Kurtz, Stanley. (2Feb04) “The End of Marriage in

Scandinavia: The "conservative case" for same-sex marriage collapses,” The Weekly Standard, Volume 009, Issue 20.

 

 

OVERVIEW

According to this article a majority of children in Sweden and Norway are born out of wedlock (60% of first-born children in Denmark).  Opponents of same-sex marriages note how rising births to unmarried parents coincide with full approval of gay marriage in the past ten or so years.  Both trends, they say, point to a Nordic trend to separate marriage from parenthood. There is not question, for them, whether same-sex marriage ill undermine the institution of marriage; it’s already evident that it has.

 

More precisely, it has further undermined the institution. The separation of marriage from parenthood was increasing; gay marriage has widened the separation. Out-of-wedlock birthrates were rising; gay marriage has added to the factors pushing those rates higher. Instead of encouraging a society-wide return to marriage, Scandinavian gay marriage has driven home the message that marriage itself is outdated, and that virtually any family form, including out-of-wedlock parenthood, is acceptable (the author of this article explains).

 

A study by Darren Spedale, an independent researcher, found that in the six years following Denmark’s legalization of gay marriage (followed by Norway in 1993 and Sweden in 1994), Denmark’s heterosexual divorce rates climbed 10% while heterosexual divorce rates declined by 12%. Journalist Andrew Sullivan and Yale law professor William  Eskridge Jr. made much of these statistics in articles they wrote for the McGeorge Law Review.  Sullivan’s article was subtitled, “The case against ssame-sex marriage crumbles,” and Eskridge wrote that Spedale’s study had exposed “the hysteria and irresponsibility” of those predicting that gay marriage would undermine marriage.

 

Conservatives continue their argument pointing out that Darren Spedale’s unpublished paper hardly gets to the truth of marriage in Scandinavia, in serious decline throughout the 1990s. In fact, “marriage and divorce no longer mean what they used to.”

 

If marriage and divorce statistics look better in Denmark and the rest of Scandinavia, it’s really “because the pool of married people has been shrinking for some time.

 

You can’t divorce without first getting married. Moreover, a closer look at Danish divorce in the post-gay marriage decade reveals disturbing trends. Many Danes have stopped holding off divorce until their kids are grown. And Denmark in the nineties saw a 25 percent increase in cohabiting couples with children. With fewer parents marrying, what used to show up in statistical tables as early divorce is now the unrecorded breakup of a cohabiting couple with children.

 

What about Spedale's report that the Danish marriage rate increased 10 percent from 1990 to 1996? Again, the news only appears to be good. First, there is no trend. Eurostat's just-released marriage rates for 2001 show declines in Sweden and Denmark (Norway hasn't reported). Second, marriage statistics in societies with very low rates (Sweden registered the lowest marriage rate in recorded history in 1997) must be carefully parsed. In his study of the Norwegian family in the nineties, for example, Christer Hyggen shows that a small increase in Norway's marriage rate over the past decade has more to do with the institution's decline than with any renaissance. Much of the increase in Norway's marriage rate is driven by older couples "catching up." These couples belong to the first generation that accepts rearing the first born child out of wedlock. As they bear second children, some finally get married. (And even this tendency to marry at the birth of a second child is weakening.) As for the rest of the increase in the Norwegian marriage rate, it is largely attributable to remarriage among the large number of divorced.

 

The family dissolution rate is different from the divorce rate. Because so many Scandinavians now rear children outside of marriage, divorce rates are unreliable measures of family weakness. Instead, we need to know the rate at which parents (married or not) split up. Precise statistics on family dissolution are unfortunately rare. Yet the studies that have been done show that throughout Scandinavia (and the West) cohabiting couples with children break up at two to three times the rate of married parents. So rising rates of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock birth stand as proxy for rising rates of family dissolution. And now that married parenthood has become a minority phenomenon, it has lost the critical mass required to have socially normative force.

 

According to Danish sociologists Wehner, Kambskard, and Abrahamson, "Marriage is no longer a precondition for settling a family--neither legally nor normatively. . . . What defines and makes the foundation of the Danish family can be said to have moved from marriage to parenthood."

 

The writer of this article concludes that “Scandinavia

has long been a bellwether of family change. Scholars take the Swedish experience as a prototype for family developments that will, or could, spread throughout the world.

 

 

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION

 

1.   What relationships do you see among the following issues: the strength of a society, the definition and strength of “family,” the loosening of traditional morals, pre-marital cohabitation, rising divorce rates, same-sex unions, and the welfare of children?

 

2.   Do you take the more liberal or more conservative perspective regarding sex, marriage and the raising of children?  Why so?

 

 

3.   What effect should religion and faith have on the morals/mores and laws of a society?

 

 

IMPLICATIONS

 

1.   We should do more than accept trends as expressions of what is right and progress.

 

2.   Sex, love and marriage need to be pondered individually and discussed in the public, faith, and family arenas.