Mel White is founder and director of SoulForce, an interfaith group committed to “ending spiritual violence perpetuated by religious policies and teachings against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.”

E.J. Graff is the author of What is Marriage For?: The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution (Beacon Press, 2000) and an advocate for same-sex marriage.

• A poll released Aug. 3, 2005, by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that 78 percent of Americans favor allowing public schools to provide students with birth control information while 76 percent believe schools should teach teenagers to abstain from sex until marriage. Solid majorities in every major religious […]

A January 2004 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation, National Public Radio and the John F. Kennedy School of Government, found that 15 percent of Americans want abstinence-only sex education taught in schools, and 46 percent want abstinence taught along with contraception. Only 7 percent said they did not think sex education should be taught […]

Evan Wolfson is a lawyer and executive director of Freedom to Marry. He argued the Boy Scout case before the Supreme Court, as well as the Hawaii marriage case.

Charles A. Cesaretti is executive director of the Center for Sexuality and Religion, which helps faith communities sexual spiritual health and justice. It is based in Wayne, Pa.

Lou Sheldon is chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, a conservative group that wants a constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage, ban same-sex unions and ban gays from receiving benefits of any such unions.

Salim Yaqub is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He specializes in U.S. foreign relations and is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where he wrote about the relationship between Americans and Arabs in the 1970s.

Robert Cochran Jr. is Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law and director of the Institute on Law, Religion and Ethics at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif. He is the editor of Faith and Law: How Religious Traditions From Calvinism to Islam View American Law.