You may recall that one of the nuttier arguments made by the opponents of marriage equality in years gone by is that it would directly lead to the decline of marriage as an institution. Stanley Kurtz, a once-sane conservative scholar who is now busy trying to prove that Barack Obama is actually a cross between Malcolm X and Yasir Arafat, was first out of the gate. He argued (against the bulk of the evidence) that this had been the pattern in Europe.
Well, it's still early but we do have some data on divorce and marriage rates since the debate over same-sex marriage began in the early 1990s, and expanded since:
Roughly 75 percent of those who have married since 1990 reported they had reached their 10-year anniversary. That's up about 3 percentage points for both men and women who married a decade earlier in the 1980s, when divorce rates in the U.S. had peaked, according to census figures released Wednesday.
Or this summary in the conservative Deseret News:
Six months after Time magazine asked "Who Needs Marriage" on its cover, the U.S. Census Bureau has released new statistics that seem to show marriage making a comeback. "Marriage is actually becoming more stable in America and the divorce is becoming less common," Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia told ABC News. The Census Bureau reported that while Americans are waiting longer to marry, the divorce rate has dropped and the average duration of marriages is rising.
Now I don't believe for a second that marriage equality caused this increase in marriage longevity in the US, although it would be nice to think so. But the case that it would hurt opposite-sex marriage must surely be abandoned by those with intellectual integrity. How about it, Stanley?
The Dish 