By Dave Anderson:
Nate Silver at 538 takes a look at divorce rates in the different states based on the different policies and legal restrictions on gay marriage and civil unions. Surprisingly, the Massachusetts is not going to Hell in a Handbasket because more people are allowed to get married and get significant pragmatic legal protections for their relationships.
those states which have
tended to take more liberal policies toward gay marriage have tended
also to have larger declines in their divorce rates. In Massachusetts,
which legalized gay marriage in 2004, the divorce rate has declined by
21 percent and is the lowest in the country by some margin....
On
the other hand, the seven states at the bottom of the chart all had
constitutional prohibitions on same-sex marriage in place throughout
2008. The state which experienced the highest increase in its divorce
rate over the period (Alaska, at 17.2 percent) also happens to be the
first one to have altered its constitution to prohibit same-sex
marriage, in 1998.
Could it be economic stress, significant education and income disparities, the lack of opportunities or other factors that could impact marriages that end in divorce? Nah, have to blame those problems on either the devil or those people... that is the only logical thing to do.
It's an amusing game to play, but ultimately kinda silly. The fundies have been pushing for convenient marriage for decades as a means of trapping a couple together with legal ropes.
ReplyDeleteThere are lots of tricks you can do to lower the divorce rate in a state artificially. I'm not even sure anyone would want to do that. It's tantamount to holding a couple hostage.
A very muddy debate continues. Universal recognition of same-sex marriage is inevitable. An essay by Donald Sensing, soon to be six years old, spells out some "uncomfortable truths" that need to be faced by those who rail against it.
ReplyDeleteOpponents of legalized same-sex marriage say they're trying to protect a beleaguered institution, but they're a little late. The walls of traditional marriage were breached 40 years ago; what we are witnessing now is the storming of the last bastion.
Marriage is primarily a social institution, not a religious one. That is, marriage is a universal phenomenon of human cultures in all times and places, regardless of the religion of the people concerned, and has taken the same basic form in all those cultures. Marriage existed long before Abraham, Jesus or any other religious figure. The institution of marriage is literally prehistoric.
[...]Today, though, sexual intercourse is delinked from procreation. Since the invention of the Pill some 40 years ago, human beings have for the first time been able to control reproduction with a very high degree of assurance. That led to what our grandparents would have called rampant promiscuity. The causal relationships between sex, pregnancy and marriage were severed in a fundamental way. The impulse toward premarital chastity for women was always the fear of bearing a child alone. The Pill removed this fear. Along with it went the need of men to commit themselves exclusively to one woman in order to enjoy sexual relations at all. Over the past four decades, women have trained men that marriage is no longer necessary for sex. But women have also sadly discovered that they can't reliably gain men's sexual and emotional commitment to them by giving them sex before marriage.
Nationwide, the marriage rate has plunged 43% since 1960. Instead of getting married, men and women are just living together, cohabitation having increased tenfold in the same period. According to a University of Chicago study, cohabitation has become the norm. More than half the men and women who do get married have already lived together.
The widespread social acceptance of these changes is impelling the move toward homosexual marriage. Men and women living together and having sexual relations "without benefit of clergy," as the old phrasing goes, became not merely an accepted lifestyle, but the dominant lifestyle in the under-30 demographic within the past few years. Because they are able to control their reproductive abilities--that is, have sex without sex's results--the arguments against homosexual consanguinity began to wilt.
When society decided--and we have decided, this fight is over--that society would no longer decide the legitimacy of sexual relations between particular men and women, weddings became basically symbolic rather than substantive, and have come for most couples the shortcut way to make the legal compact regarding property rights, inheritance and certain other regulatory benefits. But what weddings do not do any longer is give to a man and a woman society's permission to have sex and procreate.
[...] If society has abandoned regulating heterosexual conduct of men and women, what right does it have to regulate homosexual conduct, including the regulation of their legal and property relationship with one another to mirror exactly that of hetero, married couples?
I believe that this state of affairs is contrary to the will of God. But traditionalists, especially Christian traditionalists (in whose ranks I include myself) need to get a clue about what has really been going on and face the fact that same-sex marriage, if it comes about, will not cause the degeneration of the institution of marriage; it is the result of it.