Take That, Stanley Kurtz!

William N. Eskridge Jr., Darren R. Spedale, and Hans Ytterberg recently published a paper, a real, honest-to-goodness academic paper about same-sex marriage in Scandinavia entitled Nordic Bliss? Scandinavian Registered Partnerships and the Same-Sex Marriage Debate. And you know what? Surprise, surprise, Stanley Kurtz's disengenuous and statistically corrupt social scientific arguments are completely refuted.

After detailing three features of marriage that have been liberalized in the past 50 years, alternatives to marriage, state regulation of marital sex, and exit from marriage, they contrast it with the expansion of marriage eligibility, namely same-sex marriage. And then they (rightly) nail Kurtz:

There is another kind of problem with Kurtz’s mutual reinforcement

argument. After decades of catering to straight people’s desires to have the

advantages of marriage without its costs, through cohabitation regimes and nofault

divorce, it is unfair to draw the line with gay and lesbian couples, the group

whose choices have been least honored by the state. If you really want to combat

the expanded choice norm, it would be much more powerful to revoke no-fault

divorce or cohabitation regimes and reintroduce Features 1 (marriage monopoly)

and 3 (lifetime obligations) into the law. Astoundingly, these are the two reforms

Kurtz explicitly avoids. “So repealing no-fault divorce, or even eliminating

premarital cohabitation, are not what’s at issue.”31 As Kurtz explains the fate of

marriage, American society should swallow the liberalizations we have already

adopted to accommodate the choices straight people want to have, even though

this expanded-choice regime significantly undermines marriage and facilitates

divorce—and should rescue marriage from decline by denying gay people

eligibility for it, even though it is highly speculative that such denial would have

any effect on the institution. This is not only direct discrimination. It is hypocrisy.

After all of that, they show, with little statistical uncertainty, that registered partnerships in Denmark and Sweden cannot be even casually correlated with the "end of marriage".

If state-recognized same-sex partnerships “contributed” to the decline of marriage

and the rise of illegitimacy, even if indirectly by reinforcing an expanded-choice

norm, we would expect to see (ceteris paribus) something more than falling

marriage rates, rising divorce rates, and rising non-marital birth rates in Denmark

after 1989 and in Sweden after 1994; those were the trends before 1989 and 1994.

Rather, we should expect to see marriage rates falling faster, divorce rates

accelerating upward, and a surge in non-marital birth rates. The data reveal no

such trend. Not only do the registered partnership laws in Denmark and Sweden

not correlate to super-normal plunges in marriage rates and super-elevated divorce

rates, but some of the trends move in the other direction.

This doesn't even get close to how they tear apart his derogatory mis-use of the of term "out-of-wedlock births" and inconsistencies with his various other definitions, like constantly refering to registered partnerships as marriages, even though up until last year registered parnters (hetero or homo) could not adopt children or get state-assisted artificial insemination. In short, Kurtz really needs to be taken to task for his blatant abuse of his "academic" findings, especially since he's been testifying in front of Congress with his, to put it as bluntly as I can, lies. To continue to deny that Kurtz has an agenda and his work is utterly biased should be taken as either blind ignorance or rampant homophobia.