My death-match with Stanley Kurtz on the question of equal marriage rights in Scandinavia is beginning to remind me of Frodo and Gollum battling on the edge of Mordor with a marriage ring in their hands. Readers can make their own minds up. 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 fron 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. (I’d love to know what the latest stats are – and whether this finding still holds up.) 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. He does, however, come up with one new piece of evidence: there are higher rates of out-of-wedlock births in Norwegian counties where homosexual relationships are celebrated. Quod erat demonstrandum. So let’s do the same thing in America. Take two states with very different cultural attitides 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.
THE FAIRNESS PRINCIPLE: But there is a substantive point: Kurtz argues that civil marriage is still for procreation, not coupling. As an aspiration, that’s defensible. As an empirical matter, it’s false. 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. (I haven’t been able to find any stats on how many marriages – second, third or first – never have kids. Can anyone help?) But that’s a lot of non-procreative marriages and married couples with no kids in the house. 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? You could argue (and I think this is the crux of Kurtz’s case) that allowing marriage to gay couples makes this fact more explicit. But is it fair to deny one tiny group these benefits, simply as a means to promote an ideal that most heterosexuals don’t live up to anyway? Do you open the barn door and let out 98 percent of people, but close it back for 2 percent? Are gays, in other words, to be used instrumentally in this schema of social engineering? I’d say that that fails a very basic level of fairness and respect for the individual homosexual or gay couple. How can it not?
The Dish 