I need some help please

[justabob]

Have any of y'all done any research to rebut the article: "The End of Marriage in Scandinavia: The 'conservative case' for same-sex marriage collapses," by Stanley Kurtz, (The Weekly Standard, Vol. 9, Issue, 20, 02/02/2004)?
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/660zypwj.asp?pg=1

The gist of the article:
MARRIAGE IS SLOWLY DYING IN SCANDINAVIA. A majority of children in Sweden and Norway are born out of wedlock. Sixty percent of first-born children in Denmark have unmarried parents. Not coincidentally, these countries have had something close to full gay marriage for a decade or more. Same-sex marriage has locked in and reinforced an existing Scandinavian trend toward the separation of marriage and parenthood. The Nordic family pattern--including gay marriage--is spreading across Europe. And by looking closely at it we can answer the key empirical question underlying the gay marriage debate. Will same-sex marriage undermine the institution of marriage? It already has.
<snip>

(It goes on to cite the welfare state, radical feminism, secularism, and socialism generally as further reasons why traditional hetero-marriage is doomed)

I am helping a friend of mine do the research, but I thought someone here may have already had the opportunity to rebut this, especially as it is several years old now. We all know there are any number of reasons traditional marriage/family has declined, but my friend is debating with a Mormon he met, and needs some help with credible published work to back him up.

I have started searching, but don't know exactly how to research and find statistics on the state of marriage before 1989 which is when gay marriage was legalized there or any statistics at all in relation to divorce rates, single parenthood, population growth. (Especially in English!:) )

If anyone has any suggestions or sources, we would really appreciate it. Thanks!

edited to add link

[BrklynLiberal]

1. This was all I could find.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116191428485605594.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

I googled:
connection between gay marriage and fewer straight marriages

[Sub Atomic]

3. That's a great piece.

From the article:

Social conservatives suggest that legal recognition of same-sex couples has harmed society. Sen. Bill Frist has stated that "years of de facto same-sex marriage in Scandinavia has further weakened marriage"; similar claims have been made by Sens. John Cornyn, Rick Santorum, James Inhofe and Sam Brownback.

However, there is no evidence that allowing same-sex couples to marry weakens the institution. If anything, the numbers indicate the opposite. A decade after Denmark, Norway and Sweden passed their respective partnership laws, heterosexual marriage rates had risen 10.7% in Denmark; 12.7% in Norway; and a whopping 28.8% in Sweden. In Denmark over the last few years, marriage rates are the highest they've been since the early 1970s. Divorce rates among heterosexual couples, on the other hand, have fallen. A decade after each country passed its partnership law, divorce rates had dropped 13.9% in Denmark; 6% in Norway; and 13.7% in Sweden. On average, divorce rates among heterosexuals remain lower now than in the years before same-sex partnerships were legalized.

[justabob]

8. thanks

I am amazed to see that in the WSJ.

[Sub Atomic]

2. Marriage has been in decline for a long time.

Just check out divorce rates.

http://www.divorcerate.org/


Attempts at trying to tie divorce rates to gay marriage are another way the religious wrong demonize us.

Some things never change.

[justabob]

9. yeah, I know

What this is really about is the decline of organized religion, and the hard core religious folks grabbing at straws... which ironically, hastens the decline.

[FreeState]

4. Here you go:)

http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2008/05/28/2107


Nordic Myths
Jim Burroway
May 28th, 2008
Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa) recently published an op-ed denouncing the recent California Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage. There’s much to criticize in Sen. Santorum’s op-ed, but this statistical nugget stood out in particular:

Look at Norway. It began allowing same-sex marriage in the 1990s. In just the last decade, its heterosexual-marriage rates have nose-dived and its out-of-wedlock birthrate skyrocketed to 80 percent for firstborn children.

Anti-gay activists are returning once again to Scandinavian marriage and birthrate statistics as real-world examples of what happens when you allow same-sex marriage. The argument goes something like this: If you allow same-sex marriage like Scandinavia did, then you will soon see rising out-of-wedlock birthrates and a general breakdown in marriage.

But right off the bat, Sen. Santorum gets it wrong about same-sex marriage in Norway because there is no same-sex marriage there. Instead, Norway as adopted a limited form of civil unions. Norway’s 1993 civil unions laws, for example, do not permit adoptions by same-sex couples (although Norwegian law was later changed to allow a parent to adopt his partner’s children). Norway also prohibits artificial insemination for same-sex couples as well.

