The other very important resource I have recently discovered is Maggie Gallagher's Institute for Marriage and Public Policy VA, US, which can be located at http://www.marriagedebate.com. I appreciate how Dr Gallagher facilitates discussion about these important issues by allowing the posting of responses - favourable and otherwise - to her material. I have read some fascinating exchanges of ideas over the months.

Lisa Severine Nolland for Anglican Mainstream 30 June 2006 ls.noll@tiscali.co.uk

Zombie Killers A.K.A., "Queering the Social", Stanley Kurtz SK, 25 May 2006

Gay marriage undermines marriage....okay, I admit it. I'm a cranky, stick-in-the-mud conservative who keeps making the same tired old point. I can change, though. I can be a hip-and-happening culturally radical kind of guy. Try this: "The queering of the social calls into question the normativity and naturalness of both heterosexuality and heterorelationality." Or how about this? "Marriage 'in the traditional sense' is disappearing. It is the gays who are the pioneers in this respect-the prime everyday experimenters." Not radical enough? Then try this: "Gay and lesbian families are here; all our families are queer; let's get used to it!"

Gay marriage undermines marriage. You see, it turns out that this decidedly conservative observation is entirely consistent with the views of some of the most influential sociologists in Europe, and their followers here in America. I've been quoting and paraphrasing these prominent sociologists to show that I'm far from the only one who connects same-sex marriage with the decline of traditional marriage ... Same-sex marriage doesn't reinforce marriage; instead, it upends marriage, and helps build acceptance for a host of other mutually reinforcing changes like single parenting, parental cohabitation, and multi-partner unions that only serve to weaken marriage. In short, "the queering of the social" , meaning a broad spectrum of family change, including, but not limited to, same-sex partnerships calls into question the normativity and naturalness of "heterorelationality" i.e., traditional marriage. http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MTU4NDEzNTY5ODNmOWU4M2Y1MGIwMTcyODdjZGQxOTk=

The Libertarian Question: Incest, homosexuality, and adultery, SK, 30 April 2003

The libertarian asks, Just because two married gay men live next door, is that going to make me leave my wife? In a way, the answer is "Yes." For one thing, as a new generation grows up exposed to gay couples who openly define their marriages in non-monogamous terms, the concept of marriage itself will gradually change.

No doubt, movies and television in a post-gay-marriage world will be filled with stories of the "cutting edge" understandings of open marriage being pioneered by the new gay couples, even if the actual number of such married gay couples is relatively small.

A large segment of the gay community looks forward to gay marriage for precisely this reason. Many thoughtful gay activists see same-sex marriage as a chance to redefine marriage itself - stripping marriage of what they see as its outdated and constricting connection to monogamy ... Still, the libertarian asks, Would the group marriage next door really make me leave my wife? Maybe not. Of course, the married commune next door might invite the two of you over for some fun, with potentially problematic results for your marriage. But even that is not the real problem. The deeper difficulty is simply the breaking of the taboo on adultery. Sodomy laws were barely enforced, yet they made a collective statement about social attitudes toward non-marital and non-reproductive sexuality. Similarly, incest laws are rarely invoked. Yet their existence reinforces the horror of incest, and helps prevent the sort of violations that make incestuous temptation thinkable.

So the mere social statement that marriage does not mean monogamy is where the real danger of legalized gay-marriage and polyamory lie. And the collapse of consensus about shared social institutions really does effect us as individuals. Once we as a society no longer take it for granted that marriage means monogamy, you may not decide to leave your wife. But you may be more likely to give in to the temptation of an affair. And that could mean the end of your marriage, whether that's what you wanted going into the affair or not. http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz043003.asp

See also 'Marriage Radicals: Slipping down the slope', SK, 31 July 2003, where he argues that 'it's not adultery per se, but the open belief that adultery is not, in fact, a crime against marriage that's the heart of the problem ... The problem is that if a culturally salient minority of married couples begin to tout a new conception of what marriage means, it will break apart our taken-for-granted cultural consensus about the connection between marriage and monogamy.' http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz073103.asp

Beyond Gay Marriage: The road to polyamory, SK, 4 August 2003 Among the likeliest effects of gay marriage is to take us down a slippery slope to legalized polygamy and "polyamory" group marriage. Marriage will be transformed into a variety of relationship contracts, linking two, three, or more individuals, however weakly and temporarily, in every conceivable combination of male and female. A scare scenario? Hardly.

The bottom of this slope is visible from where we stand. Advocacy of legalized polygamy is growing. A network of grass-roots organizations seeking legal recognition for group marriage already exists. The cause of legalized group marriage is championed by a powerful faction of family law specialists. Influential legal bodies in both the United States and Canada have presented radical programs of marital reform. Some of these quasi-governmental proposals go so far as to suggest the abolition of marriage. The ideas behind this movement have already achieved surprising influence with a prominent American politician. None of this is well known. Both the media and public spokesmen for the gay marriage movement treat the issue as an unproblematic advance for civil rights.

