Santorum blames gay marriage for bad economy

[Adam Griffin]

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This speculation steps away from the argument and diverges into a different policy question. While I realize I mentioned homeschool initially, I did so to give a reference point to a conservative talking point that emphasizes the rights of individuals to do as they choose in the hopes of demonstrating how people of all ideologies do things that may not be in the best interests of their children, families or themselves but should still be allowed to do so.

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A reward is an offering that comes with no strings attached. The contract of marriage comes with real-life benefits AND responsibilities, in all forms (financially, emotionally, spiritually, etc). You also cannot label it as a "reward" when the vast majority of the country is already capable of taking advantage of these benefits (which I'm assuming you mean things like tax benefits). What are you thinking, "Well I guess those filthy gays can get married but it's a reward and a privilege, not a right"?

[retromike22]

Don't dismiss this, guys. Sodom had an infamously weak economy.

But gay friendly Athens had a fantastic one, until those "gay" Spartan warriors spoiled it all. So yes, gays can be bad for the economy come to think of it, if their armies beat your ass up.

Ancient Greece had rampant homosexuality, and yet they produced geometry, philosophy and democracy.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

Ben, do you maybe mean that it was 1% of the marriages in Canada that were gay, rather than 1% of the gays who were married? The statistics that I'm looking at give us 12,438 same-sex marriages in Canada between June 2003 and October 2006 (with same-sex marriage still not being legal in much of Canada for a lot of this time span), and 147,391 marriages of any kind in 2003, a rate which at that time (the website that I'm looking at for this particular number is from 2007) was said to be more or less stable. So if there are ~140,000-150,000 marriages a year, and 3,731.4 of those were gay on an average between a little over three years during all of which gay marriage wasn't legal throughout Canada...uh, that doesn't gel with what you were saying. My on-the-fly statistics don't even support the 1% of marriages being gay figure. At least in this period (which granted might have seen higher rates than subsequently for obvious reasons) it was more like 2.5%.

Here, links.

Same-sex marriage rate
General marriage rate

[Torie]

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The one percent are being oppressed, and gays in general told that they have fewer options than other, demeaning and marginalizing the entire class. In any event, oppressing 1% is 1% too many. Just because a minority is small, does not make it more just to oppress them. In some ways, it makes it worse, because it has the ugly odor of bullying attending it. If the numbers were larger, they could better protect themselves. Instead, they have to rely on our good conscience to secure their rights. In a word, they are vulnerable. The vulnerable need an equal protection of the laws most of all.

[Adam Griffin]

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Absolutely. I think it's in the interest of society to discourage divorce.

In that case, given that changes in divorce law have been around for a long time, and have demonstrably contributed to the failure of millions of marriages, while same-sex marriage is still illegal and constitutionally prohibited in most states, shouldn't conservatives who care about preserving the traditional family place a higher priority on changing divorce laws, rather than on fighting gay marriage? Aren't conservatives in fact endangering the family themselves, by not pushing back against divorce laws?

It could also be argued that conservatives should have more interest in making sure that any family unit is as strong as possible, with a two-parent household being the desired result. Now tell me, with hetero marriages ending in divorce in unprecedented numbers and with fewer and fewer younger individuals marrying in the first place, shouldn't conservatives want as many two-parent households as possible regardless of sexual orientation, seeing as how the major economic and social issues that relate from the dynamic of the family are caused by the lack of presence of one parent?

[Oakvale]

Ancient Greece had rampant homosexuality, and yet they produced geometry, philosophy and democracy.

Exactly, my friend - rampant homosexuality led to

A) Gay "shapes"
B) A bunch of liberal elites talking

and, as you said,

C) The Democratic Party.

Case rested.

[Torie]

Ben, do you maybe mean that it was 1% of the marriages in Canada that were gay, rather than 1% of the gays who were married? The statistics that I'm looking at give us 12,438 same-sex marriages in Canada between June 2003 and October 2006 (with same-sex marriage still not being legal in much of Canada for a lot of this time span), and 147,391 marriages of any kind in 2003, a rate which at that time (the website that I'm looking at for this particular number is from 2007) was said to be more or less stable. So if there are ~140,000-150,000 marriages a year, and 3,731.4 of those were gay on an average between a little over three years during all of which gay marriage wasn't legal throughout Canada...uh, that doesn't gel with what you were saying.

