Gays have been blamed for just about every bad thing that's ever happened in human history, from the fall of the Roman Empire, to the rise of Nazi Germany, to earthquakes in California. How was homosexuality responsible for these events? Well, they happened and there were homosexuals around. There was a correlation.
Enter Stanley Kurtz, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, who is making a career out of predicting catastrophe if gay marriage is recognized in the United States. In his latest article, published in the conservative Weekly Standard, he argues we have something to learn from the experience of Scandinavia. "Marriage is slowly dying in Scandinavia," Kurtz begins ominously. "A majority of children in Sweden and Norway are born out of wedlock. Sixty percent of first-born children in Denmark have unmarried parents. Not coincidentally, these countries have had something close to full gay marriage for a decade or more." Gay marriage will undermine the institution of marriage, Kurtz concludes, and Scandinavia proves it.
There's one major problem at the outset for Kurtz's argument. There is not one gay marriage in any country he cites. In 1989, Denmark adopted a registered partnership law that granted most of the benefits and obligations of marriage to same-sex couples, with the notable exception of adoption rights. Norway adopted a similar law in 1993, and Sweden expanded its cohabitation law along the same lines in 1994. (Not until 2001 did a European country - the Netherlands - recognize gay marriages that are legally identical to traditional heterosexual marriages.) Thus, Kurtz blames "gay marriage" for worsening a host of social ills that were already present before it existed anywhere in the world.
Second, even if these Scandinavian gay partnerships could be called "marriages," Kurtz shows only a correlation between them and marital decline. For example, after Kurtz notes that marital problems are highest in European countries where gay "marriage" has a foothold, and lowest where it does not, he writes: "This suggests that gay marriage is both a cause and effect of the increasing separation between marriage and parenthood." But this is a correlation; it does not show causation.
There are also correlations between marital decline and non-gay marriage phenomena, like rising women's equality (in employment and elsewhere); no-fault divorce; rising incomes and prosperity; a generous welfare state that serves a caretaker role; longer life and better health; contraception; abortion; less religiosity, and so on. Any of these is a more likely culprit than gay marriage.
Does Kurtz conclude we should return women to barefoot-and-pregnant legal status, ban divorce, tamp down on incomes, lower the quality of medical care, ban the use of contraceptives, and erase the distinction between church and state? All of these things would probably have a positive effect on marriage rates, divorce rates, and illegitimacy - but at very high and unacceptable cost to people like him. Yet Kurtz wants to ban gay marriages, which would have negligible or no effect on the pre-existing problems with marriage, at very high cost to the lives of gay people.
In an effort to demonstrate gays really don't want marriage, Kurtz notes that only 2,372 gay couples had registered after nine years of the Danish cohabitation law, only 674 after four years in Norway, and only 749 after four years in Sweden. Notice that these are tiny numbers in countries of 5.1 million, 4.2 million, and 8.5 million people, respectively, in the 1990s. They seriously undercut Kurtz's claim that registered partnerships are destroying marriage in those countries. To reach his conclusion, Kurtz must assume a huge effect (marital decline) from a tiny cause (gay "marriages").
Even if Kurtz could demonstrate that these Scandinavian gay partnerships have somehow contributed to the erosion of marriage as an institution, he only reaches a conclusion long ago pressed by gay conservatives. It is the opposition to gay marriage that has led to the proliferation of alternatives to marriage itself. These alternatives serve to knock marriage off its pedestal as the gold standard for relationships, something feminist and libertarian critics of marriage might applaud, but traditionalist defenders of marriage should abhor.
Traditionalists like Kurtz rightly worry about the rise in out-of-wedlock births in Europe and America. Notably, registered partnerships in Scandinavia restrict or forbid adoptions or artificial insemination by gay couples. That is, these partnerships encourage the separation of wedlock from parenthood.
Full-fledged gay marriages would not encourage that separation; they would encourage the opposite. In two respects, gay marriage would result in _fewer_ children being raised by single or cohabiting parents. First, there are about 150,000 gay couples in the U.S. right now raising children. Yet these couples cannot marry. Current law guarantees these children will be raised in unmarried households. Second, most gay parents get their children from prior heterosexual marriages or relationships that many of them entered because of the pressures created by anti-gay social stigma. To the extent gay marriage increases social acceptance, and provides models of married gay couples, we should expect these people to be channeled earlier into gay relationships and away from doomed heterosexual relationships that produce children.
Most telling, perhaps, is Kurtz's apparent resistance to changing no-fault divorce laws. Of all the legal changes to marriage over the past 40 years, no-fault divorce has had the greatest impact on the institution. Next to it, gay marriage as a legal reform is trivial. This shows, I think, that Kurtz isn't really serious about defending marriage. Like the many doomsayers before him, his goal is to keep gays down.
One Comment for “Are Gays Wrecking Marriage in Scandinavia?”
posted by Zydar C. on
Well, to be frank, the issue of homosexual marriage remains a contentious issue even up until now. As a rule, I have nothing against gay marriage (after all, what two or more people of either gender do in the privacy of their bedroom is none of my concern, as long as it does not affect me) But I do view gay marriage as pointless. In its basest form, marriage should be recognized by the state as a social contract between a man & a woman. He provides her with shelter, protection, and the basic necessities of life, and she in turn consents to bear his children, thus continuing his direct genetic lineage. I mean, if homosexuals want more rights such as those found in prenuptial agreements on matters such as division of property, partner support, etc. in civil partnerships, then I would fully support it. But like I said, I don’t see the point in gay marriage. Just my two cents.