Christian Right Wrong On Gay Marriage in Massachusetts:
Mass Likely To Retain Lowest Divorce Rate Spot In 2005,
States Hostile to Gay Marriage Lag
by Bruce WIlson, Talk To Action
Excerpt:
“….Over two years have passed now since same sex marriage was legalized in Massachusetts, and data from all of 2004 and the first 11 months of 2005 are now available. Emergent trends in Massachusetts amount to a stark indictment of those dire claims about sex marriage cited earlier in this article.
Divorce rates are commonly used as a key measure of marital and family health. US states, including Massachusetts, submit monthly summaries of vital statistics on births, deaths, marriages, and divorces to the US Center For Disease Control’s National Center For Health Statistics ( NCHS ). The NCHS then compiles publicly available monthly and yearly reports of this data. The following statistics are based on that NCHS material.
Divorce rates in the US have been declining steadily since the the early 1980’s. Massachusetts has shared in the trend and traditionally has had a divorce rate considerably lower than the national average. In fact. for several years now the Commonwealth has had the lowest divorce rate of any state in the union.
In 2004 the Massachusetts divorce rate, at 2.2 per 1,000 residents per year, was considerably lower than the US national average rate for that year, 3.8 per 1,000. Indeed, it was lower than the national average rate for 1950 (2.6 per 1,000) and even approached the national rate of 1940 (2 per 1,000).
In 2003, total divorces in Massachusetts declined 2.1% relative to 2002.
But in the first two years of legal same sex marriage in the Bay State, Massachusetts showed a more rapid decline and will very likely hold on to its title as the US state with the lowest divorce rate in the nation. The field is hotly contested — divorce rates have fallen dramatically in the last few decades.The institution of marriage in Massachusetts, as measured by the rate of divorce, has not been healthier in at least half a century regardless of dire predictions of Christian Right leaders and Catholic Bishops. But the states that have taken aggressive action against same sex marriage, have not done nearly as well during the two year period of legal same sex marriage in Massachusetts.
The preliminary data from 2004 and the first 11 months of 2005 — from the 17 US states which have provided data on divorce for 2004 and 2005 and whose voters also passed state constitutional amendents prohibiting same sex marriage — presents a striking picture : the group of US states arguably most hostile to divorce, those which have passed both state laws and also state constitutional amendments prohibiting same sex marriage, lag dramatically in terms of divorce rate improvement when compared to same sex marriage friendly states.
Among those US states that have no laws on the books specifically prohibiting same sex marriage or civil unions — WY, NM, NY, MA, RI, CT, NJ, MD, VT — the average divorce rate drop ( unadjusted for population changes ) was -8.74%. No states in this group had divorce rate increases in 2004 and 2005.
Among those US states that are most opposed to same sex marriage which have also provided divorce data for the time period — ( alaska ? ) AR, KS, KY, MI, MS, MO, NE, NV, ND, OH, OK, OR, UT, TX — the average divorce rate ( unadjusted for population changes ) for 2004 and the first 11 months of 2005 increased 1.75%. This group contains 4 of the 5 states with the highest divorce rate increases in the US during 2004 and the first 11 months of 2005.
( states in the second group may have on average a higher population growth rate but that will not change the almost 10.5% gap between the two groups more than a few percentage points )
Meanwhile, the one state in the United States Of America that has legal same sex marriage, Massachusetts, will be among the top ten states – or better – with the largest drop in divorce rates in America during 2004 and 2005.
Wilson provides divorce statistics for every state except Indiana, and for years going back to 1910, to substantiate his case.
Hi Mike, thanks for posting that :
I posted the entire piece at the Daily Kos – because I thought it was extremely important, but I’m suspicious that the mainstream there doesn’t see the significance in the material that I do. It didn’t get very much attention. Well, I’m just glad to have gotten through my writer’s block in terms of just getting the piece out and starting my series.
For me it’s an exciting story because it knocks the stuffing – to the extent it gets noticed in any case – out of a big part of the Christian right’s main attack line.
Maybe I’m more sensitized to minority rights than most. That could be so. In any case, this is only the first piece in a series, so I’m hoping that future themes will strike the right note.
Isn’t it odd that more access to happy marriages for everybody means…more happy marriages for everybody? I hope the right people take this to heart.