Here, links.

Same-sex marriage rate
General marriage rate

So given all that verbiage, what in Canada is the gay marriage rate among gays of "marrying" age? Again however, it is totally irrelevant from an ethical standpoint whether it is 1%, 10%, 50%, or 100% - totally irrelevant - isn't it?

[Oakvale]

I don't even understand Ben's point here - not many gays marry (according to his dubious assertion) so it shouldn't be legal?

[Alcon]

Ben, do you maybe mean that it was 1% of the marriages in Canada that were gay, rather than 1% of the gays who were married? The statistics that I'm looking at give us 12,438 same-sex marriages in Canada between June 2003 and October 2006 (with same-sex marriage still not being legal in much of Canada for a lot of this time span), and 147,391 marriages of any kind in 2003, a rate which at that time (the website that I'm looking at for this particular number is from 2007) was said to be more or less stable. So if there are ~140,000-150,000 marriages a year, and 3,731.4 of those were gay on an average between a little over three years during all of which gay marriage wasn't legal throughout Canada...uh, that doesn't gel with what you were saying.

Here, links.

Same-sex marriage rate
General marriage rate

So given all that verbiage, what in Canada is the gay marriage rate among gays of "marrying" age? Again however, it is totally irrelevant from an ethical standpoint whether it is 1%, 10%, 50%, or 100% - totally irrelevant - isn't it?

To be fair to his argument, he's saying the positive effect on 1% of gays is less than the negative effect on society from "de-gendering" marriage.  So he's not saying that 1% of gays have no value, but rather that it's reasonable to ignore them because 99% of gays are disinterested, and there's a net-negative effect on society.

The problem is, his argument about the negative effect on society is ridiculously selective, to the point where he's establishing, ignoring and limiting policy externalities at apparent convenience; and he seems all too willing to throw that 1% (if that's really it) under the bus, as if they were responsible for the disinterest of the 99%.

And he's also starting to go all Milhouse on us with this vague "consummation" stuff.

[Wisconsin+17]

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http://www.vs.gov.bc.ca/stats/annual/2003/pdf/marriages.pdf

In the first year it was legalized (where you would expect more), you see 600 residents of BC with gay marriage as compared to 40k, or 1.5 percent.

Only 40 percent of gay marriages in BC were by BC residents, 60 percent were from outside the province.

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Vital statistics.

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Answered and answered.

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Statistics are showing in BC that fewer people overall are choosing to get married.

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The rate has increased after the laws were changed.

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There's no reason why the 'nuclear family' cannot include aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins. This is a straw man.

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Unfortunately, since most gay people do not want this, this is not what we see.

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They can't have children. Not without outside help.

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So what you are arguing is that an entire family needs to rearrange itself to suits the needs and desire of one member. Are you trying to reinforce my argument?

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Unfortunately the experiment is showing precisely the opposite. Fewer people are getting married.

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That's the behaviour that we are seeing, and I believe the thesis makes sense. If you don't have to have children to get married, and it doesn't even matter if you are a man or a woman, that's not really symbolic of a relationship between a husband and wife, is it? Is someone who's already in a long term relationship going to be all that inclined to take advantage of a relationship that doesn't express how they feel about each other?

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60 percent of all gay marriages in 2003 in BC were from folks outside of BC, this corresponds to 90 percernt of all straight marriages. Clearly there is a campaign. This is what is driving the demand, and why the demand has fallen off drastically from a high of 1 percent.

[Adam Griffin]

Ben, do you maybe mean that it was 1% of the marriages in Canada that were gay, rather than 1% of the gays who were married? The statistics that I'm looking at give us 12,438 same-sex marriages in Canada between June 2003 and October 2006 (with same-sex marriage still not being legal in much of Canada for a lot of this time span), and 147,391 marriages of any kind in 2003, a rate which at that time (the website that I'm looking at for this particular number is from 2007) was said to be more or less stable. So if there are ~140,000-150,000 marriages a year, and 3,731.4 of those were gay on an average between a little over three years during all of which gay marriage wasn't legal throughout Canada...uh, that doesn't gel with what you were saying.

Here, links.

