The National Conference of State Legislatures’ website includes a summary page on marriage.

Twenty-seven bills involving marriage and family status were pending in Congress in June 2013. Track the status of these bills at Govtrack.us.

Read a Nov. 8. 2012, article from Religion News Service, posted by the Huffington Post, about gay marriage in the 2012 elections. Voters in Maine, Maryland, and Washington state voted in favor of measures legalizing gay marriage. The 2012 election brought the total number of states what allow same-sex marriage to nine.

An August 10, 2011 report from the Brookings Institution details the growing “instability” of family life among young adult couple who have finished high school but do not have a four-year college degree.

St. John’s Community Development Corp., a project of St. John’s Baptist Church in Miami, to create affordable housing and offers home ownership counseling. It has created more than 40 homes and multifamily units.

Rabbi Elliot Dorff is a professor of philosophy and university rector at American Jewish University in Bel-Air, Calif. He is an expert in Jewish family issues, including adoption. He has studied the Jewish perspective on assisted death, transhumanism and ethics in general.

Joel Zimbelman, a California State University-Chico, religious studies professor, has written on legal decisions and public opinion informing the debate over the removal of life-sustaining treatment, assisted suicide and euthanasia.

Linda Ganzini, professor of psychiatry and medicine at Oregon Health Sciences University, surveyed 2,500 Oregon physicians and 500 hospice workers about patients’ experience of assisted suicide.

Darien Fenn, professor in the psychiatry department at Oregon Health Sciences University, has studied the attitude of Oregon psychologists toward physician-assisted suicide and the Oregon Death with Dignity Act. He can be emailed through a website contact form.