The Flood-gates Open
Yesterday evening, at 5:01 PM, the first legal same-sex marriage (SSM) licenses were issued in California. I don’t know why that time was picked, but I note it coincides with midnight, Universal Time (or Greenwich Mean Time). Perhaps this was intended as a signal that this was a new “global” court decision? Who knows?
In any event, men are marrying men, and women are marrying women in the state of California. People will no doubt observe that the sun rose this morning, the San Andreas Fault has (so far) stayed quiet, the volcanos in the northern part of the state have not erupted, and married heterosexuals find their marriages are still intact (except for the few who have gotten divorces for various reasons in the past day.)
Does this mean the implementation of same-sex marriage will have no impact on society? Are the objections to this institution mere hyperventilating? We can certainly hope it is, but I’m far from the only one who has doubts. Yesterday, I found a piece on Townhall.com by Frank Turek, “Gay Marriage: Even Liberals Know It’s Bad“.
He cites David Blankenhornin his book, The Future of Marriage. About Blankenhornin, he says:
[He is] anything but an anti-gay “bigot.” He is a life-long, pro-gay, liberal democrat who disagrees with the Bible’s prohibitions against homosexual behavior.
Blankenhornin finds that when a country legalizes same-sex marriage, either de jure or de facto, the message the culture sends out is that marriage no longer about procreation, but rather merely about coupling. Fewer people get married in order to have children, birth rates fall, and what children are born are more likely to be born out of wedlock.
Children born out of wedlock are more likely to wind up in poverty, in prison, or hear to a number of social ills. The cost to society is enormous, in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year. The cost to the children raised in broken families is also huge. These costs don’t pop up right away — the 80% out-of-wedlock birth rate in Norway is seen almost a full generation after SSM became de facto law. We can coast along for quite a few years while the number of same-sex married couples rises.
This fact will make the November initiative a hard sell. Since the social fallout takes years to manifest, people will be more amenable to arguments of fairness, egalitarianism, the right of gays to marry, and the fait accompli of thousands of married same-sex couples on the book. (These, and other arguments are being tested even as you read these words. All these arguments and more were run past me when I was surveyed last month by a telephone surveyor. Four times during the survey, I was told, “It’s not uncommon for people to change their minds in a survey such as this. Has any of what you’ve heard caused you to revise your opinion?”)
If SSM remains legal in California, we can predict a population implosion, possibly excepting the conservatively religious elements of the population. (I.e., those who regularly attend a church that adheres to a socially conservative faith.) If we’re lucky, the population will merely shrink, allowing for those who still think of marriage as being about children to fill the vacated niche. If we’re less lucky, the high crime rate associated with out-of-wedlock births will also manifest, and we’ll get to deal with that phenomenon as well.
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Stumble It!
June 19th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Who’s kidding whom about this? What person in his right mind can’t see this? The problem is that, as a people, we are not in our right mind.
Governments do not bestow rights. There is no right to marry, except that authorized by God. Oh, please don’t hold your nose! I realize you have a tantrum every time you hear that, “Boo hooooooo! Religious bigotry, whine, whine.” No, no. Just good old-fashioned human contempt. Catch another minnow there on your whale-head perch?
Now, a question for all the Rhodes Scholars: Why can’t I marry my mommy? She’s only been dead for a few months.
Ahhhh, yaa uh smat buy, yah!