As If He Has Something to Say

How audacious of Stanley Kurtz to keep on researching, writing, and publishing as if he's got something to say about marriage in Northern Europe. I don't know that I've ever seen a writer's work on a particular topic more frequently declared debunked, and yet, he keeps on writing. Well, that's because he's constructing a more thorough argument than the debunkers have been willing to address:

As we've seen, the upswing in the Dutch out-of-wedlock birthrate coincides with the enactment of registered partnerships and gay marriage. A diligent search for alternative explanations, such as access to contraception and women in the workforce, yields nothing that correlates well with the rise of out-of-wedlock birthrates in the Netherlands. Both opponents and supporters of gay marriage linked the willingness to embrace same-sex marriage with increasing social and legal acceptance of cohabitation rather than marriage for couples with children. Although pinpointing cause and effect raises particular challenges when studying the intricacies of human social life, there are now at least strong indications that Dutch gay marriage has contributed significantly to the decline of Dutch marriage.

Perhaps there is an alternative explanation. But it is up to those who wish to argue that gay marriage has not undermined marriage in the Netherlands to provide a more plausible reason for the last seven years of Dutch marital decline.

Of course, everybody knows that this stuff has been deconstructed so thoroughly and quickly that even new points are "destroyed" before they've even been made. On that basis, it's understandable that Andrew Sullivan finds no need to do otherwise than mock:

You can, in fact, draw a direct connection between the liberalization of marriage laws in Liechtenstein and this collapse in marriage in Japan. And the turning point came at exactly the moment that Richard Hatch won "Survivor," putting another nail in the coffin of heterosexual marriage.

(An increase of snide comments over substantive reply to Kurtz has actually been a long-term trend for Sullivan. At each stage, Kurtz makes an argument, Sullivan provides some sort of reply, Kurtz addresses that reply, and Sullivan lets it drop, only to ratchet up his efforts simply to discredit Kurtz through ad hominem.)