This business of preserving traditional marriage keeps getting messier and messier. Now, we've got to go after married people committing "deliberate childlessness."

Or so we are supposed to believe after an Associated Press story that ran in more than 100 newspapers around the country, including this paper. The man behind the cause is Bryce Christensen, whom AP identified only as "a Southern Utah University professor who writes frequently about family issues."

The attack on couples who choose not to have children was a flash point for a lot of women, and for good reason. They intuited what the story did not report: Christensen's real target is women.

Christensen writes regularly for the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, a conservative organization whose chief grievance is that women have abandoned their biblically mandated roles as homemakers for the work force. And blaming career women for the lack of "completed gestation" in their marriages is only the beginning of Christensen's rant.

Working mothers' children are "semi-orphans" languishing in day care and after-school programs. By middle school, they become adolescent criminals vandalizing malls.

Working wives are the reason two-income couples have bid home prices out of reach for single-income families.

They demean and humiliate their husbands, too, and rob other men of a "family wage" that could keep their wives at home.

In Christensen's view, working women aren't even very nice because their focus on jobs and careers has extinguished women's "traditionally feminine" virtues of "care and sensitivity."

I guess it was all so much better when we lived on farms and the womenfolk knew their place - in the home, performing a "score of productive skills" such as cooking, spinning thread and weaving cloth, and making their own candles, soap and buttons.

If only Christensen were living the life he preaches. But like so many hellbent on bending others to their version of hell, his rules worked until they didn't.

So he changed them. Just this once.

His wife, it turns out, works outside the home.

"She stayed at home with our three sons until our youngest was in sixth grade," he said, his voice halting. "She felt he didn't need her at home as much."

He bristled at the reminder that it was he who identified that as the age when "semi-orphaned" kids of working mothers begin committing crimes.

"I don't claim we're charting the ideal pattern for all couples," he said. "Our circumstances had changed."

What changed, said his wife, was that they needed more money.

Mary Christensen went back to teaching high school after it became clear that her husband's income would not "meet our expectations," she said. She worked part time for one year, then went full time.

As she spoke, at first, she parroted her husband.

"I resented that society put me in the position where I had to go back to work," she said. "I remember a time when cars were $3,000, houses were $27,000. But banks started taking second incomes as collateral, and that priced so many out of a home."

Then her voice softened.

"Did I want to go back to work? Yes. Yes I did." She talked about why.

She could finally buy a second car. She could help her husband maintain their current lifestyle. She loves to cook, and likes teaching cooking. And she didn't have to worry too much about her kids because they were in an after-school swimming program.

"That way they didn't come home to an empty house while I was at work," she said.

Just like the working moms her husband regularly attacks, Mary Christensen adapted. And her sons thrived.

When asked about her husband's rage toward working mothers, she sighed.

"One of the things you need to realize is that, if the wife goes back to work, there are problems that have to be dealt with. My house is still clean, for example, but it isn't neat the way I like it. You come down to choices."

She sighed again.

"I've decided I can live with it messy."