To: Johannes Pilch who wrote (543379 ) 2/20/2004 5:44:54 PM From: Kevin Rose Read Replies (1) | Respond to Oh, now, you've outdone yourself, Johannes! An example:you err here in claiming that a lack of proof of causality is itself proof that a change of trend is not created by homosexual marriage. That is sloppy thinking. You and the author assert a cause/effect, provide no data, and challenge to disprove. Back to intellectual dishonesty.This suggests that gay marriage is both an effect and a cause of the increasing separation between marriage and parenthood. As rising out-of-wedlock birthrates disassociate heterosexual marriage from parenting, gay marriage becomes conceivable. If marriage is only about a relationship between two people, and is not intrinsically connected to parenthood, why shouldn't same-sex couples be allowed to marry? It follows that once marriage is redefined to accommodate same-sex couples, that change cannot help but lock in and reinforce the very cultural separation between marriage and parenthood that makes gay marriage conceivable to begin with. We see this process at work in the radical separation of marriage and parenthood that swept across Scandinavia in the nineties. If Scandinavian out-of-wedlock birthrates had not already been high in the late eighties, gay marriage would have been far more difficult to imagine. More than a decade into post-gay marriage Scandinavia, out-of-wedlock birthrates have passed 50 percent, and the effective end of marriage as a protective shield for children has become thinkable. Gay marriage hasn't blocked the separation of marriage and parenthood; it has advanced it.
