SAME-SEX MARRIAGE & LIES FROM THE RIGHT

Months ago, I heard Richard Land, the president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission since 1988, claim that the legalization of same-sex marriages in the Scandinavian countries had led to a decline in marriage rates and thus must be opposed. I looked around to get the facts about this but I was unable to find any. Fortunately, MediaMatters has come up with some real research about this issue: http://mediamatters.org/items/200506030007

You can find the research paper MM's article is based on here:
http://www.freedomtomarry.org/pdf/scandinaviaBEPressArticle.pdf

Here is a key excerpt from the paper:

The long-term trend in Scandinavia has been lower marriage rates, higher divorce rates, and higher rates of nonmarital births. This has been a trend lasting at least two generations -- long predating registered partnership laws adopted in 1989 (Denmark) and 1994 (Sweden). The trend has mainly been cultural and social. To the extent that law has made a difference, one would expect the liberalization of alternatives (cohabitation) and exit (no-fault divorce) to be the key legal developments contributing to these changes in marriage and divorce rates. In both Denmark and Sweden, these legal changes occurred between 1969 and 1980, and the data in Tables D-1 and S-1 reveal a close correlation between these particular legal changes and lower marriage rates and higher divorce rates. Less dramatic legal changes, such as state support for working women with children, have also contributed to rising births of non-marital children.
Can Kurtz convincingly show that registered partnerships accelerated the pace of change in marriage that had been going on for most of the twentieth century, and that had been dramatic since 1970? Because registered partnership laws have been in effect for almost 15 years in Denmark and almost 9 years in Sweden, these countries might offer laboratories for testing his hypothesis. 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. The 1990s see no stake through the heart of marriage--indeed, the institution shows renewed signs of life in the new millennium. It is Kurtz's hypothesis that dies, according to the data.