Does Kurtz have a hypothesis? / Jon Rauch

Thanks to Stanley Kurtz for his replies (two consecutive posts) to my and Lee Badgett's posts. I'm afraid, though, that his replies illustrate the contradictions in which he's tangled. I'm increasingly suspicious that Kurtz has no consistent hypothesis to defend and no consistent method by which to defend it.

Let's review the bidding. Kurtz says that same-sex unions caused a spike in out-of-wedlock childbirth (OWC) in the Netherlands. ("Until 1997, when the Netherlands legalized Registered Partnerships, the Dutch out-of-wedlock birthrate was notably low. After 1997, the rate of non-marital births began to accelerate twice as quickly as it had been," etc.) Confronted with the fact--from his own source--that the spike predates the same-sex unions, he shifts ground, arguing that it's the growing cultural acceptance ("cultural impact") of same-sex unions, not policy change flowing from such acceptance, that causes the spike. I think this is a serious hypothesis (marriage is as much a cultural as legal institution), but then what about America? Here we've seen a remarkable growth in cultural impact of same-sex unions over the past ten years (including lots of corporate and local partnership plans), coinciding with a deceleration in OWC, beginning just as the gay-marriage movement gets traction. Well, that's not a problem, because America defended itself against the cultural impact of same-sex unions by passing the Defense of Marriage Act and welfare reform.

Two problems here are evident. First, having propounded that it's cultural impact rather than policy change that explains the decline of marriage in Europe, Kurtz turns around and says that it's policy change rather than cultural impact that explains the stabilization of marriage in the U.S. So cultural impact is the key variable, except when it isn't.

Second, even on its own terms, Kurtz's correlation doesn't work, because DOMA and welfare reform were passed in 1996, after the deceleration/stabilization of out-of-wedlock childbearing in the U.S.

Look, I don't like these simple correlations. But if they're going to be used, use them logically. In Simple-Correlation Land, the effect is not supposed to precede the cause.

It's fair to say that both culture and policy contribute to behavioral change. Kurtz needn't choose. But it's not fair to switch from one to the other to suit convenience.

It's also fair to say--in fact, it's emphatically true--that the U.S. context is different from the European context. But surely that principle must operate in both directions across the Atlantic: If America does not invalidate his thesis about Europe, then surely Europe does not validate his thesis about America.

I don't think it's junky to posit a relationship between homosexual unions and heterosexual behavior. But I'd like to see a consistent hypothesis, tested consistently, and without depending on conditions like "except when I explain otherwise." As of now, the only consistency I can find in Kurtz's argument is a determination to blame gay marriage first. That may be effective polemic, but social science it ain't.
posted by Jon at 8:23 PM | link

4 Comments:

At 3/04/2006 4:29 AM,  John Howard said...

The fact that we passed a doma and elected presidents only because they explicitly defended man-woman marriage, while Scandinavia did the opposite, shows that the two cultures have different attitudes about marriage. In Scandinavia the culture is 'progressive' idea and that's why both gay marriage was enacted and owc went up. In the US, people said 'no' to gay marriage and the debate probably woke them up to their own commitment to marriage in their personal sphere as well as in the the voting booth.

 

At 3/06/2006 12:46 PM,  Chairm said...

Jon Rauch,

You have shifted and now you can see the sudden spike that you disputed but that Kurtz had said was there.

The campaign to change the public meaning of marriage had its influence during the progress of that campaign. Also, the "gay marriage" legislation was followed by even greater acceleration in the pace of growth in nonmarital births.

The first boost coincided with the early phase of the campaign; the second boost coincided with the legislation and the second phase of the campaign. One spike merged into the other.

In the USA the "gay marriage" push was turned back across the country.

The cultural impact in Holland was met with political success there; the USA scenario is quite different both in cultural impact and political outcome.

It's fair to say that both culture and policy contribute to behavioral change.

You agree with Kurtz on that point.

If America does not invalidate his thesis about Europe, then surely Europe does not validate his thesis about America.

That's a nonsensical statement given the context. Holland resisted the nonmarital trends despite having ever-liberalizing laws; adherence to traditional family formation was expected to innoculate society against policy reform.

That changed suddenly. Holland is no more the exception.

Your opinion on the Holland situation is at odds with the timeline and the trendlines.

 

At 3/09/2006 4:23 PM,  leftcoastbreakdown.com said...

Am I crazy here, or are you folks all talking in a vacuum? Of course out-of-wedlock births are rising in Europe. Not because of Europe's tiny gay minority, but because in the modern West, marriage is just not as important. In a day and age where women are free to earn thier own wage in the world and men are not the sole providers to their household, this was inevitable.

The strictures of marriage evolved to secure two basic guarantees. The first guarantee was made to women and children, that their husband and father would be responsible to providing for them. The second guarantee was to the husband, who was guaranteed that his wife "belonged" to him, and that his children were thus his.

In the modern age, where physical labor is no longer the main source of employment, and domestic work is increasingly handled by the market, and where science guides childbirth and can determine parentage, it was inevitable that this contract would fade, as its guarantees became less important.

These changes, for good or bad, are driven by economics and technology, the same way that "traditional marriages" were (and by traditional marriages, I include such popular marriage traditions as polygamy and primogeniture, matriarchal domestic inheritance and arranged marriage).

There are both positive and negative effects of these changes. On the positive side, the ability of women to free themselves from unsatisfactory marriages and domestic violence is far greater, and the freedom to marry for love is enshrined. On the negative side, the human emotional expectations that many hold about marriage are disrupted, and men are more unsure and insecure about their place in the family.

We can discuss these positives and negatives clearly, with acknowledgement of their complexity and of the little power we have to direct or manage them, and work out real coping mechanisms that fit the age we live in. Or we can do as Kurtz and the Right seeks to do, and try to find an irrelevant scapegoat. Ever since the modern Religious Right was born in the hysterical reaction to the Equal Rights Amendment (a reaction born of the shifting economic uncertainties of the Seventies, and the enormous anxiety men felt as women first started entering the workforce in large numbers) they have tried to blame the changes in the institution of marriage on the "culture". In an age where few families can survive on one income, and women, for the first time on this scale in our Western history, are on more-or-less equal economic footing with men, isn't it possible that the changes in marriage have less to do with a few million gay people, some minor changes in divorce law, and MTV, and more to do with the shifts in economic power and technology in our age of increasing autonomy and long life?

It's no coincedence, for example, that while the OWB rate has climbed in Europe, the rate of childbirth has drastically declined. It could be argued that as children have become more scarce in European societies, these same societies are much better, healthier places (by measurable standards) for the children who are born into them then they were a generation, or five generations, ago. But that would be an arguement that would need to be argued on the merits of the data, and that would leave little place for the stiff-necked spasms of self-righteousness that pass as scholarship these days.
Cheers,
Spence

 

At 3/11/2006 12:27 AM,  Cynicus Prime said...

In Simple-Correlation Land, the effect is not supposed to precede the cause.

Actually in Simple-Correlation Land, no one knows anything about what is a cause and what is an effect. That may be the major flaw in both Kurtz's argument that you're overlooking. He's looking at two variables (marriage policy/perception and the bastardization rate) and presupposing that if one changes at roughly the same time as the other, the first one that changes must have caused the second one to change. This is of course not the case.
Correlations and causations are two entirely different logical animals. For Kurtz to make a causation out of a correlation (that doesn't even exist) is seriously flawed.
Also be sure that in your argument you're not consequently just turning around the causation on him, when you should be noting its non-existence in the first place.

 

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