What was that proverb? Physician, heal thyself! (in re: the states opposed to ssm)
Um… I notice that the divorce rate was measured in terms of population (“2.2 per 1,000 residents”). That seems to be pretty meaningless to me, and could easily be misleading; wouldn’t a better ratio be the number of divorces per number of married couples?
Agree with Skemono on that. The per 1000 residents is best considered a substitute measure, albeit generally a reasonable one.
Also need to account for the age profile of the married couples — areas with an older population will show reduced rates because 1) older couples simply do not divorce as readily as younger couples and 2) those marriages that were going to fail probably already have done so.
And let’s not forget there is a very simple way to reduce the official divorce rates to zero — ban divorce.
But that, of course, says nothing about the state of the marriages. There is a reason the rates accelerated upwards in the 1970s… easier access to divorce (and a decline in the social consequences of doing so) enabled many more couples to finally put a bullet into their bad or unhappy marriages.
The important thing to take out of Bruces work is that the figures clearly show that making marriage available to gay couples has had no effect on the marriages of straight couples. If anything, one could argue that it has actually had a positive effect — possibly because the very debate itself has caused straight couples to reconsider and reaffirm their own reasons and commitment to marriage.
And that’s no bad thing.
I wonder whether, as pointed out above, one of the reasons Massachusetts (and possibly by extension other New England states, like my own – Connecticut) has a lower divorce rate is because it has a lower marriage rate. I am under the impression (and this is purely anecdotal) that, particularly in Southern states, marriage between young people, often very young people, is accepted and smiled upon… and the younger you marry, the less chance your marriage will have. Many times, too, young people, who do not receive sex education or access to contraception, and have received lots of abstinence teaching, may believe that the only route to having a sexual relationship with someone is to marry them. Since marriages based only on sexual attraction don’t tend to outlast the infatuation, at least by long, these marriages may be more in the nature of “starter” or “first relationship” marriages than anything else. By contrast, young people in other areas may tend to cohabit with that “first love” (because this is socially and religiously acceptable in their communities) rather than marry them, and then move on when first love burns out.
It’s also true that young people who are pursuing their higher education, or careers, often delay marriage. Again, to the extent young people are more encouraged or expected to do this in the North and West, it may depress the overall marriage rate, and certainly would tend to depress the divorce rate, since these people would be waiting to marry until they were (presumably) more financially and emotionally stable.
It’s interesting, though, to see the absolute phobia that folks on the RR have for looking at the “test labs” for same sex marriage that actually exist. Rather than hypothesizing all sorts of awful things, anti-gay marriage people could look at all the places around the world, and even here in the U.S., where gay marriage is legal, to see if any of those things actually came to pass. It’s odd that they persist in making testable predictions about the outcomes for society if gay marriage is legalized, yet when the results of those tests don’t support their arguments, they simply ignore them.
Jane in CT
Hi Jane, and welcome 🙂
Quite apart from the work of real researchers — and that ain’t us! — several years ago we did run through that type of analysis and your perception appears not too far off the mark.
We did adjust for the population age profile etc, and the divorce rates were highly correlated to:
age at first marriage, the South has lowest ages and highest rateseducational attainment; a parallel to the above, as you’ve consideredextent of religious conservatism, higher = higher divorce rates. Again, as you’ve suggested, this may again be a parallel for abovethe type of sex and relationship education, with school-based comprehensive being a positive and “private” (read, “church”) based being a negative.
Correlation, of course, does not equal Cause; but it was interesting.
Perhaps it’s time to revisit given we do now have a few years of extra data that now includes a marriage for gay couples State and several years of extended priming the pump over “abstinence only education”. The old analysis is so many years old we’d be down in flames for merely presenting it as indicative. And we’ve no desire to “do a Hindenburg” 🙂
I’ll add that to our mile-long To Do list. Urgh.
Oh, and all of above also applied to rates of teen/unmarried preganancy and rates of abortion.
I do not wish to criticize gay marriage here, but I don’t think legalizing gay marriage is the reason for the low divorce rate in Massachusetts. Massachusetts has a low divorce rate because of the ethno-religious make up of the state and the fact that couples get married later. This has been the case for quite some time now. Massachusetts has a Catholic majority and even liberal Catholics divorce at a lower rate than the national average. I believe the Catholic divorce rate is something like 21% ( religious tolerance website)compared to 40% + for the nation as a whole. Also, gay relationships do break up in high numbers. Even if we are supporting gay marriage, we should not try to hide this fact. Look at Scandinavia and the Netherlands. Gay and Lesbian divorce rates/civil union dissolution rates are very high and higher than those for heterosexuals.
