Subtitle: No Dutch Treat for US
Only a few years ago, many lamented the sky high American illegitimacy rate as a wretched example for the western hemisphere. Somehow, Americans had managed to combine capitalists values and a shockingly high illegitimacy rate. To be sure, many Americans married, but many American marriages also crumbled. Often, parents decided not to marry anyone at all.
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.
Examine the evidence. The figure below shows the relationship between out-of-wedlock births and the campaign for same sex marriage. Isolated discussions of same sex marriage began in the mid-80s and mounted slowly. Gays made local gains in 1989 when San Francisco and New York extended domestic partnership benefits to same sex couples. Naturally, local victories in only two cities had little effect on the nationwide illegitimacy rate. However, with these local victories, discussions began to gain steam. Nationwide conversation took off in 1993, when the Supreme Court of the State of Hawaii ruled that denying same sex marriage violated due process.
(Click on image to see larger version)
The impact of nationwide discussions was almost immediate. Obviously, unmarried women already pregnant at the time of the ruling still bore their illegitimate babies. But in 1995, we see the illegitimacy rate dropped for the first time in decades. In the following years, recognition of the importance of marriage for everyone spread to other states. In 1999, Vermont’s Supreme Court ruled that the benefits of marriage must be extended to same sex partners. Soon Vermont offered domestic partnership, and the State of California passed “The Declaration of Domestic Partners”.
The effect of all this discussion of same sex marriage, with its emphasis on responsible parenthood, and long term commitment, has been stunning and persistent! It has also surprised some conservative opponents of same sex marriage. Despite aggressive educational programs like “Just Say No” implemented during the Reagan administration, the non-marital birth rate had increased steadily at a rate of 0.8% per year for more than two decades. Yet, as gay rights advocates began to describe the numerous benefits of marriage for everyone, we see prospective parents began to value marriage once again. The rate of increase in non-marital births has dropped to only 0.2%, or one fourth its previous value. It was more than Nancy Reagan could have ever wished for!
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.
PS. Barry blogged on this topic. You may wish to refer to articles he cites. If I understand him correctly, Stanley Kurtz made the case that discussions of Same Sex Marriage have caused the Dutch illegitimacy rate to explode..
excellent and brilliant.
seems you’ve destroyed the ‘dutch illigitimacy/SSM marriage’ correlation with one simple post :D
oh, and you might want to point to these statistics.. the rates of abortion have fallen dramatically in the 1990’s as the four states Vermont, California, Massachusetts and Hawaii discussed and implemented civil unions, domestic partnerships and SSM, exceeding the US fall in abortion rates by large margins.
http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/sfaa/vermont.html
(just type in california, hawaii, etc to replace ‘vermont’ to get those graphs)
I don’t believe the coorelation is real.. but its as real as the dutch coorelation.
This is brilliant. I’m adding a link.
Oh, this is wonderful. Great post.
Well, interesting data, but really, how does it work? I mean, why does allowing a gay couple to get married make a straight couple more likely to stay with each other and/or get married when they raise their kids? As far as I can tell, the cause is something like “gay people call for responsibility-oriented marraige-rights. They generally add their weight on the scales on the side of responsibility. The strengthened, general trend to responsibility pressures people into not having illegitimate children.” Is that how it works? I’m not sure I buy that sequence. Personally, if pressured to guess, I’d say that if there’s a relation, it’s that some wider cultural trend has created the responsibility ethos that created both activism among gays for marraige rights and a reduction of illegitimacy. Then agian, my view has a bit of a Deus Ex Machina in the form of this “wide cultural responsibility trend” that appears mysteriously in the zeitgeist.
Well, either way, the idea that gay marraige will “destroy the family” is nuts. I’m not sure I’m willing to take the leap that it will reinforce it, though. Hmm… no pressure on you, Lucia, but I think that I’d be more persuaded if you compared the illegitimacy trends in states that enacted gay-rights policies to states that didn’t. (For that matter, even if gays are in favor of fairly traditional family values, I’m not sure I am! I realize kids need some kind of socially stable environment in which to grow up, but who says the two-parent, traditional American nuclear family’s so great anyway? I had one, and mine worked fine, but I still think the idea that all kids should be raised by two parent figures, (same or different genders) isn’t necessarily supported. Anthropologically, isn’t the nuclear family a rather recent development from more extended family arrangements? Overall, I think that two guardians is better than one, but I don’t think that we should regard it as the only possible game in town.)
Gosh! You’re not convinced?! ;-)
I think I’ll start my next post with “my detractors..” LOL!
Actually, I think it’s worth mentioning why I decided to pick the abortion rate as a percent of births, the years I picked etc.
1) I picked abortion rate as a percent of births because that is exactly the parameter Stanley Kurtz picked.
2) I picked the years 1970-2003 because those are exactly the years Stanley Kurtz picked. (Note:I am missing data for 2003. I was unable to find it on the web– and the CDC data for 2002 were published late in 2003. So, I figured, probably not available.)
3) I picked the US because Stanley Kurtz seems to be warning us that “If it happened in the Netherlands, it will happen in the US”. Well, the campaign has been going on here too– as is obvious from the events on the graph.
So, although I think people may suspect I “hunted” around until I found something that opposes Kurtz’s Dutch data, that is not the case. I intentionally restricted myself. This is the first and only correlation I tried. (And since I got the CDC data in pdf and had to type it in, I assure you I wasn’t going to do a whole lot more! )
Now, my understanding based on Kurtz publications is that he has been studying the data for many years. We know there are a fair number of countries who have had campaigns, and based on his various articles, we know he has looked at lots and lots and lots of data. The recently article I linked to is the first to actually show the data.
As to the “explanation”, if you read the first few paragraphs of the Kurtz’s article, you’ll see the beginning my explanation mirrors his. He provides all sort of wild generalizatoins about the Dutch character, their values, how SSM has been promoted and how that has changed their character. (And, Kurtz can pretty much rely on the fact that 99% of American’s have no idea what so ever what anyone in the Netherlands provided as their reason for promoting SSM.)
Don’t get me wrong, lucia. I think your data’s fine, and I think Stanley Kurtz is wrong. I just don’t understand the “mechanism” that makes gay marriage cause more traditional family values, in your argument. That doesn’t mean, of course, that I think Stanley Kurtz’s explanation of how gay marraige causes the weakening of the traditional family is better (it’s worse, I’d say, since it claims that allowing marraige is tantamount to abolishing it without explaining why). I’m dont’ really have an informed opinion here, but if I had to guess, I’d say that gay marraige and straight marraige don’t really have all that much effect on each other, though both are affected by cultural trends in which they both have some impact.
UP
Julian,
You are asking the right question…. and you are getting the right answer….. :-)
What a bogus use of statistics – good try though.
Hurrah! One site has actually pointed out that nobody except the so-called “religious right” is threatened by same-sex marraige. It would be nice if someone did an international study on same-sex marraige and its effect on divorce rates. The divorce rate in America is 50%, meaning that half of marraiges in this country end in divorce. I would really like to know if divorce rates in California took a surge upward during the brief period when same-sex marraiges were allowed. Where are the stats on that?
Personally I think that the discussion on SSM marriage has help increase the marriage rate in the US. The reason is that there is a discussion.
I think as glbt’s express why they wish to be able to marry it makes heteros think about marriage again themselves.
Whether the trend will last is hard to say, but any discussion that moves things in a positive way is a good discussion.
I do have to say I dislike the term illegitimate when talking about children. I do believe we have erased that stigma to help improve the self-esteem of children born to unwed mothers and I don’t think it’s good to let it slip back in.
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