What I don’t get is why? Why would same sex marriage lead to more out-of-wedlock children being born? Were all those frustrated gays somehow preventing people from having babies? Did legalizing their marriages somehow remove this vital social protection? What’s the mechanism? It seems like saying that eating more beef produces more high-school dropouts. How?
You find the temporary leveling off after two states recognition of gay marriage by two states more convincing than a 13% jump in eight years after a dozen years of no growth? That seems like motivated reasoning to me.
It is not my burden to prove anything. The OP merely asks if the bad things those of us who are anti-gay marriage predicted would happen have happened. The answer is an unequivocal yes and no one has disputed that. It would be possible to say that we were right for the wrong reasons but it would be impossible to dispute that we were right in our prediction.
I’m confused. The US sees a growth from 27% to 41% for children born out of conventional marriage before any states legalize SSM and this is a validation of your position that SSM would erode the conventional family structure?
Because it changes the definition of marriage from one that is concerned with the formation of a stable familial environment in which to raise children into one that is concerned with the expression of love toward a partner. Since having the state bless your love is not a concern for many young people fewer seek it because they don’t see the purpose in it.
You seem to be surprised how changing the definition of something can affect people’s attitude toward it.
That Canada’s out of wedlock rate increased is validation. The US rate before gay marriage can tell us nothing of the effects of gay marriage.
If you are confused try this.
Possibly.
Possibly.
Okay, now prove it.
Hah, nice try,
I was vaguely certain “this” was going to be an animated gif of a man hitting himself in the head with a frying pan.
:dubious: What it shows is the % was primarily driven by factors *other *than SSM and those factors may be continuing currently with or without any influence from SSM. Any influence of SSM on the would be on your side to show.
But what about Celine Dion and William Shatner (to say nothing of Shania Twain)? They pre-date SSM, so you’re going to have to do better than that…
No, the counter-arguments were that the rate of out-of-wedlock births increased regardless of gay marriage, and the mechanism of how gay marriage would have affected out-of-wedlock births at all remains unclear and unproven.
Yes, but it’s puddleglum’s argument that has never moved from square one, not those of SSM proponents, because he is advancing an idea that seems to make sense to him but has offered no evidence in support of it.
The OP is asking if a number of factors were affected by gay marriage. Even puddleglum hasn’t demonstrated that one of those factors (out-of-wedlock births) has been, but he maintains that it “seems” to have been, while offering no evidence at all in support. If anything, the OP’s challenge is to SSM opponents who claimed that gay marriage would make some or all the listed elements worse, and since puddleglum has invoked the scientific method, let’s follow through on that:
Null hypothesis: Gay marriage has no negative social effect.
Alternate hypothesis: Gay marriage has some negative social effect.
Experiment: Establish social-effect benchmarks and compare countries that have gay marriage with those who do not have gay marriage. If the null hypothesis is false, we should see a significant difference, the gay marriage countries scoring lower on those benchmarks.
Analysis: No significant difference established.
Conclusion: Do not reject Null Hypothesis. We lack sufficient evidence at this time to establish that gay marriage has some negative social effect.
Puddleglum’s mistake is to look for evidence that supports his belief, when he should be looking for evidence that disproves it. If one seeks the former, it’s too easy to cherry-pick, and if it wasn’t out-of-wedlock births, it could just as easily be something else.
By the way…
Please don’t invoke the scientific method while claiming control groups (in this case, births in the pre-gay-marriage U.S.) are meaningless. That makes me sad, like someone arguing for nuclear power while rejecting physics.
An increased demand for beef leads to more jobs in slaughterhouses. Young boys are attracted to the cash and glamour of work on the killing floor, leading to them quitting school and taking those jobs.
BTW, BigBeef denies this to be the case.
ETA: This is discussed in the tell-all exposé Bringing Home The Bacon.
I don’t see it. Something someone else does somehow magically causes you to skip the part about commitment.
(If marriage was that weak, then to hell with it!)
(Besides, marriage was already “re-defined” into extinction by the ease of divorce.)
It all sounds like a weak-water excuse for gay bashing.
I love you and want to give you a side of beef and a hug!
Awww…puddleglum’s making me nostalgic! It’s been a while since the right-wing nutbaggery about SSM has shown its face around here.
Uh, why do you think the first definition is more valid than the second? Who are you to define what marriage is to other people and the reasons they enter into it?
More like: Societal norms shifted from strictly ‘requiring’ marriage when reproducing. And the sky did not fall. Which led to an openness and aceptance that helped make SSM a much easier sell.
I think you got it backwards!
So you’re saying two same sex people cannot form “a stable family environment in which to raise children?” Bullshit!!!
Plenty of gay and lesbian couples are parenting, and no damage has come from it. And plenty of opposite sex couples do not have children, or are not raising them in a “stable family environment.”
I’d rather David Butka and Neil Patrick Harris have children than the parents of Lattie McGee (google if you dare; I’ll not provide a link).
Following up on Annie Xmas’s excellent post, I would comment that one of the reasons for the push for same-sex marriage from GLBT communities was precisely because marriage provides support for the creation of families. Gays and lesbians do in fact have children, by various ways, and being able to marry means that both members of the couple will be recognised by law as the parents of the children, rather than one being the parent and the other having no more rights and obligations to the children than a casual roommate.
This discussion highlights to me what I think is the fundamental flaw in Puddleglum’s argument: that there is one and only one purpose for marriage, and that purpose was raising kids.
In my experience, most young couples (and I was in that group, once upon a time 
) get married because they want to spend their lives with that wonderful person they have found. Sure, kids are a possibility that is always considered, but marriage starts with that union, in my experience.
Marriage has a number of purposes, in my opinion. That union of the couple is high on the list, whether or not kids ever come along. If there are kids, them marriage and all the attendant laws and customs provide a strong support for that family. But I don’t think it’s ever been the case that the sole purpose of marriage is to provide a support system for the kids.
Marriage starts with the couple wanting to be together. Expanding marriage to include same-sex couples is completely consistent with that purpose.
Thank you. An excellent book on the issue is Family Values by Phyllis Burke. When her partner Cheryl was inseminated and gave birth to a son Jesse, Phyllis thought she’d be the “Aunty.” However, Jesse, Cheryl and even Phyllis’s parents knew she was Jesse’s mother.
If we’re going to exclude gay people from marriage because they can’t have children, then we should exclude ALL infertile people. No post-menopausal women, no men with low sperm counts, no impotent men, whatever.