WHAT HAPPENED IN EUROPE?: Gabriel Rosenberg replies to Stanley Kurtz

...The first thing that struck me about the article was the leading graphic showing the rate of out-of-wedlock birth in the Netherlands from 1970 to 2003. It's a bar graph and the bars are blue until 1997, the year when a registered partnership bill passed, at which point the bars become red. Before looking at the text, I would have thought the red bars were a projection based on the trend of the blue bars. I was thus a little suprised that this was supposed to be evidence of an effect of registered partnerships. ...

Now that I understood better what the graph was actually claiming, I could start to consider its significance. Using the direct CBS numbers I noticed that the illegitimacy rate has risen every year since 1973. So the claim must be that registered partnerships exacerbated this trend. We do see from the numbers that while the rate of increase rose drastically during the 70's, the rate of increase stabilized during the 80's before rising drastically again during the 1993-1998 timeframe and then stabilizing again. ...So what might have been some of the causes of this acceleration during the time frame 1993 to 1998? I don't know, but it wasn't registered partnerships and it certainly wasn't same-sex marriage. The former didn't occur until the end of that time frame (it passed in 1997 and became law in 1998) and the latter not until after it. It seems like Kurtz might realize this because he labels his graph as "Out-of-Wedlock Births and the Campaign for Same-Sex Marriage." So it seems at times that Kurtz is arguing not that same-sex marriage will lead to an increase of out-of-wedlock birth, but rather the campaign for it will. I don't know how he proposes to stop people from campaigning for same-sex marriage, but perhaps, as the subtitle of his article indicates, we can learn some lessons from the Netherlands.

In his article Kurtz refers to the danger of a menu of relationship options. Sure enough the Dutch do have four types of living/partnership arrangements recognized under family law. And all four options are open to both same-sex and opposite-sex couples. It does seem natural to me that now that marriage has to compete with three other arrangements, [fewer] people will choose marriage. So the question then becomes how do we avoid this "menu" of living arrangements. One solution that seems obvious to me is to adopt same-sex marriage to begin with. That would weaken the drive for civil unions, registered partnerships, legally recognized cohabitation, etc. ...The choice of spouse is not a threat to marriage. It's the choice of alternative living arrangements with the same spouse. ...

...Perhaps this is another lesson from the Netherlands. Instead of arguing how married couples must have children, try focusing on how marriage helps those couples that do have children. The answer is not that it gives the child a mother and a father. A couple can cohabit and do that. They can even live apart and do that. What is probably meant instead is that marriage makes it more likely for the mother and father to stay together which is good for the child. That seems like a natural argument and one can even explain how marriage helps to keep the couple together, and how that is good for the child. But then one might ask, isn't it better for a child being raised by same-sex parents for those parents to stay together? And couldn't marriage increase the chances of that couple remaining together?

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posted by Eve at 3:23 PM | link

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