gay marriage roll call

[The Duke]

Nay

I'm yet to see a credible argument against it.

Then you aren't paying attention.

[The Duke]

I'm yet to see a credible argument against it.

Then you aren't paying attention.

Actually I have been.  So far every argument against it can easily be refuted.

While I'm here I may as well point out that I agree 100% with Emsworth, Philip and M&C's posts.

Not close enough attention.  The countries of Europe, (Sweden, Denmark, and Norway), that have legalized gay marriage/civil unions have the highest divorce rates and illegitimacy rates in the world (outside Iceland).  Before they legalized these changes, this was not true, and all three have seem a marked shift towards more divorces and more illegitimacy at a time when divorces and illegitimacy in other western countries have remained steady.

There is statistical evidence that gay marriage at the very least correlates with a collaps of traditional marriage.  Its not some religious hysteria.  Perhaps you simply don't value traditional marriage, but for those who do, the arguments against gay marriage have in fact not been universally refuted.

[The Duke]

Not close enough attention.  The countries of Europe, (Sweden, Denmark, and Norway), that have legalized gay marriage/civil unions have the highest divorce rates and illegitimacy rates in the world (outside Iceland).  Before they legalized these changes, this was not true, and all three have seem a marked shift towards more divorces and more illegitimacy at a time when divorces and illegitimacy in other western countries have remained steady.

There is statistical evidence that gay marriage at the very least correlates with a collaps of traditional marriage.  Its not some religious hysteria.  Perhaps you simply don't value traditional marriage, but for those who do, the arguments against gay marriage have in fact not been universally refuted.

Sorry, but correlation does not imply causation. Your own marriage is not in any way being affected by some same-sex couple getting "married." After all, they would have been living together anyway, whether or not the government calls them "married." Why should the labeling of their partnership affect others in any way whatsoever? How would one same-sex getting married somehow affect another's decision to get a divorce? Unless I can see a coherent explanation of how labeling one partnership as "marriage" somehow affects another totally unrelated couple, I would not accept this argument.

Secondly, the concept of "illegitimacy" is not something that I think is particularly meaningful to talk about. Just because a child is "illegitimate," it does not follow that his parents will be bad at raising children. Similarly, just because a child is "legitimate," it does not follow that his parents will be particularly good at doing so either. There are, for example, several instances in which a legitimate father or mother abuses his or her own child, and several instances in which an illegitimate father or mother takes care of him very well. Thus, the statistic of the number of illegitimate children is not (IMO) an appropriate argument. Rather, it is the unquantifiable variable of how the children are actually brought up by their parents (whether they are legitimate or not) is much more significant. I don't think that there should be an automatic stigma associated with illegitimacy.

Since you've just said you don't think there's anything wrong with illegitimacy, I have to question whether being reasonable with you is a valid use of my time.

Its true that correlation and causation are not the same, and you'll notice that I said "evidence" not "proof".  What is the explaination that would suggest that there is causation here?  Its very simple and straightforward.  When you change the definition of an institution, you change how people behave towards an institution.  There's a whole school of sociology called functionalism built around these precepts.  Its not that hard to figure that there's a relationship between the two.

[The Duke]

I don't mean to pile on you John, but in addition to what Emsworth stated, I must point out that the list of countries that allow gay marriage or civil unions is much, much longer than Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.  In fact, it is as follows:  Canada, Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, Greenland, Hungary, Iceland, Netherlands, France, South Afirca, Germany, Portugal, Finland, Croatia, Israel, Luxembourg, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Andorra, Slovenia, and soon in Switzerland.  This plus some regions of Argentina, Australia, Italy, Brazil, and the United States.

The most recent data I can find is 1996, three years after Norway legalised civil unions and seven years after Denmark did, with Norway's divorce rate moderately below the United States's (43% versus 49%) and Denmark's far, far below (35%).  That doesn't exactly seem like a "collapse of marriage" to me.

Sources:

1996 divorce statistics
Civil union legalisation

The source of the data is Eurostat, which is a government statistics reporting agency in the EU.  I used the data in a paper for a class a year and a half ago, but I can't find the page with the data.

Most of the additional countries you've mentioned have not had civil unions for long enough to have meaningful data.  I hadn't realized Iceland had civil unions, though it lends support to my point as they have the highest illegitimacy rate on Earth.

Here's the problem with you collaps of marriage argument.  If Country A has a divorce rate of 50% in 1995, and Country B has a divorce rate of 0% in 1995, and then ten in 2005 Country A has a divorce rate of 45% and County B had a divorce rate of 40%, would you say that Country B was doing better than Country A?  I wouldn't, but that's what your logic would seem to lead to.  America has had an unacceptably high divorce rate for thirty years, but the Scandavian countries had, until recently, pretty good numbers in this area.  The change is very recent, and its the trend not the present condition that I label a collapse of marriage.  During the period where these three countries saw their dramatic rise in divorce and illegitimacy the US saw its divorce rate level off.  In this sense, we're doing much, much better than these other countries.

[The Duke]

All right.  Well, when you find the statistics, post them and I'll consider them.

In any case, though, considering that the countries in question are similar enough to track economically and culturally to an extent, evidence is all there is.  And I don't find "evidence" enough reason to deny these people equality.

Also, did this take into account that the rash of new gay marriages probably also resulted in a rash of new divorces from those marriages?

