Mary Cheney’s out-of-wedlock child won’t change my perception of marriage at all, nor will her openly lesbian relationship. The only people likely to be affected are guillible jerks like you.

When you posted a link to an article in the admittedly neo-conservative National Review, you claimed it was about statistics in Denmark. I had to point out to you that the article was about the Netherlands. Learn to read, Timmy, if you want to be taken seriously here.

Idiots here cannot seem to understand what is being done to the institution.

Typical cliches like – how does it effect your marriage?

Libs should just do away with marriage as there are no legal or social reasons to support it.
Its all about love.
Since when is the US government is the love business?

———————————————————————————————
timmy – you owned this thread buddy

I have given an example of how it will lead to more out of wedlock children. It won’t effect my marriage, it will effect society’s perception of marriage and what it has meant in building our country.

Take responsbility for the failure of others = Democrats.
Refuse to take responsibility for their own failures = Republicans.

Why do Republicans refuse to take responsibility for their own actions? Could it be that they hate to admit their own failures? Most probably, so.

You choose your bias, I’ll choose mine. And, yes, you DO have a bias!

Now, to poke the holes in Mr. Kurtz’s falacious logic:
‘First, for completeness sake and for those idiots who actually need convincing about this, some holes in Stanley’s theory:

Marriage has been in decline since the late 1960s, way before same-sex marriage (or registered partnerships).

Marriage has been in decline in places without same-sex marriage.
Marriage has held steady in places with same-sex marriage.

The biggest cause of marital decline is not same-sex marriage, it’s divorce. Getting a divorce used to be legally difficult and socially frowned upon. Now people have prenuptial agreements. Why not re-outlaw divorce instead of outlawing same-sex marriage?

If marriage is all about childrearing and that is the reason gays should not be allowed to marry, how come infertile people are allowed to marry?
If the debate surrounding same-sex marriage is causing people to doubt their own convictions as to what marriage is all about, why not accept same-sex marriage and end the debate?
What about other social factors besides same-sex marriage? I already mentioned divorce, but what about the advent of reliable birth control, financial independence for women, the fact that nowadays most people no longer “marry from home” but first live independently in a single household? Kurtz should weigh the importance of these factors instead of just discarding them.
Having just one parent is bad for kids, which presumably means stuff like less household income, the kid doing badly at school, juvenile delinquency and the like. But who says that having two parents is the only solution to problems like that? What about extensive daycare, or more money for schools, cheaper higher education? And waddyuknow, countries with same-sex marriage have all that. That changes the equation for parents thinking about a divorce or a break-up. Kurtz doesn’t even mention it.

Then, some holes in his data:

Kurtz posits that cohabitating (unmarried) parents break up more often than married parents. This may well be true, but:
He’s forgetting that a lot of cohabitating ends not with a split, but with a wedding. This skews the data because it takes couples who are not likely to break up and shifts them from one group to the other.
The actual numbers he shows are for cohabitating couples, not cohabitating parents (let alone cohabitating biological parents). It is likely that unmarried childless couples do not have the same break-up rate as unmarried couples with children. Kurtz should quote the relevant data or admit that it just isn’t available.

He is interested in couples with young children (because it’s all about childrearing), so any older couples will just pollute his data. This would be bad enough if older couples were a constant confounder, but the fact is that yesterday’s older couples (i.e., the greatest generation) were married for life, while today’s boomers are more likely to have divorced, be in an unmarried partnership, be openly gay, etc. A lot of the “marital decline” has nothing to do with childrearing.
Because it often takes a lot of time to formalize a divorce, quite a few single parents are still officially married. In the Netherlands, one in ten single parents is married.

What’s the deal with stepparents? If Kurtz considers childrearing as an something that ought to be done by the biological parents, if a stepparent just ain’t good enough for him, then remarriage is counted in the wrong category. If, on the other hand, being raised by stepparents is fine, then the breaking up of biological parents is less of an issue, since most single parents will find a new partner. And what about informal stepparents?
Stanley has just posted two articles at the NRO, one on Scandinavian marital woes, the other on the Dutch decline. In them, he graciously responds to his critics. It took him more than a year (he is responding to articles published in 2004), but still.”

http://emmering.blogspot.com/2006/03/newsflash-stanley-kurtz-is-still.html

Husband = man
Wife = man?

