The State of Marriage

Today I came across Gabriel Rosenberg’s blog that, in his own words, is "A mathematician’s thoughts on same-sex marriage, and little else of late". While obviously a lot of the discussion revolves around the culture and mores of Americans, I noticed that one of the entries referred to an article by Stanley Kurtz that was called "Lessons of the same-sex marriage debate in the Netherlands". Intrigued, I went and read the piece, which turned out to be arguing that same-sex marriage signifies the demotion or abolition of marriage as the socially preferred setting for parenthood.

The article leads off with a graph that strikes me as being a very questionable piece of statistical cooking. It is a graph from the Dutch Central Bureau for Statistics showing "Out-of-Wedlock births" for the years 1970 – 2003. That in itself is fine – the questionable bit comes in having certain years marked with the milestones in the moves to introduce same-sex marriage in the Netherlands, and the suggestion that the conjunction between the introduction of same-sex marriage and the rise in out-of-wedlock births "is no coincidence". There are of course plenty of other factors that play out in Dutch society that might influence the figures, but those are ignored by Kurtz.

I thought that I would visit the Central Bureau of Statistics web site to see what they might have to say about the matter. I found a paper by Jan Latten on Trends in samenwonen en trouwen (Trends in cohabitation and marriage) published in Q4 2004. It’s in Dutch (unfortunate – if you don’t read the language) and it illustrates some of the complex interactions. Latten himself warns against simplistic interpretations using the traditional categories of marriages, divorces, etc., but I can’t resist pointing to the very first graph in the paper, showing the numbers of marriages registered during the years from 1960 to 2003. What that shows is that the rate of marriages rose during the swinging sixties to a peak in 1970, and then fell very rapidly thereafter to a low point in 1983, whereupon it picked up again and oscillated at around 85,000 per year up to today. These facts clearly didn’t suit Kurtz’s argument. Also, at first sight, graph 8 is startling, showing that in 2003, nearly 40% of the firstborn were born out-of-wedlock. However, as Latten points out, many parents now marry after their first child is born – and graph 8 also shows the effect of this.

What all this boils down to is that ideas of marriage are indeed changing, but that simplistic, Chicken Little-like cries of "The Sky is falling" are not the answer, particularly if the "blame" is placed at the door of same-sex marriage.

As an aside, reading some of the comments on Gabriel’s blog gives me a strong impression that their writers are particularly unpleasant people. Phrases such as "same-sex impersonation of marriage" and how homosexuality "crushes responsible procreation". I think I need to go and have a wash.