Has Massachusetts seen a significant rise in divorces?  How about all of the states that have legalised civil unions?

Gays do have eqyality in terms of marriage.  They have the same rights as I do, the right to marry someone of the opposite gender.  What they don't have is the specially tailored right that they are now asking for.

The rash of new gay marriages would not affect the divorce rate, because the divorce rate is not a measure of total divorces, but dovorces as a percentage of marriages.  So unless the gay marriages themselves are extraordinarily less stable than straight marriages, which would seem to badly undercut your position if it were true, this cannot be the explaination.

I do not think there is subtantive data yet for Massachussetts, since the legalization gay marriage is so recent.  As for Vermont, take all of this with a grain of salt, because most couples who got a Civil Union were not from Vermont.  It also can't be said that people in Vermont have really accepted the legitimacy of Civil Unions, because they threw out a bunch of the legislators who were for the bill (Republicans gained 17 seats in the Assembly).

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/mar%26div.pdf

CDC shows divorce rates by state here, but data only goes to 2002.

District of Columbia (!) has the lowest divorce rate, followed by Georgia and Massachussetts.  Nevada (Duh) is the highest.  Regionally, New England is the runaway winner in terms of having the lowest divorce rates.  Vermont looks to be near the middle of the pack, I haven't done any serious breakdown, just looked it over briefly.  Across the board, divorce rates in the US are declining, it seems, which tends to suggest the position of marriage over here is strengthening, not weakening as it seems to be in Europe.

Didn't find divorce rates for actual Civil Unions themselves, but here is some stuff I found on Google from the Family Research Council (so again, grain of salt) that seems to indicate little interest among gays in entering Civil Unions, and substantiates the prevailing belief that gays have different ideas about committment that straight people, and that their relationships lack the duration of straight relationships.

[The Duke]

Since you've just said you don't think there's anything wrong with illegitimacy, I have to question whether being reasonable with you is a valid use of my time.

Adultery is repugnant to my own personal moral standards. However, my personal standards are not universal; I have no right to impose my view of morality on the whole of a society. Hence, I would question whether the number of "illegitimate" children should be a relevant statistic.

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There was a time when marriage was defined in some states as the union of a man and a woman of the same race. Should this definition never have been changed, because of the potential threat to how people would have behaved towards the institution?

By illegitimate, I mean all children born out of wedlock.  The changing of the definition of marriage to include interracial marriage is not, in my view, relevant here.  The prohibition of interracial marriage was a statement not on the social purpose of marriage, but a statement on the social status of blacks.  In the gay marriage case, it would be a change from marriage being designed as an institution that tames men and rears children to one that is based on love between two individuals, and I can't think of anything more dangerous to marriage than the idea that it should be based on love alone.

[The Duke]

So far, there is no legal obligation that married couples have to raise children.  In fact, childless couples seem to be perfectly normal now.

What threat to childless couples constitute marriage?  To me, the idea that marriage becoming about love is a bad thing is a...strange concept.

But it is true that most couples do have children, and are often expected by others to have children.  When someone leaves no children, we think of that as an anomaly.  So while their is no explicit obligation to have children, it is still a societal expectation that indicates a set of common values.

Here' why marriage should not be about romantic love, and this insipid Hollywood-Fairy Tales-Pop Music nonsense about falling in love and living happily ever after is bad.

In my experience, most people who are married are not in (romantic) love, and most people who are in (romantic) love are not married.  It is also true that most people take the traditional marriage vow before getting married (I actually think the state should refuse to recognize any marriage where the traditional vow in some form is not taken), which goes like this:

"[Name], do you take [Name] to be your wedded [husband/wife] to live together in marriage. Do you promise to love, comfort, honor and keep [him/her] For better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. And forsaking all others, be faithful only to [him/her] so long as you both shall live?"

So, the common conception of marriage is still that the contract is expected to last for a full lifetime, and we are dissapointed when it doesn't.  We also accept that love is a feeling.  These are two critical premises, so they must be stated explicitly.

Another of my premises is that we cannot control our deepest feelings, and in most cases cannot discern a rational basis for feeling a certain way.

If love is a feeling, and we cannot control our deepest feelings, how can we base a critical social institution whose intention is permanence, and in fact publicly pledge to remain in the contract permanently when we admit that the basis for our contract cannot be controlled?  We make a promise that by definition we know we cannot keep!

The only way that the traditional vow can make logical sense is to interpret the word love as meaning something other than the romantic love we now base our realtionships on.  To make romantic love the basis for marriage is not only illogical but it sets up dangerous expectations about what married life is like, myths we tell ourselves simply because it feels good to hear those myths.  It is not accidental that arranged marriages are more stable than "love" marriages.  Instead, love should be seen not as a pledge to have long walks on the beach together, but as a pedge to a familial love, similar but not identical to the kind that exists between very close friends, a mutual system of support.  Love the feeling should be out, and love the bahavior should be in.

Gay marriage undercuts this idea by saying that when two people who are not related and are both above the age of consent are in love, they should have the right to get married.  I just don't think that romantic love is a good enough reason to just let people marry.  This of course assumes that "love" is something mnore than a psychological construct whose purpse is to blind us from the realization that our affection of the opposite gender is not some beautiful unity of like-spirits, but is in fact nothing more than primitive sexual urges.  Ever notice how men suddenly fall out of love with their wives when their wife is over 40 and their secretary is under 30?