong as those of heterosexual couples. While many businesses, including Coors Brewing Company, offer benefits to gay couples, the intense focus of this campaign season on constitutionally prohibiting gay marriage makes it easy for other companies to be mean spirited and inequitable in their treatment of same sex partners.

How unfortunate that some politicians, including Colorado Representative Marilyn Musgrave and Senator Wayne Allard, see political gain in isolating a significant percentage of our population. They claim that gay marriage threatens the institution of marriage as we know it, a union between a man and a woman. I am mystified as to why gay marriage threatens my marriage (which is to a person of the opposite sex) or anyone else's marriage, for that matter.

What really threatens the institution of marriage in this country is the high divorce rate. It's all the factors that contribute to divorce, including domestic violence, poverty, caring for disabled children or parents without help, and the enormous stress of catastrophic accidents or illnesses when you have no health insurance. Sometimes, it's a lack of commitment to your partner or your children. Or disagreements over values or education or money. There are countless reasons couples divorce, but I've never heard gay marriage cited as one of them by a divorcing couple.

Recently, Alan Keyes (the perennial losing candidate from Maryland who has cynically been recruited to run for the U.S. Senate in Illinois against Barack Obama, an African American, simply because he, too, is African American) was interviewed on National Public Radio. He staunchly defended a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage because, he said, "Marriage is solely for procreation." He added that because procreation was the only reason for marriage, a marriage in which people biologically couldn't produce children, was abominable.

That's a pretty remarkable position, given the fact that so many married couples decide not to have children. They must be marrying for other reasons than procreation, and that is certainly acceptable in our society. Maybe they're marrying for love, companionship, or security. Certainly, couples marrying in their 60's or 70's aren't marrying to produce children.

My parents have been married almost 64 years. They had children early in their marriage, raised us for the next 20 years, and have spent the last 40 years of their marriage happily engrossed in each other's lives. My 90-year-old uncle has survived three wives and is now married to his fourth. I know for certain that procreation is not on their marriage agenda. But, they do care for each other and enjoy a warm companionship. Marriage, obviously, is what each couple defines for itself.

So, why are we so worried about gay couples? Whether you support gay marriage or not, any of us would be hard-pressed to explain why it will destroy traditional marriage. Or to insist that it's solely for procreation. Those rationales for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, or for denying benefits to gay couples, are simply nonsensical.

Rather than focus so much energy on a non-issue-most states already ban gay marriage-perhaps we should put our effort into solving the social problems of our society that contribute so heavily to divorce, abuse, and abandonment, to all the real life pressures that undermine marriages. When our country faces such intractable problems as war, unemployment, and millions of uninsured Americans, why are we spending so much time and political capital trying to isolate one group of us rather than solving the problems that would enrich us all?