Gay Marriage
Out of context: Reply #17
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"How Would Homosexual Marriage Hurt Children?
If government endorses the idea that marriage is just a legal contract between consenting adults of any gender, regardless of procreative realities, then marriage will no longer be seen as a prerequisite for bearing and raising children. Marriage will be seen as nothing more than coupling. In fact, that’s exactly how Sullivan sees marriage now. He writes, “Coupling — not procreation — is what civil marriage now is.”19
If Sullivan’s view of marriage prevails — as it will if homosexual marriage is legalized — many more couples in our society will forgo traditional marriage and have more children out of wedlock. That will hurt children because illegitimate parents (there’s no such thing as illegitimate children) often never form a family, and those parents who simply live together break up at a rate two to three times that of married parents. When illegitimacy rises, not only do children suffer, but the rest of us are forced to pay high social costs to deal with the problems that result from it, including increases in the number of neglected and troubled children, as well as in crime, poverty, and social spending.
Are these just the hysterical warnings of an alarmist? No. We can look at the results in Norway, a country that has had homosexual marriage (without legal sanction) for about a decade. In Nordland, the most liberal county of Norway, where they fly gay “rainbow” flags over their churches, out-of-wedlock births have soared. In Nordland, more than 80 percent of women giving birth for the first time do so out of wedlock and nearly 70 percent of all children are born out of wedlock! Across the entire country of Norway, the out-of-wedlock birth rate rose from 39 percent in 1990 to 50 percent in 2000.20
Social anthropologist Stanley Kurtz writes, “When we look at Nordland and Nord-Troendelag — the Vermont and Massachusetts of Norway — we are peering as far as we can into the future of marriage in a world where gay marriage is almost totally accepted. What we see is a place where marriage itself has almost totally disappeared.”21 Homosexual marriage is probably not solely responsible for this growing problem, but it is certainly a contributing factor. “Instead of encouraging a society-wide return to marriage,” says Kurtz, “Scandinavian gay marriage has driven home the message that marriage itself is outdated, and that virtually any family form, including out-of-wedlock parenthood, is acceptable.”22 When the entry standards for marriage are weakened to include same-sex couples, the perception of marriage will also be weakened; marriage and childbearing will just be considered incidental. That’s one reason why the number of illegitimate parents is exploding in Norway and it’s a major reason why we shouldn’t bring homosexual marriage to America."