Variation in divorce rates among Christian faith groups:
Denomination (in order of decreasing divorce rate) % who have been divorced
Non-denominational (small conservative groups; independents) 34%
Baptists 29%
Mainline Protestants 25%
Mormons 24%
Catholics 21%
These figures are on the religious tolerance website.
This isnt unusual. Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Poland all have low divorce rates in comparison to the European average. These nations are Europe’s most Catholic in terms of membership, belief and participation in the Catholic church. Almost half of Italians and Portugese are active in the Church (and probably over 90% are cultural Catholics.. observing the holidays) Meanshile, in Poland and Ireland about 2 in 3 are active in the church. Even modern Spain, which is ultra secular and liberal has a fairly low divorce rate, but it is also culturally Catholic. So, most Spaniards still hold on to some cultural vestiages of Catholicism, even if they have embraced modern trends at the same time.
John Faux said:
I do not wish to criticize gay marriage here, but I don’t think legalizing gay marriage is the reason for the low divorce rate in Massachusetts. Massachusetts has a low divorce rate because of the ethno-religious make up of the state and the fact that couples get married later. This has been the case for quite some time now.
I don’t think the article claims to be exhaustive, and as Grantdale said, correlation doesn’t equal cause. But as a general response to the incessant claims by those against gay marriage that allowing such would be the end of the institution as we know it, I think this makes a good point. Those claims were hardly scientific themselves.
John Faux, you have introduced a complete furphy.
(For the non-antipodeans… that’s a red herring, in this sense).
John,
The (anti-gay) claim wasn’t about whether being more Catholic or whatever would “cause” a lower absolute divorce rate.
The claim is that allowing gay couples to marry would “destroy marriage”. This, of course, is a claim made by the Church in Rome, amoung others.
Whatever the reason Massachusetts is traditionally a low divorce state, one thing is clear — marriage has not been destroyed.
Again, the issue is not about why MA was and remains a low divorce state.
And we do prefer people to link to a source when they make a claim. So…
The rest of your claims (NL, Scandinavia) are, of course, straight off the website of Maggie Gallagher’s Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, via Andersson. Or perhaps you saw in on NARTH?
Despite the headliner’s from iMPP — the data actually shows that similarly aged, educated and of the same cultural background gay couple’s are as stable as heterosexual couples are. In some groupings, more so. That last factor in italics is, note, a highly significant one.
And somewhat amiss, the iMPP doesn’t mention Gallagher’s own contribution to the divorce stats. Those who can do, those who can’t… teach.
PS: while the stats of themself are somewhat useful, they also ignore some fundamental factors. eg, etc
Take Ireland, for one. The reason the divorce rate was low was because getting divorced was previously a major pain in the perverbial to go through. Of course, that said nothing about the actual quality of thosee death-do-us-part marriages. People didn’t get divorced, because they couldn’t. That changed. Has done for decades.
The church attendance rates have also fallen dramatically, particularly for those under 40yo. Those in their 20’s — about to start getting married — now bear little resemblence to their grandparents who grew up in a State dominated, and often controlled, by the Church/es. They are more non-churchgoers, and secular.
John,
You make a number of unsubstantiate claims. I’ll give you credit in that it’s well written and appeals to shared presumptions. This would probably fly at another site. But not here.
“Also, gay relationships do break up in high numbers.”
You are convoluting two very different things: gay relationships and gay marriage. It is also very try that straight relationships break up in high numbers. But we aren’t talking about “relationships”, we’re talking about marriages.
“Even if we are supporting gay marriage, we should not try to hide this fact.”
Whether “relationships” break up isn’t being hidden. It’s just irrelevant. The point is whether marriages are ending in divorce.
“Look at Scandinavia and the Netherlands. Gay and Lesbian divorce rates/civil union dissolution rates are very high and higher than those for heterosexuals.”
That’s a very bold claim. And it appears to flat out wrong. (I tend to believe the Dutch government over NARTH):
https://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_1685059,00.html
“Amsterdam – Gay Dutch couples appear to divorce at a rate of about one percent a year – the same rate as heterosexual married couples, according to government data released on Monday.”
Even if gay couples did divorce at a higher rate than heterosexuals, that still isn’t all that interesting in the debate over how gay marriage will “destroy marriage”.