Homosexual marrige – I now pronounce you husband and husband?
Bisexual marriage – I now pronounce you husband and wife and husband?
I now pronounce you wife and husband and wife?

Just love America freedom to chose

They did the same thing with the flawed hypothalmus study of homosexuals.
The researchers were homosexuals.

Comment by Democrat Soldier

I showed the facts in the Netherlands and then you got some hack from the Gay and Lesbian STRATEGIC Studies and passed him off as just an ecomomics professor.

Still waiting to hear how allowing same-sex marriage will make your marriage somehow less than it was when you got married.

And waiting, and waiting, and waiting. . . . . . . . . .

Comment by Democrat Soldier

I don’t remember you asking that before. I have given an example of how it will lead to more out of wedlock children. It won’t effect my marriage, it will effect society’s perception of marriage and what it has meant in building our country.

And your strategy is to try and discredit the facts that do not support your prejudice.

Still waiting to hear how allowing same-sex marriage will make your marriage somehow less than it was when you got married.

And waiting, and waiting, and waiting. . . . . . . . . .

Comment by Lora

You are right, it was the Netherlands, not Denmark. As to why it is biased, how?

Comment by Democrat Soldier

Talk about a biased source. Nice try.

http://www.thenation.com/directory/bios/m_v_lee_badgett

M.V. Lee Badgett is an economist at the University of Massachusetts and the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies.

Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies? Looks like the strategy here is to try and discredit any evidence against the agenda.

And can we move away from sexual/personal issues to issues truly affecting this nation?

“But University of Massachusetts economist Lee Badgett demonstrates that the adoption of same-sex marriage and same-sex partnership rights in Scandinavia and the Netherlands has not changed previously-existing trends in marriage, divorce, cohabitation, or out-of-wedlock childbearing. Same-sex marriage has not undermined heterosexual marriage where it has been adopted and is unlikely do so in the United States. Surprisingly, in many countries where there is greater tolerance for same-sex marriage and unwed childbearing, children actually spend more of their lives with their two biological parents than in the U.S.”

http://www.contemporaryfamilies.org/subtemplate.php?t=pressReleases&ext=July13-

“Despite what Kurtz might say, the apocalypse has not yet arrived. In fact, the numbers show that heterosexual marriage looks pretty healthy in Scandinavia, where same-sex couples have had rights the longest. In Denmark, for example, the marriage rate had been declining for a half-century but turned around in the early 1980s. After the 1989 passage of the registered-partner law, the marriage rate continued to climb; Danish heterosexual marriage rates are now the highest they’ve been since the early 1970’s. And the most recent marriage rates in Sweden, Norway, and Iceland are all higher than the rates for the years before the partner laws were passed. Furthermore, in the 1990s, divorce rates in Scandinavia remained basically unchanged.”

http://www.slate.com/id/2100884/

You’ve got to stop drinking the kool-aide, Timmy!

Comment by Flaco — June 14, 2007 @ 10:25 pm

On the other hand, an overwhelming majority of the Massachusetts legislature voting down a bigoted constitutional amendment is extremely democratic. Why do you hate democracy?

I think Timmeh needs a refresher on the meaning of “idea”.
Also on the use of biased sources to prove debatable points…….
Nice try, though.
Comment by KRank

Timmeh not only needs a refresher on the meaning of “idea” but also a remedial reading course. I looked at the link provided to the hardly non-biased National Review. The study referred to is of marriage in the Netherlands–not Denmark; Dutch citizens–not Danes! KRank is too generous in even calling it a “nice try.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz200602230800.asp

Comment by timmy — June 14, 2007 @ 10:23 pm

I think Timmeh needs a refresher on the meaning of “idea”.

Also on the use of biased sources to prove debatable points.

The article you link to, Timmeh, speaks of the decline of marriage since the legalization of gay marriage and “Registered Partnerships.”

Children born to heterosexual couples involved in “Registered Partnerships” are considered out-of-wedlock births. That is a function of the new classification of legal relationships. Gay marriage has nothing to do with it, despite what the National Review Contributing editor has to say.

Nice try, though.

Comment by Flaco — June 14, 2007 @ 10:25 pm

I understand that you believe that it redefines marriage for us all, but you haven’t explained how. Or why. You’ve just insisted that it does.

Please explain how gay marriage would redefine my own marriage. Or yours (if you have one).

Explain how it would affect my marriage at all?