Jim Talent misleads on gay marriage

On the day that George Bush and Senate Republicans attempt to refresh the fading fortunes of the GOP by resorting to the tried-and-true tactic of gay bashing, I note a formulaic defense of the maneuver from Missouri Senator Jim Talent. Embedded in Talent’s boilerplate response to a letter urging that he oppose the same-sex marriage ban was this bit of rationalization (emphsis mine):

To the extent we have experience with same sex marriage, the results have been disquieting. In the Scandinavian countries which have permitted same sex marriage, marriage of all kinds has systematically declined. The more malleable the definition of marriage becomes, the less respect people have for it, and the less important it is as part of family life.

A powerful motive for “defending” marriage. If only it was true. Talent is no doubt parroting conservative pundit Stanley Kurtz, who opined alarmingly in The Weekly Standard that legalized same sex marriage in Scandinavian countries had led to a weakening of the institution. Those decadent Danes and Swedes allowed marriage to crumble! Now it’s anything goes! Babies born out of wedlock! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!

At least we know now where Talent gets his “experience with same sex marriage.” We also know that this opinion is, to say the least, misinformed. In a recent Slate article, M.V. Lee Badgett, a professor and research director of the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies, exposes the errors in Kurtz’s - and Talent’s - assumptions:

Despite what Kurtz might say, the apocalypse has not yet arrived. In fact, the numbers show that heterosexual marriage looks pretty healthy in Scandinavia, where same-sex couples have had rights the longest. In Denmark, for example, the marriage rate had been declining for a half-century but turned around in the early 1980s. After the 1989 passage of the registered-partner law, the marriage rate continued to climb; Danish heterosexual marriage rates are now the highest they’ve been since the early 1970’s. And the most recent marriage rates in Sweden, Norway, and Iceland are all higher than the rates for the years before the partner laws were passed. Furthermore, in the 1990s, divorce rates in Scandinavia remained basically unchanged.

Badgett demolishes Kurtz’s claims point by point, demonstrating that gay unions were not responsible for negative shifts in heterosexual marriage patterns and had no effect on cohabitation rates or nonmarital births. In short, as Badgett concludes, ‘letting gay couples say “I do” does not lead to heterosexuals saying “I don’t.”‘

Talent’s misinformed stance on same sex marriage in other countries misleads others. The senator from Missouri should do some more reading before he helps encode discrimination into the Constitution.

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