True, relatively conservative gay spokesmen do consider the social effects of gay matrimony, insisting that they will be beneficent, that homosexual unions will become more stable. Yet another faction of gay rights advocates actually favors gay marriage as a step toward the abolition of marriage itself. This group agrees that there is a slippery slope, and wants to hasten the slide down. To consider what comes after gay marriage is not to say that gay marriage itself poses no danger to the institution of marriage. Quite apart from the likelihood that it will usher in legalized polygamy and polyamory, gay marriage will almost certainly weaken the belief that monogamy lies at the heart of marriage. But to see why this is so, we will first need to reconnoiter the slippery slope. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/938xpsxy.asp?pg=

The End of Marriage in Scandinavia: The "conservative case" for same-sex marriage collapses, SK, 2 February 2004 Marriage is slowly dying in Scandinavia. A majority of children in Sweden and Norway are born out of wedlock. Sixty percent of first-born children in Denmark have unmarried parents. Not coincidentally, these countries have had something close to full gay marriage for a decade or more. Same-sex marriage has locked in and reinforced an existing Scandinavian trend toward the separation of marriage and parenthood.... Will same-sex marriage undermine the institution of marriage? It already 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. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/660zypwj.asp

Slipping Toward Scandinavia: Contra Andrew Sullivan, SK, 2 February 2004 Marriage in the northern county of Nordland is in severe decline. In 2002, an extraordinary 82.27 percent of first-born children in gay-friendly, socially liberal Nordland were born out-of-wedlock. A "mere" 67.29 percent of all children born in Nordland in 2002 were born out-of-wedlock. As I explained in "The End of Marriage in Scandinavia," many of these births are to unmarried, but cohabiting, couples. Yet cohabiting couples in Scandinavia break up at two to three times the rate of married couples. Since the Norwegian tendency to marry after the second child is gradually giving way, it is likely that the 67-percent figure for all out-of-wedlock births will someday catch up to the 82-percent figure for first-born out-of-wedlock births. At that point, marriage in Nordland will be effectively dead ... The deeper point is that, contrary to the "conservative case," those who favor gay marriage tend to favor or condone unmarried parenthood. The connection between gay marriage and unmarried parenthood extends to all sectors of Scandinavian society - religious or not. So when socially radical professors from NTNU the Norwegian University of Science and Technology use the example of gay marriage to argue that marriage is unnecessary for parenthood - they have just as much effect on their secular "congregations" as Lutheran clergy have on theirs. http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz200402020917.asp

The Marriage Mentality: A reply to my critics, SK, 4 May 2004

Gay marriage is part and parcel of a whole new stage of marital decline-a stage still relatively unfamiliar in the United States. In this new stage of marital decline, couples don't just cohabit before they become parents. Couples cohabit even after they become parents. Because gay marriage helps to break apart the ideas of marriage and parenthood, it is closely associated with this advanced stage of marital decline.

There are three core elements in this new and more radical stage of marital decline: parental cohabitation, the legal equalization of marriage and cohabitation, and gay marriage. My claim is that these three factors are mutually reinforcing. When any of these three factors emerges, the others tend to follow. And they draw out the initial factors still further. http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2QzNDA3YWYwNmZjYWUyMDA4NzI0ODc0YTQ5ZTM1NWQ=

Smoking Gun: The Netherlands shows the effect of same-sex marriage. SK, 2 June 2006

The numbers are in, and the Dutch out-of-wedlock birthrate has done it again, shooting up a striking 2.5 percentage points. That makes nine consecutive years of average two-percentage-point increases in the Dutch out-of-wedlock birthrate, a rise unmatched by any country in Western Europe during the same period ...

The Netherlands is so important because it provides evidence for an actual acceleration of out-of-wedlock birthrates following the passage of same-sex unions-proof demanded by Eskridge and Spedale, conservative gay marriage advocates. We see this in the Netherlands because, in contrast to Scandinavia, out-of-wedlock birthrates were relatively low in Holland prior to the advent of registered partnerships and gay marriage. So in the Netherlands, we aren't comparing apples and oranges out-of-wedlock births for second-born children and above, as opposed to first-born children ...

All indications are that the Dutch case is a causal smoking gun for gay marriage's negative effects. Although the matter is fair game for continued debate, no one has yet offered a convincing alternative explanation, or even fully confronted the arguments already on the table. At a bare minimum, the rapid and ongoing deterioration of Dutch marriage shows that the "conservative case" for same-sex marriage has been proven wrong in the Netherlands. Convince the public that marriage is not about parenthood, and increasingly parents simply stop getting married. http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDFhMjk0YjI4NzgyZGM4NjMxZmY4NTQwZWNjYzkzYjg=

See also 'Standing Out: The sharp increase of non-marital birth in the Netherlands needs some explaining', SK, 23 February 2006. 'Marriage in the Netherlands is in serious trouble. You don't have to take my word for it, because even the Netherland's own statistical agency is making the same point.' http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz200602230800.asp

Finally, note the very recent articles by SK, 'Why So Few? Looking at what we know about same-sex marriage', 5 June, 2006; http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OWVmMDgyYWRmOTNjOTM2M2JlNGZhZTI5YTlmYjY4ZWY= and 'Why So Few? Part II Same-sex marriage isn't taking off in Scandinavia' 6 June 2006; http://author.nationalreview.com/latest/?q=MjMxNA==

END