SCANDINAVIAMANIA: Stanley Kurtz testifies; reporting by the San Francisco Chronicle

A Hoover Institution scholar told a House committee Thursday that same-sex marriages destroy heterosexual marriages, citing a coincidence of out-of-wedlock births in Scandinavia and the Netherlands after acceptance of homosexual unions.

But some lawmakers criticized his contention, suggesting the scholar was attributing cause-and-effect to separate, coincidental trends.

Stanley Kurtz, who holds a doctorate in social anthropology from Harvard University and is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution think tank, said the Dutch example is particularly striking because Holland had an ample stock of "cultural capital," or conservative social tradition, before it legalized same-sex marriage in 2000.

The increasingly widespread European practice -- which Kurtz said took root in Scandinavia -- of heterosexual cohabitation and out-of-wedlock childbearing was still fairly rare in Holland, Kurtz said, until the debate over same-sex marriage began in 1996.

"The movement for same-sex marriage picked up steam after the election of a socially liberal government in 1994, a government that for the first time included no representatives of the socially conservative Christian Democratic Party," Kurtz said.

The result, Kurtz asserted, is that the Dutch out-of-wedlock birthrate doubled.

Kurtz testified before the Constitution panel of the House Judiciary Committee, holding its second hearing on a federal constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex marriage. ...

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., accused Kurtz of adopting the elementary statistical fallacy of confusing correlation with cause and effect.

"You show no causality whatsoever," Nadler said, adding that he may attempt to amend the Federal Marriage Amendment, assuming it comes to the floor, with prohibitions on divorce, birth control, adultery, female employment and other social trends believed to undermine traditional marriage.

Kurtz replied that he can't prove causation but is making a systematic argument, and there is no better explanation for the sudden doubling in the out-of-wedlock birthrate in the Netherlands. To disprove him, he said, same-sex marriage advocates would have to come up with a better explanation.

Rep. Robert Scott, D-Va., asked Kurtz several times if what he was arguing was that heterosexual couples will not marry if homosexual couples do. "Are you saying that men and women are less likely to get married because two men get married?"

When Kurtz said yes, Scott laughed.

Kurtz agreed with Nadler that banning such things as divorce and female employment would strengthen traditional marriages, and he said there is a tradeoff between changing social mores and strengthening traditional marriage.

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