Stanley Kurtz has written a long article about changing family structure in Scandinavia. It’s a not unfamiliar tale. In countries with high levels of secularism, a vast welfare state, and the option of registered partnerships rather than marriage, you would indeed expect traditional marriage to be in decline. There are other factors as well, as Kurtz details them: “Contraception, abortion, women in the workforce, spreading secularism, ascendant individualism…” All of this is not exactly staggering news. What is staggering is Kurtz’s attempt to show that gay marriage in these countries is somehow responsible for this shift. First off: the entire premise of the piece – that marriage for gays is legal in Norway, Denmark and Sweden – is factually untrue. There are no marriage rights for gays in the countries he cites. There are, instead, what are called “registered partnerships.” These partnerships are open to heteros as well as homos. So the entire premise of the piece is false. Even if Kurtz were able to prove in any way a linkage between the emergence of “registered partnerships” and the decline of marriage, it would have no relevance to the debate on equal marriage rights for gays in the U.S. In fact, it shows what many of us have been arguing for over a decade. The emergence of gay couples in society is a fact. Sane conservatives need to acknowledge this rather than run away from it. Given that such a presence is here: what should we do to respond to it? My answer is: co-opt gays into the existing and paramount institution for coupling, i.e. marriage. Oppose all counterfeits – like civil unions – which, because they are also open to straights, obviously do undermine marriage. Don’t let your homophobia get in the way of your conservative common sense. Defend marriage from civil unions and domestic partnerships – not from gay couples.
CORRELATION, CAUSES, LINKS, WHATEVER: Then Kurtz tries to argue that there is a causation effect between registered partnerships for gays and the decline of traditional marriage. He proves nothing. There are so many independent variables – from secularism to contraception to cultural gender roles and on and on – that such a conclusion is intellectually preposterous. Kurtz does his best to hide this obvious truth. Check the words: the decline in marriage and gay registered partnerships are “linked”; they are both “an effect and a cause”; in the same paragraph, same-sex marriage has “undermined” marriage – then it has simply “locked in and reinforced” an “existing trend;” the decline of marriage “closely tracks” the emergence of gay registered parttnerships. Please. The decline of smoking in America “closely tracks” the success of Republicans in Congress in the 1990s. So what? These kinds of unsubstantiated correlations, slippery links and simple associations would be laughed out of a freshman social science class. Did no one edit this? The truth is that for several decades, revolutions in contraception, feminism, the economy have all severed the linkage between marriage and procreation. If you want to take the institution back, go ahead and try. Or go visit Saudi Arabia (or Muslim enclaves in Scandinavia) where those connections are still tightly bound. But to pin all the change in marriage on gay couples – the only group that has had nothing to do with marriage decline in this century – is grotesque. And given that coupling – not procreation – is what civil marriage now is, we have two options. Accelerate the decline by devising new and more elaborate marriage-lite options for gays and straights (which is now, bizarrely, the position of National Review); or arrest it by bringing gays into the real institution and ask the same standards of them that we ask of everyone else. Then get rid of all the counterfeits. The great sadness of the last two decades is that many of us tried to persuade conservatives that they should put their defense of marriage before their fear and loathing of gays. For most, but not all, conservatives, we failed. What’s left is a Republican party devoted primarily to exclusion and fear – and to undermining the very institution they want to defend. And they still don’t see it. Maybe it will take their own destruction of civil marriage before they do.
CORRECTION: In tackling Krugman, I committed an error of hyperbole. I wrote that he had said that the “entire reason” for the deficit was tax cuts. He said the “main reason.” He did, however, omit any reference to the vast increase in discretionary domestic spending under Bush.
The Dish 