Same-sex marriage rate
General marriage rate

So given all that verbiage, what in Canada is the gay marriage rate among gays of "marrying" age? Again however, it is totally irrelevant from an ethical standpoint whether it is 1%, 10%, 50%, or 100% - totally irrelevant - isn't it?

It is irrelevant, and also hard to calculate. First, you have to pin down what percentage of the population is "eligible" to engage in a same-sex marriage. If we low-ball it and say 1%, that's roughly 150,000 Canadians. If we take the numbers from 2006-2007, with there being roughly 12,000 gay marriages, then that means that 24,000 gays are married in Canada.

24,000/150,000 = 0.16 = 16% of the homosexual population in Canada is married.

Even if gays made up 5% of the population, that would still place the number of married homosexuals at roughly 3%, as of 2007.

Five years later, it's safe to assume that there are a lot more than 24,000 married gays in Canada.

[Wisconsin+17]

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Is divorce an issue more or less likely to be tackled before or after gay marriage is legalized?

[Adam Griffin]

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Is divorce an issue more or less likely to be tackled before or after gay marriage is legalized?

If the idea cannot stand alone, then it does not deserve to be considered. You don't get to delay the rights of gays just because you can't get your own house in order.

[Swedish Rainbow Capitalist Cheese]

Ben, where are you getting the "only 1% of gays in Canada are getting married" numbers? It sounds completly made up and I would like to see a source to that claim.  

Ben, do you maybe mean that it was 1% of the marriages in Canada that were gay, rather than 1% of the gays who were married? The statistics that I'm looking at give us 12,438 same-sex marriages in Canada between June 2003 and October 2006 (with same-sex marriage still not being legal in much of Canada for a lot of this time span), and 147,391 marriages of any kind in 2003, a rate which at that time (the website that I'm looking at for this particular number is from 2007) was said to be more or less stable. So if there are ~140,000-150,000 marriages a year, and 3,731.4 of those were gay on an average between a little over three years during all of which gay marriage wasn't legal throughout Canada...uh, that doesn't gel with what you were saying. My on-the-fly statistics don't even support the 1% of marriages being gay figure. At least in this period (which granted might have seen higher rates than subsequently for obvious reasons) it was more like 2.5%.

Here, links.

Same-sex marriage rate
General marriage rate

Ah there we go, so as it seemed, Ben didn't quite make his research. 2.5% of all marriages in Canada is quite a lot different. Even if that's a smaller marriage rate than straights it's much much much more than 1% of gays. I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt though guessing he just made a mathmatical mistake.

[Wisconsin+17]

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Never said it would be the cure or moral decay, but banning it will treat the symptom so you can tackle the other problems. Doing nothing will simply let things get even worse then they are now.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

...Ben, marriage rate in one year is not the same as the percentage of a population that is married.

'Nuclear family' by definition refers to a 'family group consisting of a pair of adults and their children'. Yes, there is a reason why it cannot include other members of the in the family group. It's called the definition of the phrase.

[Alcon]

Ben, do you maybe mean that it was 1% of the marriages in Canada that were gay, rather than 1% of the gays who were married? The statistics that I'm looking at give us 12,438 same-sex marriages in Canada between June 2003 and October 2006 (with same-sex marriage still not being legal in much of Canada for a lot of this time span), and 147,391 marriages of any kind in 2003, a rate which at that time (the website that I'm looking at for this particular number is from 2007) was said to be more or less stable. So if there are ~140,000-150,000 marriages a year, and 3,731.4 of those were gay on an average between a little over three years during all of which gay marriage wasn't legal throughout Canada...uh, that doesn't gel with what you were saying.

Here, links.

Same-sex marriage rate
General marriage rate

So given all that verbiage, what in Canada is the gay marriage rate among gays of "marrying" age? Again however, it is totally irrelevant from an ethical standpoint whether it is 1%, 10%, 50%, or 100% - totally irrelevant - isn't it?

It is irrelevant, and also hard to calculate. First, you have to pin down what percentage of the population is "eligible" to engage in a same-sex marriage. If we low-ball it and say 1%, that's roughly 150,000 Canadians. If we take the numbers from 2006-2007, with there being roughly 12,000 gay marriages, then that means that 24,000 gays are married in Canada.

24,000/150,000 = 0.16 = 16% of the homosexual population in Canada is married.

Even if gays made up 5% of the population, that would still place the number of married homosexuals at roughly 3%, as of 2007.

