Can't Beat 'em Join 'em

Although the post has a diction suggestive of a tongue in the cheek, Lucia of Alas, a Blog, has put together a more serious parry to Stanley Kurtz's arguments about cultural correlations with respect to marriage in Northern Europe:

Today, the family is reviving in the US. In the mid-1990’s, the sky high American illegitimacy rate seems to have ended its mad ascent after nearly tripling in the years between 1970 and 1993. Yet, since the campaign to legalize same sex marriage has built up steam, the rate of increase in non-marital births has slowed dramatically. This is no coincidence.

A careful look at the campaign for same sex marriage in the US shows that its principle themes are to promote responsible parenthood and long term commitment. Advocates of same sex marriage like Jonathan Rauch and court cases like Goodridge vs. Massachusetts stressed both themes. This important message seems to be getting out; American parents seem about to reverse the long term trend of forgoing marriage.

The first thing to note is that one must look carefully indeed — some might say narrowly — to believe that the principal themes of the same-sex marriage movement have been as Lucia describes. The principal theme of the advocacy has been rights-based. The "conservative case" has added a layer concerning the stability of relationships, yes, but not parenthood. In his extensive advocacy throughout the late '90s, Andrew Sullivan, who is widely regarded as the most visible "conservative" advocate for SSM, focused on marriage in terms of the adults involved in it.

Even Rauch, in an extended online debate in August 2001, never mentions parenthood. If he does so in his new book, then that effort — just like Goodridge — comes after Lucia's window of analysis. A message cannot "have gotten out" before it was presented.

Putting anachronisms aside, however, Lucia doesn't address arguments that are already on the table to explain the trend that she observes. For example, I've suggested (here, for one) that the debate itself can cause a healthy boost in marriage statistics, as those inclined to support traditional marriage strengthen their own. If same-sex marriage is in the news and a person opposes it — for whatever reason, but using traditionalist rhetoric — that person is less likely to devalue his or her own marriage. So the statistics that Lucia cites could be similar, in dynamic, to an observation from Stanley Kurtz when Andrew Sullivan sought to compare divorce rates in Massachusetts and Texas: "Sullivan is actually holding up the marital behavior of Catholic opponents of gay marriage as a model."

Another argument that Kurtz has put forward is that there are various apparent stages in the demise of marriage. Although the stages might vary in degree and timing for each culture, for Northern Europe Kurtz gives two:

In the early stages of parental cohabitation, the first child is treated as a test of the relationship. Many couples break up shortly after the first child is born, but many also marry. Yet as parental cohabitation grows more popular, people lose the impulse to marry at all. They have two and even three children without marrying, and many stop marrying altogether. This second stage spells the end of marriage itself. That's why it has to work against deeper cultural resistance than "experimental" first-child out-of-wedlock births.

Generically, this will result in a rapid increase of out-of-wedlock births as a result of loosening sexual and marital mores and laws. At some point, this levels off, if only for a time. His argument is that separating the notions of procreation, parenthood, and marriage kicks off another increase.

And of course, just as Kurtz has devoted much ink attempting to tease out other factors that affect marriage in Scandinavia, Lucia must contend with largely unrelated phenomena. Perhaps most notable is that U.S. out-of-wedlock births began to slow their increase around the time of welfare reform in the '90s. Since that time, overall births decreased among blacks, and out-of-wedlock births decreased among women under 20 (PDF).

Restricting ourselves to the SSM movement and out-of-wedlock births, however, the correlation isn't that strong. Lucia doesn't provide a link to her source, but it looks as if the year following the first SSM court case, in Hawaii, out-of-wedlock births jumped up. Moreover, the issue didn't really come to the public's attention until just the past year or so. Given the various arguments, or even just looking at the chart that accompanies Kurtz's "Going Dutch?" piece, the question is whether the trend up to that point does in fact represent a reversal, or merely a temporary plateau. Time will tell, but my assessment is that Lucia is only half right here:

There is hope yet. If we continue discussing same sex marriage, and enacting it more widely, Americans may once again remember that people raising kids had best be married.

The key to saving marriage will be to broaden the discussion of SSM and then, ultimately, to reject it.