THE END OF MARRIAGE IN SCANDINAVIA? Andrew Sullivan replies to Stanley Kurtz
...On one simple point: Kurtz
now argues that I'm having it both ways, since I once called registered partnerships in Scandinavia "de facto marriage" and now claim that there is a small distinction--in what they are called, adoption rights, and how they would be perceived in the U.S. We're into very fine distinctions here, as I have said before. But
my previous piece was in part designed to argue that, despite predictions that gays cannot hack marriage, the evidence from Scandinavia was that same-sex partnerships had a far lower divorce rate than heterosexual marriages. That strikes me as an interesting fact--and it stands on its own. ...In fact, if such relationships last longer than straight ones, even while being consigned to second-class status, why wouldn't they be even stronger if included within marriage? So my point is strengthened, not weakened. As to Stanley's further arguments, they still amount to correlations, not causes. ...So let's do the same thing in America. Take two states with very different cultural attitudes toward gay equality, Massachusetts and Texas. In anti-gay Texas, the divorce rate is 4.1 per thousand people; and the percent of people unmarried is 32.4 percent. In pro-gay Massachusetts, the divorce rate is 2.4 per thousand and the percent unmarried is 26.8 percent. By Kurtz's Norwegian logic, if you want to save marriage, adopt Massachusetts values, not Texan ones. I think it's more complicated than that.
...According to the Census, 52.1 percent of married couples are in households with no children present. Now many of these may be because the kids have grown up. Many are also because the couple has decided not to have children; or are re-married with no kids; or are infertile; or any other range of possibilities. ...If coupling isn't the de facto meaning of that relationship, what else is? That's the living, breathing reality of civil marriage in America. Given that reality, how can civil marriage be denied gay couples?
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