Five years later, it's safe to assume that there are a lot more than 24,000 married gays in Canada.

He is correct that a lot of those marriages were probably non-residents.  He just seems to be a little eager to set low values as zero; and for all of his abstract arguments about the negative externalities on heteros, he doesn't seem to be giving any due to the arguments about why it might take gays a while to come around to the whole marriage thing.  His argument is complicated and has some fair points, but he seems to be going out of his way to ignore some factors and highlight others.

[ajb]

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Is divorce an issue more or less likely to be tackled before or after gay marriage is legalized?

Well, same-sex marriage has only been an active issue since the very late 1990's, and divorce rates haven't actually gone up since then, the big shift having happened in the 1970's or so. And yet conservative Republicans in office at the state and federal level during that time seem to have done awfully little about it.
If you're saying that gay marriage is a higher priority now, then why wasn't divorce a higher priority for conservatives then? Dare I suggest that it's because lots of conservatives are divorced?

[Free Palestine]

Countries that have legalized same-sex marriage:

Canada
Argentina
Spain
Portugal
South Africa
Belgium
The Netherlands
Norway
Sweden
Iceland

Countries that have encountered significant economic/social problems/whatever as a result of legalizing same-sex marriage:

...

DURR

Seriously, this may seem hackish, but I have no problem saying that there is no legitimate argument against same-sex marriage.

[Adam Griffin]

He is correct that a lot of those marriages were probably non-residents.  He just seems to be a little eager to set low values as zero; and for all of his abstract arguments about the negative externalities on heteros, he doesn't seem to be giving any due to the arguments about why it might take gays a while to come around to the whole marriage thing.  His argument is complicated and has some fair points, but he seems to be going out of his way to ignore some factors and highlight others.

Valid points all. There are definite flaws in how low the projections were made by Ben. Even at a projection of 1% of the Canadian population being gay and with 80% of all marriages being from out-of-country, it still amounts of 2.5-3% of native Canadian gays being married.

There's also huge validity in the long-term trends that will have to take place for gay marriage rates to be on par with hetero marriage. People don't change their behaviors, stigmas or actions overnight.

[Wisconsin+17]

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Ok, then are you arguing that your sex is in fact relevant?

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You can't have both of these. One or the other. Either things like procreation are relevant or they are not.

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If you are arguing that they are both the same and should be treated the same, then you are saying that procreation is irrelevant to marriage.

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Then you don't see consummation as having any relevance to marriage?

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Uh, yeah. Sorry. If a policy that's supposed to bring freedom to people is outright rejected, then that pretty much says it all? Maybe the policy stinks and/or doesn't meet the needs of gay people.

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Yep, you've got it, it breaks things that have generally always been associated with marriage.

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I'm stating that the effect of 10 percent of the population doing something that hurts things overall outweighs 1 percent of the population doing something that may be helpful.

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All I'm seeing are negative externalities associated with the policy. If you've got positive externalities, then I'd like to see them.  

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Because it's an empirical effect? You've asked for something that can be measured. This is one thing that can.

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I'm stating that the evidence that we possess at present shows an insignificant increase in one type of marriage and a significant decrease in another type of marriage. Ergo, the policy is an outright failure at producing the desired result, increasing the marriage rate in Canada. In fact, it's been quite the opposite.

Fewer people getting married is going to have a negative effect further on down the road. Smaller families, more breakups, more children out of wedlock, and an overall drag on the economy.

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It would be, except this theory isn't working out this way. If gay marriage increased overall monogamy, we would not be seeing the things we do see. We're seeing precisely the opposite.

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Not sure where I've dismissed them altogether? I've argued they are substantially outweighed by the negative effects.

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What percentage of children overall are raised in these circumstances? By far the greatest correlation is the overall marriage rates.

[Wisconsin+17]

One of me, lots of you.

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The problem is that 60+ percent of gay marriages are not to Canadians, whereas 90+ of straight marriages are.

So you really can take only the 40 percent or so of marriages that actually involve Canadians.

[Wisconsin+17]

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Again, you have to take into account the fact that most do not actually involve Canadians.

[Wisconsin+17]

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If I'm in Georgia, I don't go to NYC by way of Florida Keys.

[Lincoln Republican]

Well, there goes about 20 million independents, swing voters, and crossover Democrats.