Indeed, in Sweden the out-of-wedlock birthrate is 55 percent, Norway is 50 percent, Iceland is approaching 70 percent, and in Denmark 60 percent of firstborn children are born out of wedlock. So what? you ask. So cohabitation has replaced marriage, big deal; men and women are still having children, only without the formality of a marriage certificate. What’s the problem? According to Dr. Kurtz, studies in these countries demonstrate that these unmarried families break up at a rate two to three times that of married couples. This has only exacerbated the welfare state that is unparalleled in Scandinavia. Kurtz points out that “no western nation has a higher percentage of public employees, public expenditures, or higher tax rates than Sweden.”
Craven makes no case whatsoever about why any of these things is even remotely negative. There is no evidence that out-of-wedlock births have any significant negative effects on children. If handled correctly, there's no evidence that any long-term damage is done to children whose parents break up. There's also nothing inherently negative about public employees or public expenditures. And a higher tax rate itself is not particularly negative, especially if you have fewer costs to pay.
All of the Scandinavian countries mentioned embraced de facto same-sex marriage, beginning with Denmark in 1989. The out-of-wedlock birth rates mentioned experienced their most dramatic increases in the decade following the acceptance of SSM in these countries.
Confusion of correlation and causation. What other factors might have contributed to the rise in out-of-wedlock births. He makes a clear point to show that not that many gay people married. And it's unlikely that gay couples were having a whole heck of a lot of out-of-wedlock births. And he still shows no harm caused by an out-of-wedlock birth.
Kurtz concludes by saying, “This suggests that gay marriage is both an effect and a cause of the increasing separation between marriage and parenthood. As rising out-of-wedlock birthrates disassociate heterosexual marriage from parenting, gay marriage becomes conceivable” In essence, SSM is simply the extreme and final step in a culture’s descent from absolute monogamy.
What an incredibly extreme, hate-filled and illogical slippery slope that is. Because gay marriage has an effect (it doesn't say how big or small the effect is) on the separation between marriage and parenthood, culture has reach the bottom of a final descent from absolute monogamy? Complete and utter nonsense. There was never any country where absolute monogamy existed in the first place and the millions upon millions of people are still getting married, so obviously, we have reached the bottom of the slippery slope that doesn't exist.
While the sky may not have fallen, effects that have historically taken generations to produce have already begun to manifest within just twenty years of the acceptance of SSM in Scandinavia, the first nations to risk their future on this perilous social experiment.
Seriously, how insane do you have to be to actually argue that the countries of Scandinavia are going to be destroyed because a few thousand gay people got married?
