Gay marriage saves straight marriage! / Jon Rauch

Having gotten that out of my system, I'd like to amplify Lee Badgett's cautionary note about correlations, including Maggie's and (especially) those of Stanley Kurtz, who purports to show that same-sex unions caused an increase in out-of-wedlock childbirth in the Netherlands. Here are a couple of correlations that involve a country of indisputable relevance to the U.S., namely...the U.S. (Please click on the charts to see them full-size.)

Here's out-of-wedlock childbirth:

And here's the percentage of children living with two married parents:


In American, same-sex marriage hit the national radar screen in 1993, when Hawaii's supreme court stepped toward mandating it, setting off a furor. In the years since then, cultural acceptance of same-sex unions (marriage and civil unions) has soared, from literally unmeasurable (pollsters had no reason even to ask) to 60 percent combined support in the 2004 election exit poll. Obviously, there has also been a major backlash, but the growth in acceptance has been remarkable.

Now consider the charts: America's calamitous increase in out-of-wedlock childbirth starts in the 1960 and then decelerates to a much lower trend (stability, in the case of blacks) right around the time gay unions get cultural traction. And, after years of decline, the percentage of children living with two married parents stabilizes around the time gay-marriage catches on.

If I believed in simple correlations (see my exchange with Stanley Kurtz, here and here), I might be tempted to say something like this:

"Coincidence? I don't think so! After decades of remorseless deterioration, these sudden positive changes are remarkable, and they call for some explaining. What could be happening? Well, it's not a sudden onset of contraception, or a collapse of communism. But one important thing did change, and how: gay unions got traction in American culture and law--and their effect was to broadcast a powerful message that marriage and serious relationships go together, and that marriage is so important that no one should go without it. At a minimum, this means that the conservative case against same-sex marriage has been refuted in the American case." (If you've read this article by Stanley Kurtz, those words should sound familiar.)

I don't believe in simple correlations. In reality--although I do see the U.S. gay-marriage movement as of a piece with the marriage movement at the grassroots and popular levels (the elite picture is more mixed)--I don't know why the out-of-wedlock childbirth and two-parent trends changed in the mid-1990s, and I don't think anyone else does, either. But I do think three points can be made:

1) There are lots of simple correlations out there, and it's not clear what any of them tells us.

2) Whatever one may think is going on in the Netherlands and Scandinavia, the American situation is clearly different. (Which is why, in the context of the U.S. debate, I've put little stock in claims one way or another about those other countries.)

3) These data offer no support for the claim that cultural acceptance of same-sex unions is part and parcel of a cultural flight from marriage. Not in the U.S., anyway.

posted by Jon at 11:26 PM VOTE

1 Comments:

At 3/03/2006 1:26 AM,  José Solano said...

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Kurtz has acknowledged numerous factors in his "Going Dutch" article. We need to understand the entire sexual revolution climate of the Netherlands to see how they have arrived at where they are. For details on this sexual revolution do see

http://opine-editorials.blogspot.com.

A couple of fascinating articles describing this powerful work to realize the ultimate sexual revolution in the Netherlands can be found here:

http://www2.fmg.uva.nl/gl/radsex.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v010/10.2hekma.html

One can see how intimately homosexuality is tied in with the entire process. Nothing quite like this has been allowed to flourish yet in the US.

 

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