Perhaps it would make you happy to learn that in order to be a control the group would have to be similar enough to the treatment group for a valid comparison.
I used to judge the science fair for my brother’s 4th grade science classes. If some of those kids can understand the scientific method, I’m sure eventually you can get it too.
Keep your chin up.
There really are no words.:rolleyes:
From the data reported by Grey, the out of wedlock birthrate in Canada in 2000 was 32%, then in 2005 (after about 2 years of legalized same sex marriages) the rate dropped to 30%, but 5 years later in 2010 the steady increase prior to SSM reasserted itself and the rate stabilized at 33%.
You can’t claim this as a validation of the prediction that legalizing same sex marriages leads to more out of wedlock births, any more than I can claim that when Canada did legalize SSM it caused a temporary reversal in the long term trend of increasing numbers of out of wedlock births.
If you don’t have a sufficiently good control group, your experiment will never establish causation. While I’m sure being able to pin a blue ribbon on a nine-year-old’s model volcano gives you some authority on ribbons and volcanoes, neither of those is statistical analysis.
I’m happy in the sense that if what you’ve presented is the best argument against gay marriage, I can feel confident that legalizing gay marriage was the right decision for society.
Not to me. If you’re gonna take a purely literal interpretation of the OP, then you have to restrict yourself to the actual things the OP brought up. The OP doesn’t ask for any possible prediction, but names the ones that they are considering. There’s no “or other calamity.”
If you actually read the OP for its meaning, then it is a statement about how same sex marriage has not caused problems, and challenging anyone to prove this wrong. Thus refuting a dubious claim about a correlation is perfectly on topic.
Furthermore, as a board against fighting ignorance, arguing against false claims of causation from correlation is also inherently part of any thread, whether the OP mentions it or not.
Plus, the thread title implies causation: that same-sex marriage has affected the country, not simply that there has been a change following same-sex marriage.
As for the Netherlands, puddlegum has a point. In the Netherlands in the 60’s, one in 30 kids was born out of wedlock. Last year it was one in 3. However, nowadays such Dutch kids are born in a steady two parent family: their parents just don’t want to get married. Marriage has been out of fashion for at least two decades here. But that has had very little effect on the longevity of relationships, or on single parenthood.
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You forgot the country that God smote from the earth and the minds of men in his righteous wrath at the abomination of two people who love each other and live together anyways, getting to pay a tax marriage penalty (God hates taxes) and getting social security survivor benefits (God also hates big government), prohibitions against these things are littered throughout the bible so they can’t say they weren’t warned.
Some form of this has been pointed out twelve times in this thread. But when someone doesn’t like gay people, well, they usually stick to that opinion.
Excuse me? How does anything on that link remotely have anything to do with SSM? :rolleyes:
As an anti-abortion protester pointed out to me in all seriousness, homosexuality has increased since abortion was made legal. Hence, abortion makes people gay. When I asked her for the statistics on the matter, she replied “I know a woman who had two abortions, and she later became a lesbian.”
OOOOOKKKKKKKAAAAYYYY!
Sure there are … but we’re not in the Pit.
As no one posting here lives in Westeros, what is the supposed harm of being born out of wedlock?
I can point to at least one concrete consequence of Canada’s legalization of SSM. My nextdoor neighbours are married, whereas they could not be if SSM had not been legalized.
Seems like a win to me. They’re quite excellent nextdoor neighbours.
My take: the first countries to legalize gay marriage are countries where marriage was already on the wane, and where nobody bothered any longer to get married anyhow.
That is, it’s precisely the people who regard marriage as nothing sacred, as “just a piece of paper,” who are most likely to support gay marriage.
Correlation may or may not equal causation, in any given instance. The world is a pretty complex place, and it’s generally very difficult if not impossible to pin down societal changes to any specific cause. If things are at least consistent with X causing Y, then that’s about as good as you can get. If you insist on a higher standard than that about such issues, it’s hard to see it as a good faith question.
Nonsense. Statisticians deal with this all the time; it’s actually pretty easy to determine if a single variable changing in a complex system affected the results, particularly when–as in this case–we have lots of data about trend lines and rates of change from both before and after the variable changed.
I frankly couldn’t care less about the answer, since I don’t see much harm in out of wedlock births or marriage rates changing, but the notion that “well there’s no way to know, so all explanations are equally valid” is total nonsense.
What you’ve written is itself nonsense.
Statisticians can adjust single variables in lab test conditions. Society is not controllable in that manner, and it can’t be done.
Well, there go the social sciences. Thanks for clearing that up for us.
The social sciences are called “soft science” for a reason. You can’t draw as definitive conclusions as you can for other sciences, and in part this is because of the reasons I gave - the complexity of society and the difficulty in setting up precise controlled experiments.
I believe this is generally accepted.