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The AFM's office location is a secret, and its entrance in a nondescript office park is unmarked. Daniels says the death threats started in 2001, when the AFM announced plans to introduce the amendment in the House. He has since come to expect them with each political success.

"The movement trying to destroy marriage is a very hateful, angry movement," Daniels says. "The anger and hatred from many of the activists is quite intense."

Daniels's passion for preserving the traditional family stems from the conviction-solidified during law school and doctoral studies in politics at Brandeis University-that the courts are dismantling America's democratic processes. "For him it's very much a sense of calling … that this is what he has been equipped and called to do," Hammond says.

His calling to defend the traditional family also comes from an urgent sense of responsibility toward his children and future generations. "If we fail to protect the legal status of marriage, our children will inherit a wasteland," Daniels says. The erosion of traditional marriage "will change our social and cultural DNA."

Violence and abandonment marked Daniels's own unhappy childhood. He grew up in New York City's Spanish Harlem, the son of a nominally Catholic mother and a father "intellectually hostile" to the gospel.

Daniels was two when his father, a writer and Russian-speaking translator, abandoned the family. It was the second of four marriages he would desert, leaving "a trail of human suffering in his wake." Daniels recalls the uncertainty and fears of the resultant poverty.

"There was the constant sense that something terrible could happen to us at any moment," he says.

One night Daniels's mother got off at the wrong bus stop on her way home from work. Four men attacked her. Badly beaten and permanently disabled from a broken back, she turned to alcohol. She ended up on welfare.

Such experiences toughened Daniels; little seems to faze him now. He shrugs off criticism-which pours in from both liberals and conservatives-and relishes taking on critics.

He enjoys recounting stories of hostile press interviews and goes into such encounters believing he has more to gain than lose. "You know why I do these interviews even when I know they will do an ambush?" he asks. "It's because the public is so deeply with us that any coverage increases our support."

Young says that Daniels seems to thrive amid conflict: "He's a very strong person." He notes that Daniels regularly disarms angry reporters from gay-rights publications or advocacy groups. "He dumbfounds them," he says. "He's quick on his feet."

Once after a hostile press conference, Fauntroy received a torrent of angry threats after gay-rights activists made public his home phone number. "Matt came to his defense like a tiger," Young says. "He got on the phone with the group and said what an affront it was, that they were supposed to be about justice and human rights. He took them on."

Yet Daniels is no darling of the Right either. Some conservative groups, including Concerned Women for America (CWA) and the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), criticized the Federal Marriage Amendment because it does not prevent state legislatures from approving same-sex civil unions and marriage benefits.

"The issue is, what is the legal recognition we give to people?" HSLDA chairman and general counsel Michael Farris says. "If [homosexual couples] can get 100 percent of the benefits of marriage, that's marriage. And if Matt Daniels is willing to give them that, he's disillusioning people and destroying the pro-family movement permanently."

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September 2004, Vol. 48, No. 9