Commentary: Issue of gay marriage and parenthood
   November 20, 2003

  BOB EDWARDS, host: Just two days after the Massachusetts Supreme
  Judicial Court handed down a ruling supporting gay marriage, both
  liberals and conservatives are predicting that the issue will split
  American voters. In the second in a series of commentaries on gay
  marriage, Stanley Kurtz says not everyone who is anti-gay marriage is
  anti-gay.

  STANLEY KURTZ:

  Gay marriage is a tough issue. Many Americans want to offer gay marriage
  as a gesture of love, acceptance and support to our gay friends and
  relatives. Yet Americans also worry about the effects on the institution
  of marriage, of so profound a change. Same sex marriage could affect
  marriage itself. There has long been a profound symbolic link between
  marriage and parenthood. Of course, not all married couples can or do
  have children. But gay marriage would create a whole new class of
  marriages that cannot, by themselves, produce children. It would break
  apart the symbolic connection between marriage and parenthood.

  Consider the experience of the Scandinavian countries where gay marriage
  has existed for a decade. Marriage is slowly dying there. Increasingly,
  affluent, middle class Scandinavians are having children without getting
  married. European statistical bureaus report that a majority of children
  in Sweden and Norway are now born out of wedlock. The unmarried parents
  break up at two to three times the rate of married couples leaving their
  children in the lurch.

  In Scandinavia, gay marriage has reinforced the existing trend toward
  the separation of marriage and parenthood. Thus, it has contributed to
  higher out-of-wedlock birth rates and higher rates of family
  disillusion. Scandinavia's system of same sex registered partnerships is
  a sort of de facto gay marriage, very much like Vermont's civil unions.
  This means that granting same sex marriage in everything but name could
  get us into trouble as well. And Scandinavia doesn't have an under
  class. America's under class already suffers from sky-high rates of
  unwed motherhood. That leaves us particularly vulnerable to any further
  separation between the ideas of marriage and parenthood.

  You don't have to be religious to take this problem seriously. Gay
  marriage is much more than a simple question of civil rights. Our sex
  and our sexuality have much more bearing than skin color does on the way
  marriage and parenting work. This isn't about returning to the '50s when
  homosexuals were closeted. We cherish tolerance, but Americans are
  rightly concerned about the possible social effects of gay marriage. On
  balance, I think gay marriage is a bad idea, but it's a tough issue
  because it's a real issue, a genuine conflict between the need for
  social tolerance and the welfare of children who need and deserve stable
  families.

  EDWARDS: The comments of Stanley Kurtz, a research fellow at the Hoover
  Institution and a contributing editor for National Review Online.
  Tomorrow, commentator Patt Morrison said gays should look before they
  leap into marriage.

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