Did gay marriage destroy heterosexual marriage in Scandinavia,
as anti-gay pundit Stanley Kurtz claims? A resounding "no" comes
from M.V. Lee Badgett, writing at
Slate.com:
Reports of the death of marriage in Scandinavia are greatly exaggerated; giving gay couples the right to wed did not lead to massive matrimonial flight by heterosexuals. ...
No matter how you slice the demographic data, rates of nonmarital births and cohabitation do not increase as a result of the passage of laws that give same-sex partners the right to registered partnership. To put it simply: Giving gay couples rights does not inexplicably cause heterosexuals to flee marriage, as Kurtz would have us believe.
So there. Also,
over at MarriageDebate.com, Barry Deutsch argues that around
the industrialized world the state of gay rights correlates with
fewer abortions, with pro-gay countries like the Netherlands,
France and Germany having very low abortion rates. He speculates
that more sexually liberal attitudes are associated with both
gay-friendly laws and widespread use of contraceptives, which would
account for the correlation. But don't expect anti-abortion
conservatives to go for that one.