<snip>

But we can verify that Norway’s overall birth rate outside of marriage is pretty high, and it has been for quite some time. We can see this by combining data from Norway’s Statistical Yearbooks for 2007 and 1996 and plotting that data on a single graph. When we do that, we can see that the rate of births outside of marriage had skyrocketed throughout the seventies and eighties, only to level off somewhat in the 1990’s and 2000’s.


But more specifically with respect to civil unions, look at what the data tells us:

Before 1993, the percentage of births outside of marriage grew steadily by an average of about 9% per year.

After civil unions were enacted in 1993, the growth of that birth rate slowed dramatically. The the growth rate fell from 9% per year to an average of less than 1.5% per year between 1993 and 2006.

Which means that if there were a cause and effect between Norway’s birth rate outside of marriage and providing civil unions for same-sex couples, the data suggests that civil unions actually had a dramatic affect in slowing the rate of births outside of marriage.

[justabob]

11. that is great, thank you

Refutes, almost line by line, the article in the op. Thank you so much.

[Warpy]

5. Face it, we women are just living too long

Back in the good old days, men would marry us for life and rest assured that yearly childbirth would kill us off within a decade at most so that replacing us with a younger, racier model was always just right around the corner. Since most of the children we produced also succumbed to the usual childhood diseases, life was good for him--few mouths to feed and a new bed partner every few years.

Now we just insist on hanging on and on and on and divorce is too damned expensive for men and women of modest means. Dispensing with marriage, itself, looks like a pretty logical step for people who don't have the means to dissolve it when it's time.

When 50+% of marriages end in divorce, it's a clear signal that something is wrong with the institution, not with the people trying to live within it.

I certainly don't want to go back to the days of no birth control, no vaccines, and an early death for women just to preserve an institution that doesn't work very well now that we have improved health and longevity.

However, that's what's killing marriage, not opening it to same sex couples. It just doesn't work any more.

[justabob]

14. i have never thought about it that way

but you are right. It is interesting (and important to notice) just how much is tied into the same-sex marriage debate.

[xchrom]

18. there's nothing wrong with marriage or divorce.

all of the 'old' restrictions on marriage are over.

our parents don't find partners for us anymore -- we don't live in villages any more -- we don't have clan elders anymore.

the social restrictions on getting separated have lifted.

on the other hand we have left marriage up to the whims of love and romance.
well -- talk about two things subject to change.

without the severe outside limitations of previous generations -- people are free to make their own 'mistakes' -- and rectify them as they see fit.

[Mabus]

6. Found divorce/marriage rates in Sweden

http://micpohling.wordpress.com/2008/01/30/sweden-marriage-and-divorce-rates-1950-2005/

[justabob]

16. thanks

Graphs are always helpful. I appreciate it.

[Iterate]

7. I'd like to help.

I'm not familiar with this article beyond the first reading, but I do have a background, once-upon-a-time, in sociology and data analysis. What I can say now is probably what you already know - that the article is chock full of twisted conservative assumptions, misstated research conclusions, conflation of correlation and cause, on and on. You must know their game already, and this one is a real rats nest.

What I've found useful in the past is to go line-by-line and make notes on every sentence, look up every study. It's tedious, but it works. Soon enough it all comes untied.

I'll start with a couple hours searching to see if I can find anyone who's already done the heavy lifting. Post or PM what you've already found and I'll do the same when I get somewhere.

[justabob]

10. the statistical contortions

in the article are something, aren't they? I was also taken by how many uses the Weekly Standard article could be set against.... taxes, welfare, feminism.... remarkable bang for the buck in that piece. *sigh*

Thanks for the help. I am just getting started, my friend just approached me an hour or so ago so I haven't gotten very far. There is always that first openning struggle to find the right key words when starting out.

[bluedawg12]

12. Their fallacy is lining up data side by side and then claiming cause and effect.

For example:

"Same-sex marriage has locked in and reinforced an existing Scandinavian trend toward the separation of marriage and parenthood."

As if a change in one aspect of society having to do with the word marriage, affects another aspect of society having to do with the word marriage.

Of course, the rightwing has not disappeared, and simply because they are out of power does not mean they won't continue using the same mindless logic they have always used.

Look at the cohort that got the talking points: Brownback, Satanorum, and the rest.

The fear driven social conservatives eat this stuff up and they spread the word in well established patterns, through speeches, emails, blogs, the pulpit it's like a cancer in it's uncanny ability to metastasize.

