FIC Blog

Amid all the other battles raging for the future of the family in Connecticut, new information continues to emerge demonstrating why same-sex “marriage”/civil unions will be bad for marriage in Connecticut. Stanley Kurtz’s careful rebutting of his critics helps to lay out the connections:

So Scandinavia leads the world in parental cohabitation and the legal equalization of cohabitation and marriage. Amazingly, even as he claims to defend marriage, Eskridge actually endorses this system. Meanwhile, Sweden has seen the birth of a political drive to abolish marriage and recognize polyamory. That doesn’t look like “nordic bliss” to me. Also, Eskridge has absolutely nothing to say about the continued decline of marriage in Norway, the actual center of my Scandinavian case. And today we’ve learned that the effect of introducing same-sex partnerships to Sweden in 1987 unravels Eskridge’s already weak statistical case there. Combine these Scandinavian examples with the Dutch experience, and it’s clear that gay marriage weakens marriage itself.

As FIC and others have repeatedly noted, it is only in a society where the institution of marriage was already weakened that same-sex “marriage” could even become thinkable. So it is not a surprise to learn that Connecticut, which legalized same-sex unions in 2005, had the lowest marriage rate in the nation in 2004:

According to the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, the Nutmeg State had the nation’s lowest marriage rate in 2004, at just 24.2 betrothals per 1,000 single women over the age of 15. The runners-up were also blue states: After Connecticut, the top marriage-phobic states are California (26.4 weddings per 1,000 single women), Pennsylvania (27.4), New Jersey (30.4), Massachusetts (30.4) and New York (30.6).

The author of the op-ed on marriage in Connecticut believes that the “paucity of weddings” in our state is not a problem. Maggie Gallagher explains why it is:

In a fascinating recent study, Lesthaeghe and a colleague looked for evidence of the Second Demographic Transition [skyrocketing out-of-wedlock births and collapsing fertility, leading, if present trends continue, to massive depopulation] in America. What states are leading indicators of SDT, as measured by postponement of marriage and children? California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and (the most extreme outlier of all) Massachusetts. Recognize this list? Except for Rhode Island, they are among the first states gay marriage advocates chose to pursue court-created gay marriage. What instinct led them to suppose that legal elites would be particularly open to the argument?

Stanley Kurtz recently argued that the explosion in Dutch illegitimacy is directly connected to a campaign for gay registered partnerships and gay marriage in the mid-1990s. It’s a hard case to prove in the middle of a marital collapse of historic proportions all over Europe.

But I do think it is fair to say these two trends go hand in hand in this sense: Cultures deeply committed to “generativity” — to the importance of men and women getting married and having children as a social norm — tend to find the idea of gay marriage deeply disturbing, if not incomprehensible. Conversely, societies in the midst of devaluing the norms that sustain the generative family (in the name of attractive alternative values such as increasing expressive individualism and moral autonomy) will find gay marriage a natural fit, an idea that both expresses and reinforces their deepest moral preferences.

Gay marriage advocates here and abroad can expect to happily reap the benefits of the Second Demographic Transition. But as the consequences for Europe painfully suggest, maybe not for long.