[justabob]

15. here's a couple of things

http://www.slate.com/id/2100884/

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2006/11/marriage_in_sca.html

I think my friend will have enough for the next round, but I am going to keep digging.... for the round after that :)

on edit:


http://brneurosci.org/gaymarriage2.html
http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/national/2008/06/11/an-economic-boost-from-gay-marriage.html
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1066349/postshttp://pewresearch.org/pubs/820/two-perspectives-on-gay-marriage
http://fora.tv/2007/03/14/Gay_Marriage_Debate
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/660zypwj.asp?pg=2
http://www.cbn.com/CBNNews/News/040510a.aspxhttp://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/2006/09/12/USTPstats.pdf
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr56/nvsr56_07.pdfhttp://firstthings.org/page/research/out-of-wedlock-pregnancy-fact-sheet
http://www.rainbows.org/statistics.htmlhttp://marriage.rutgers.edu/Publications/SOOU/TEXTSOOU2007.htm

[Iterate]

17. I noticed right off the bat...

that they had used nearly the same data about Scandinavia years before to argue their agenda then, whatever it was at the time -against equal pay, childcare, pro-restrictive divorce laws, etc. I suppose it saves on real research when you can do that.

I also remember seeing, some years before, a county-by-county map of the US with marriage/divorce/spousal abuse demographics overlaid. No shit, it looked like a map of the red states. Specifically, it looked like a map of antebellum slaveholders. At a glance it suggested that poverty, lack of education, and injustice were were mighty big factors.

I also noticed that Sweden specifically had a recession from '74 to '80 and from '90 to '94 that matches upturns in divorce. I'm looking now for a study I vaguely remember about marriage and economic justice/social stability. Slight changes is the Swedish rates since the article was written suggests that if there ever was a correlation (which I doubt), the opposite conclusion can be drawn since then.

On the face of it, anyone who carelessly compares Scandinavia with the US is an idiot to begin with. Why Scandinavia? Since most of us are Latino, African, German, Irish, Italian, or Asian -and presumably brought some of those cultures with us- why Scandinavia?

The Slate article is particularly good -

Take a look at this, a more meaningful comparison of divorces per marriage worldwide:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/peo_div_per_100_mar-people-divorces-per-100-marriages

Counties which have not enacted gay marriage, or did so more recently, rank as high or higher than Sweden. If there was more that a coincidence of numbers it would be clear.

[bluedawg12]

19. The rw hates Scandanavia and Sweden because they think

they are all socialists. That's their buga-boo word. :scared:

[Iterate]

23. And all those damned Minnesotans,

North Dakotans, and Iowans with their evil farm co-ops and evil community telephone exchanges(all socialist). They'll be the downfall of us all.

[bluedawg12]

26. Yeah. Lief Erickson invented socialism.

Boo! I said, "socialism."

Boo! :eyes:

[nikkos_71]

21. Thank you ALL

I am new to DU and was referred by my friend Justabob. All the responses are great and have given me more than enough ammo to continue my conversation with my mormon email buddy. This is my first of many posts here, I hope. Now off to do some reading...

[justabob]

24. hi nikkos!

:hi:

[FreeState]

25. Hey if you need any help

let me know... Im a former Mormon so I might have some insight into how to help get a point across or understanding thought patterns etc. Feel free to message me (there are several other Gay Mormons here as well - sorry cant remember their names...).

Welcome to DU!

[justabob]

13. Damn... I love this place

Thanks everyone! Great articles and comments, I really appreciate it!

[bluedawg12]

20. The LOWEST divorce rate is in Massachusetts.

The highest is in the bible belt.

[Iterate]

22. Baptists have the highest divorce rate.

"The Associated Press 12/30/99 1:31 AM Eastern

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) -- Baptists have the highest divorce rate of any
Christian denomination, and are more likely to get a divorce than
atheists and agnostics, according to a national survey."

""While it may be alarming to discover that born-again Christians are more
likely than others to experience a divorce, that pattern has been in
place for quite some time," said George Barna, president of Barna
Research Group.

A Birmingham minister, the Rev. Stacy Pickering, said the numbers are
skewed because Baptist churches encourage young people to get married --
sometimes before they're ready -- before living together.

"Fewer people are getting married and the number of couples living
together has increased," said Pickering, minister of young married adults
and director of counseling at Shades Mountain Baptist Church.

He said his church now requires premarital counseling for couples who
want to marry at the church. "


http://www.divorcereform.org/mel/rbaptisthigh.html


While divorce correlations are notoriously tricky and difficult(let alone causality), the relationship of divorce to youthful marriages has been shown consistently.

So there you have it, in order to save marriage as an institution, ban marriage amongst born-again Baptists and those under thirty.

[bluedawg12]

27. I bet warm weather leads to high divorce rates.

That makes as much sense as gays being the cause. Gee we're powerful.,:EYES: