The End of Marriage in Scandinavia
KURTZ, STANLEY
The End of Marriage in Scandinavia The "conservative case" for same-sex marriage collapses BY STANLEY KURTZ Marriage is slowly dying in Scandinavia. A majority of children in Sweden and Norway...
...If we bracket the crisis of single parenthood among African-Americans, the picture is somewhat different...
...Our cultural libertarianism protects the family as a bulwark against the state, yet it also breaks individuals loose from the family...
...There is a growing tendency for even middle class cohabiting couples to have children without marrying...
...And once enacted, gay marriage had a decidedly unconservative impact on Norway's cultural contests, weakening marriage's defenders, and placing a weapon in the hands of those who sought to replace marriage with cohabitation...
...The results are in...
...Marriage is disappearing in Scandinavia, and the forces undermining it there are active throughout the West...
...Not coincidentally, nearly every country in that middle group has recently either legalized some form of gay marriage, or is seriously considering doing so...
...All of these considerations suggest that the gay marriage debate in America is too important to duck...
...Sweden's position as the world leader in family decline is associated with a weak clergy, and the prominence of secular and left-leaning social scientists...
...Not coincidentally, the research was conducted by a British scholar, Duncan W.G...
...Much of the increase in Norway's marriage rate is driven by older couples "catching up...
...Stimulated by rising rates of unmarried parenthood, the influential American Law Institute (ALI) has proposed a series of legal reforms ("Principles of Family Dissolution") designed to equalize marriage and cohabitation...
...It took another 15 years (and the advent of gay marriage) for Norway's out-of-wedlock birthrate to shoot past even Denmark's...
...Remember that although the Scandinavian welfare state encourages family dissolution in the long term, in the short term, Scandinavian parents giving birth out of wedlock tend to stay together...
...Nor has Hundvin appeared to consider that her affection for Haakonsen's child (also apparently born out of wedlock) might better be expressed by marrying Haakonsen and becoming his son's new mother...
...Despite the regnant social liberalism in these countries, proposals to recognize gay unions generated tremendous controversy, and have reshaped the meaning of marriage in the years since...
...It's easier to divorce your spouse when the state will support you instead...
...Writing in the Mc-George Law Review, Eskridge claimed that Spedale's study had exposed the "hysteria and irresponsibility" of those who predicted gay marriage would undermine marriage...
...Moxnes identified homosexuals— with their experience in forging relationships unencumbered by children—as social pioneers in the separation of marriage from parenthood...
...Gay marriage hasn't blocked the separation of marriage and parenthood...
...He has praise for the Swedish welfare state, and criticizes American opposition to some child welfare programs...
...Not coincidentally, these countries have had something close to full gay marriage for a decade or more...
...In a given country, public policy decisions and cultural values could slow, and perhaps halt, the process of marital decline...
...The cultural effects would be national...
...This is not what proponents of the conservative case for gay marriage had in mind...
...Our love is what matters, not a piece of paper...
...Norway's gay marriage debate, which ran most intensely from 1991 through 1993, was a culture-shifting event...
...Bracketing the problem of underclass single parenthood, America is largely at this second stage...
...And even this tendency to marry at the birth of a second child is weakening...
...The same study found that in countries with high levels of family dissolution, religion in general, and Catholicism in particular, had little influence...
...Until recently, France was a member of this middle group, but France's rising out-of-wedlock birthrate has moved it into the Nordic category...
...And Denmark in the nineties saw a 25 percent increase in cohabiting couples with children...
...Strong state enforcement of child support is another factor discouraging single motherhood by teens...
...And cohabitation as a premarital testing phase is not the same as unmarried parenting...
...By guaranteeing jobs and income to every citizen (even children), the welfare state renders each individual independent...
...Instead, we need to know the rate at which parents (married or not) split up...
...Yet once a stage has been reached, earlier phases coexist...
...Whatever the causes, the discouragement of lone motherhood is a short-term effect...
...Most resistant to cohabitation, family dissolution, and out-of-wedlock births are the southern European countries of Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece, and, until recently, Switzerland and Ireland...
...According to Kiernan, these stages may vary in duration, yet once a country has reached a stage, return to an earlier phase is unlikely...
...This is not how the situation has been portrayed by prominent gay marriage advocates journalist Andrew Sullivan and Yale law professor William Eskridge Jr...
...Yet a significant number of out-of-wedlock births in Britain are to lone teenage mothers...
...Only in the group with low out-of-wedlock birthrates has the gay marriage movement achieved relatively little success...
...At the start of the nineties, 60 percent of unmarried Norwegian parents who lived together had only one child...
...A 2002 study by the Max Planck Institute, for example, concluded that countries with the lowest rates of family dissolution and out-of-wedlock births are "strongly dominated by the Catholic confession...
...What about Spedale's report that the Danish marriage rate increased 10 percent from 1990 to 1996...
...He treats the "conservative case" as something that served chiefly tactical purposes during a difficult political debate...
...Yet the half-page statistical analysis of heterosexual marriage in Darren Spedale's unpublished paper doesn't begin to get at the truth about the decline of marriage in Scandinavia during the nineties...
...Yet the Swedish welfare state may encourage traditionalism in one respect...
...Responding to Haugland's criticisms, Moxnes invoked homosexual families as proof that "relationships" were now more important than institutional marriage...
...It's true that in Denmark, as elsewhere in Scandinavia, divorce numbers looked better in the nineties...
...With the Nordic pattern's spread across Europe, Britain's out-of-wedlock birthrate has risen to 40 percent...
...The key differences are that registered partnerships do not permit adoption or artificial insemination, and cannot be celebrated in state-affiliated churches...
...The message was not lost on ordinary Norwegians, who continued their flight to unmarried parenthood...
...The Scandinavian welfare state aggravates these problems...
...Two things prompted the Swedes to take this extra step—the welfare state and cultural attitudes...
...In the second stage, cohabitation serves as a testing period before marriage, and is generally a childless phase...
...The danger we face is a combination of America's divorce rate with unstable, Scandinavian-style out-of-wedlock parenthood...
...Out-of-wedlock birthrates were rising...
...The post-gay marriage changes in the Scandinavian family are significant...
...Popenoe is no toe-the-line conservative...
...Ireland, perhaps because of its geographic, linguistic, and cultural proximity to England, is now suffering from out-of-wedlock birthrates far in excess of the rest of Catholic Europe...
...Certainly, you can chalk up more than a little of this saga to celebrity culture...
...What about a patchwork in which some American states have gay marriage while others do not...
...And the mainspring of the decline—an increasingly sharp separation between marriage and parenthood—can be linked to gay marriage...
...She argued that Norwegian gay marriage was a sign of marriage's growing emptiness, not its strength...
...Here is at least a partial realization of Simone de Beauvoir's dream of an enforced androgyny that pushes women from the home by turning children over to the state...
...So rather than strengthening Norwegian marriage against the rise of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock birth, same-sex marriage had the opposite effect...
...It took about 15 years after the change hit Sweden and Denmark for Norway's out-of-wedlock birthrate to begin to move from "European" to "Nordic" levels...
...These days, however, having publicly announced her bisexuality, Hundvin is linked with Norwegian snowboarder Terje Haakonsen...
...Bech, perhaps Scandinavia's most prominent gay thinker, dismisses as an "implausible" claim the idea that gay marriage promotes monogamy...
...The American mix of family traditionalism and family instability is unusual...
...Both Bech and Halvorsen stress that the conservative case for gay marriage, while put forward by a few, was rejected by many in the gay community...
...In the fourth stage (Sweden and Denmark), marriage and cohabitation become practically indistinguishable, with many, perhaps even most, children born and raised outside of marriage...
...This kicked off a debate in Norway (traditionally more conservative than either Sweden or Denmark), which legalized de facto gay marriage in 1993...
...Boys living with single, separated, or divorced mothers had particularly high rates of impairment in adolescence...
...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...
...In effect, Scandinavia has run our experiment for us...
...So as out-of-wedlock childbearing pushes Because so many Scandinavians now rear children outside of marriage, divorce rates are unreliable measures of family weakness...
...The Nordic family pattern—including gay marriage—is spreading across Europe...
...Scandinavian registered partnerships are Vermont-style civil unions...
...In the American context, this would be a disaster...
...Movies and television, which do not respect state borders, would embrace gay marriage...
...All this is happening in Britain...
...The death of marriage is not inevitable...
...By that measure, Scandinavian family dissolution has only been worsening...
...Sweden expanded its benefits packages into de facto gay marriage in 1994...
...In states like Sweden and Denmark, where out-of-wedlock birthrates were already very high, and the public favored gay marriage, gay unions were an effect of earlier changes...
...In Scandinavian demography, what counts is the out-of-wed-lock birthrate, and the family dissolution rate...
...Although Sweden leads the world in family decline, the United States is runner-up...
...Precise statistics on family dissolution are unfortunately rare...
...Perhaps the most disturbing sign for the future is the collapse of the Scandinavian tendency to marry after the second child...
...Since liberalizing divorce in the first decades of the twentieth century, the Nordic countries have been the leading edge of marital change...
...This didn't happen...
...Scandinavia's out-of-wedlock birthrates may have risen more rapidly in the seventies, when marriage began its slide...
...But with Scandinavia, we are well beyond the realm of even educated speculation...
...Are Scandinavians concerned about rising out-of-wed-lock births, the decline of marriage, and ever-rising rates of family dissolution...
...Many Scandinavian social scientists see marriage as a barrier to full equality between the sexes, and would not be sorry to see marriage replaced by unmarried cohabitation...
...A state-by-state patchwork would practically guarantee a shift toward the Nordic family system...
...And with our underclass, the social pathologies this produces in America are bound to be more severe than they already are in wealthy and socially homogeneous Scandinavia...
...Adoption of the ALI principles would be a giant step toward the Scandinavian system...
...we see this most clearly in Norway...
...Yet even now we are being pushed in the Scandinavian direction...
...But Americans lead the world in single parenthood and divorce...
...So rising rates of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock birth stand as proxy for rising rates of family dissolution...
...And now that married parenthood has become a minority phenomenon, it has lost the critical mass required to have socially normative force...
...Registered partnerships have reinforced existing trends...
...Halvorsen suggests that the low numbers of registered gay couples may be understood as a collective protest against the expectations (presumably, monogamy) embodied in marriage...
...The lesson of the Scandinavian experience is that even de facto same-sex marriage undermines marriage...
...Because so many Scandinavians now rear children outside of marriage, divorce rates are unreliable measures of family weakness...
...Would that be a workable compromise...
...Andrew Sullivan's Spedale-inspired piece was subtitled, "The case against same-sex marriage crumbles...
...Again, the news only appears to be good...
...Sullivan and Eskridge have made much of an unpublished study of Danish same-sex registered partnerships by Darren Spedale, an independent researcher with an undergraduate degree who visited Denmark in 1996 on a Fulbright scholarship...
...Gay marriage has served to validate the belief that individual choice trumps family form...
...In liberal Denmark, where out-of-wedlock birthrates were already very high, the public favored same-sex marriage...
...Arnstad had gotten pregnant in office and had declined to name the father...
...There is a serious scholarly debate about the spread of the Nordic family pattern...
...That study found that regardless of income or social status, parental breakup had negative effects on children's mental health...
...Americans take it for granted that, despite its recent troubles, marriage will always exist...
...The rise of fragile families based on cohabitation and out-of-wedlock childbearing means that during the nineties, the total rate of family dissolution in Scandinavia significantly increased...
...Between 1990 and 2000, Norway's out-of-wedlock birthrate rose from 39 to 50 percent, while Sweden's rose from 47 to 55 percent...
...The Swedes have simply drawn the final conclusion: If we've come so far without marriage, why marry at all...
...With taxes so high, women must work...
...More than a decade into post-gay marriage Scandinavia, out-of-wedlock Gay marriage had a decidedly unconservative impact on Norway's cultural contests, weakening marriage's defenders...
...Yet even among non-Hispanic whites, the American divorce rate is extremely high by world standards...
...Kier-nan's model posits stopping points...
...That weakened the taboo against divorce...
...Moxnes had criticized Christian marriage classes for teaching children the importance of wedding vows...
...birthrates have passed 50 percent, and the effective end of marriage as a protective shield for children has become thinkable...
...So the highly touted half-page of analysis from an unpublished paper that supposedly helps validate the "conservative case" for gay marriage— i.e., that it will encourage stable marriage for heterosexuals and homosexuals alike—does no such thing...
...To see this, we need to understand why marriage is in trouble in Scandinavia to begin with...
...In practice, however, conservative churchmen speak out against the trend toward unmarried cohabitation and childbirth, while liberals acquiesce...
...Gay marriage is both an effect and a reinforcing cause of the separation of marriage and parenthood...
...Spedale reported that in the six years following the establishment of regisStanley Kurtz a research fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...If the "conservative case" for gay marriage had been valid, clergy who were supportive of gay marriage would have taken a strong public stand against unmarried heterosexual parenthood...
...Italy is at this first stage...
...If marriage is only about a relationship between two people, and is not intrinsically connected to parenthood, why shouldn't same-sex couples be allowed to marry...
...The most important trend of the post-gay marriage decade may be the erosion of the tendency to marry at the birth of a second child...
...And once established, gay marriage became one of several factors contributing to further increases in cohabitation and out-of-wedlock birthrates, as well as to early divorce...
...gay marriage has added to the factors pushing those rates higher...
...In Denmark out-of-wedlock births stayed level during the nineties (beginning at 46 percent and ending at 45 percent...
...The implication is that, should the experiment go bad, we can call it off...
...We see this process at work in the radical separation of marriage and parenthood that swept across Scandinavia in the nineties...
...These limitations are gradually being repealed...
...Secular social scientists (most of them quite radical) have largely replaced clerics as arbiters of public morality...
...And by looking closely at it we can answer the key empirical question underlying the gay marriage debate...
...And many studies confirm that, throughout the West, religiosity is associated with institutionally strong marriage, while heightened secularism is correlated with a weakening of marriage...
...The church's agonies have been intensively covered in the Norwegian media, which have taken every opportunity to paint the church as hidebound and divided...
...Nonetheless, although cohabiting parenthood is growing in America, levels here are still far short of those in Europe...
...Beyond raising rates of middle class family dissolution, a further separation of marriage from parenthood would reverse the healthy turn away from single-parenting that we have begun to see since welfare reform...
...From the start of the prince's controversial relationship to its eventual culmination in marriage, the future head of the Norwegian state church received tokens of public support or understanding from the very same bishops who were leading the fight to permit the ordination of homosexual partners...
...Meanwhile, Norway's fast-rising out-of-wedlock birthrate has shot past Denmark's...
...With fewer parents marrying, what used to show up in statistical tables as early divorce is now the unrecorded breakup of a cohabiting couple with children...
...British demographer Kathleen Kiernan, the acknowledged authority on the spread of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock births across Europe, divides the continent into three zones...
...Drawing on the Swedish experience, Kathleen Kiernan, the British demographer, uses a four-stage model by which to gauge a country's movement toward Swedish levels of out-of-wedlock births...
...Since its adoption, gay marriage has brought division and decline to Norway's Lutheran Church...
...Timms...
...Potentially, a line between the two can hold...
...A majority of children in Sweden and Norway are born out of wedlock...
...Danish social theorist Henning Bech and Norwegian sociologist Rune Halvorsen offer excellent accounts of the gay marriage debates in Denmark and Norway...
...North American rates of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock birth put the United States and Canada into this middle group...
...Hundvin had been in a registered gay partnership with fellow handballer Camilla Andersen...
...And scholars agree that cultural tradition plays a central role in determining whether a given country moves toward the Nordic family system...
...While the most public disputes of the nineties were over homosexuality, Norway's Lutheran church was also divided over the question of heterosexual cohabitation...
...gay marriage has widened the separation...
...Spedale's report of lower divorce rates and higher marriage rates in post-gay marriage Denmark is thus misleading...
...The Scandinavian example also proves that gay marriage is not interracial marriage in a new guise...
...The decline of marriage and the rise of unstable cohabitation and out-of-wedlock childbirth are not confined to Scandinavia...
...So repealing no-fault divorce, or even eliminating premarital cohabitation, are not what's at issue...
...If America is to avoid being forced into a similar choice, we'll have to resist the separation of marriage from parenthood...
...This suggests that someday, Scandinavian parents might simply stop getting married altogether, no matter how many children they have...
...But the leveling off seems to be a function of a slight increase in fertility among older couples, who marry only after multiple births (if they don't break up first...
...True, by preserving legal distinctions between marriage and cohabitation, reining in the welfare state, and preserving at least some traditional values, a given country might forestall or prevent the normalization of nonmarital parenthood...
...Nor are we faced with an all-or-nothing choice between the marital system of, say, the 1950s and marriage's disappearance...
...It follows that once marriage is redefined to accommodate same-sex couples, that change cannot help but lock in and reinforce the very cultural separation between marriage and parenthood that makes gay marriage conceivable to begin with...
...Finally, consider a case that made even more news in Norway, that of handball star Mia Hundvin (yes, handball prowess makes for celebrity in Norway...
...What defines and makes the foundation of the Danish family can be said to have moved from marriage to parenthood...
...By the time we see the effects of gay marriage in America, it will be too late to do anything about it...
...She offers no examples of stage reversal...
...In Sweden, as elsewhere, the sixties brought contraception, abortion, and growing individualism...
...Kari Moxnes, a feminist sociologist specializing in divorce, is one of the most prominent of Norway's newly emerging group of public social scientists...
...The miscegenation analogy was never convincing...
...The story in Norway's premiere paper, Aften-posten, doesn't bother to mention...
...Despite the reluctance of Scandinavian social scientists to study the consequences of family dissolution for children, we do have an excellent study that followed the life experiences of all children born in Stockholm in 1953...
...This a function of Britain's class divisions...
...And cross-class family decline would bring intense pressure for a new expansion of the American welfare state...
...Noteworthy, too, is the lack of a movement toward marriage and monogamy among gays...
...Asked directly, liberal and conservative clerics alike voice a preference for marriage over cohabitation—especially for couples with children...
...That oft-noted fact is directly related to another...
...Yet every Western country is susceptible to the pull of the Nordic model...
...With no-fault divorce, Americans traded away some of the marital stability that protects children to gain more freedom for adults...
...In Norway, gay marriage has given ammunition to those who wish to put an end to marriage...
...Since young couples were putting off children, the next step was to dispense with marriage and cohabit until children were desired...
...In 2000, Danish sociologist Mai Heide Ottosen published a study, Samboskab, Aegteskab og Foraeldrebrud (Cohabitation, Marriage and Parental Breakup), which confirmed the increased risk of family dissolution to children of unmarried parents, and gently chided Scandinavian social scientists for ignoring the "quiet revolution" of out-of-wedlock parenting...
...Yet the effects, even in a few American states, will be neither containable nor revocable...
...This brought a sharp public rebuke from Haugland...
...And the steady rise of Norway's out-of-wedlock birthrate during the nineties proves that the opponents of marriage are succeeding...
...First, there is no trend...
...If, as in Norway, gay marriage were imposed here by a socially liberal cultural elite, it would likely speed us on the way toward the classic Nordic pattern of less frequent marriage, more frequent out-of-wedlock birth, and skyrocketing family dissolution...
...America's situation is not unlike Norway's in the early nineties, with religiosity relatively strong, the out-of-wedlock birthrate still relatively low (yet rising), and the public opposed to gay marriage...
...Yale's William Eskridge acknowledged this when he reported in 2000 that 2,372 couples had registered after nine years of the Danish law, 674 after four years of the Norwegian law, and 749 after four years of the Swedish law...
...Contraception, abortion, women in the workforce, spreading secularism, ascendant individualism, and a substantial welfare state are found in every Western country...
...They are not called marriage, yet resemble marriage in almost every other respect...
...This division over heterosexual cohabitation broke into the open in 2000, at the height of the church's split over gay partnerships, when Prince Haakon, heir to Norway's throne, began to live with his lover, a single mother...
...Yet we can accept that trade-off, while still drawing a line against descent into a Nordic-style system...
...Gay marriage also elevated the church's openly rebellious minority liberal faction to national visibility, allowing Norwegians to feel that their proclivity for unmarried parenthood, if not fully approved by the church, was at least not strongly condemned...
...Once in place, gay marriage symbolically ratified the separation of marriage and parenthood...
...According to Halvorsen, many of Norway's gays imposed self-censorship during the marriage debate, so as to hide their opposition to marriage itself...
...A related cultural-ideological agent of marital decline is secularism...
...Moreover, a closer look at Danish divorce in the post-gay marriage decade reveals disturbing trends...
...So instead of noting that an expectant mother might want to follow the example of marriage that even gays were now setting, Melby invoked homosexual families as proof that a child can do as well with one parent as two...
...This held true after controlling for a wide range of demographic and socioeconomic circumstances...
...Since gay marriage is a part of that pattern, it needs to be part of that debate...
...Yet we needn't wait that long...
...That makes sense...
...With a growing tendency for cohabiting couples to have children outside of marriage, America is headed in that direction...
...tered partnerships in Denmark (1990-1996), heterosexual marriage rates climbed by 10 percent, while heterosexual divorce rates declined by 12 percent...
...Scholars take the Swedish experience as a prototype for family developments that will, or could, spread throughout the world...
...The Scandinavian experience rebuts the so-called conservative case for gay marriage in more than one way...
...But given the presence of a substantial underclass in Britain, the spread of Nordic cohabitation there has sent lone teen parenting rates way up...
...found that children of single parents in Sweden have more than double the rates of mortality, severe morbidity, and injury of children in two parent households...
...A frequent public presence, Moxnes enjoyed her big moment in 1999, when she was embroiled in a dispute with Valgerd Svarstad Haugland, minister of children and family affairs in Norway's Christian Democrat government...
...Sex was separated from procreation, reducing the need for "shotgun weddings...
...With married couples putting off parenthood, early divorce had fewer consequences for children...
...In 1989, Denmark had legalized de facto gay marriage (Norway followed in 1993 and Sweden in 1994...
...Will same-sex marriage undermine the institution of marriage...
...In the early nineties, gay marriage came to the Nordic countries, where the out-of-wedlock birthrate was already high...
...The symbolic message of registered partner-ships—for social scientists, handball players, and bishops alike—has been that most any nontraditional family is just fine...
...This is not like the fantasy about interracial birth defects...
...Yet none of the forces weakening marriage there are unique to the region...
...Yet by the end of the nineties, the problem was too obvious to ignore...
...Did Hundvin divorce her registered partner before deciding to become a single mother by (probably) her new boyfriend...
...Second, marriage statistics in societies with very low rates (Sweden registered the lowest marriage rate in recorded history in 1997) must be carefully parsed...
...Kiernan maintains that as societies progressively detach marriage from parenthood, stage reversal is impossible...
...It was the conservative clergy who criticized the prince, while the liberal supporters of gay marriage tolerated his decisions...
...The goal of the gay marriage movements in both Norway and Denmark, say Halvorsen and Bech, was not marriage but social approval for homosexuality...
...After noting that Hund-vin and Andersen were registered partners, the paper simply says that the two women are no longer "romantically involved...
...In his study of the Norwegian family in the nineties, for example, Christer Hyggen shows that a small increase in Norway's marriage rate over the past decade has more to do with the institution's decline than with any renaissance...
...Most of that increase is among cohabiting couples...
...As Britain's rates of single parenting and family dissolution have grown, so has pressure to expand the welfare state to compensate for economic help that families can no longer provide...
...Scandinavia shocks us...
...Yet the pattern is spreading unevenly...
...For over 15 years, an American outsider, Rutgers University sociologist David Popenoe, has played Cassandra on these issues...
...Take-up rates on gay marriage are exceedingly small...
...Even more than in the United States, radical feminist and socialist ideas pervade the universities and the media...
...But in Norway, where the out-of-wedlock birthrate was low-er—and religion traditionally stronger—gay marriage was imposed, against the public will, by the political elite...
...In the post-gay marriage nineties, as Norway's once relatively low out-of-wedlock birthrate was climbing to unprecedented heights, and as the gay marriage controversy weakened and split the once respected Lutheran state church, secular social scientists took center stage...
...In stage three, cohabitation becomes increasingly acceptable, and parenting is no longer automatically associated with marriage...
...What about Vermont-style civil unions...
...Nor is Kari Moxnes an isolated case...
...Swedes themselves link the decline of marriage to secularism...
...Same-sex marriage has locked in and reinforced an existing Scandinavian trend toward the separation of marriage and parenthood...
...It already has...
...By 2001, 56 percent of unmarried, cohabiting parents in Norway had two or more children...
...Clearly, the idea of parenthood here has been radically individualized, and utterly detached from marriage...
...This reduces the time available for child rearing, thus encouraging the expansion of a day-care system that takes a large part in raising nearly all Swedish children over age one...
...Clearly not...
...But in Norway, where out-of-wed-lock birthrates were lower, religion stronger, and the public opposed same-sex unions, gay marriage had an even greater role in precipitating marital decline...
...it has advanced it...
...In recognizing homosexual relationships, Moxnes said, society was ratifying the division of marriage from parenthood that had spurred the rise of out-of-wedlock births to begin with...
...The taxes necessary to support the welfare state have had an enormous impact on the family...
...Hundvin has only been with Haakonsen about a year...
...Ireland's rising out-of-wedlock birthrate has just pushed it into the middle group...
...Although Moxnes spoke in favor of gay marriage, she treated its creation as a (welcome) death knell for marriage itself...
...Young Americans are more likely to favor gay marriage than their elders...
...Once even that marker disappears, the path to the complete disappearance of marriage is open...
...They are followed by a middle group that includes the Netherlands, Belgium, Great Britain, and Germany...
...Why should children change that...
...Religion is a key variable...
...But the push of that rate past the 50 percent mark during the nineties was in many ways more disturbing...
...Still, who can deny that gay marriage will accustom us to a more Scandinavian-style separation of marriage and parenthood...
...No Western economy has a higher percentage of public employees, public expenditures—or higher tax rates—than Sweden...
...In making her case, Melby praised gay parenting, along with voluntary single motherhood, as equally worthy alternatives to the traditional family...
...The family dissolution rate is different from the divorce rate...
...These three groupings closely track the movement for gay marriage...
...There are also cultural-ideological causes of Swedish family decline...
...As for the rest of the increase in the Norwegian marriage rate, it is largely attributable to remarriage among the large number of divorced...
...Scandinavian marriage is now so weak that statistics on marriage and divorce no longer mean what they used to...
...Americans have lived through this transformation...
...Hi^ "Beyond Gay Marriage" appeared in our August 4, 2003, issue...
...The separation of marriage from parenthood was increasing...
...By the end of the decade, liberals had seized the reins...
...The lone teen pregnancies common in the British and American underclass are rare in Sweden, which has no underclass to speak of...
...Ten years later, out-of-wedlock birth rates have risen significantly in the middle group of nations...
...Disenchanted mystiques cannot be restored on demand...
...Yet the studies that have been done show that throughout Scandinavia (and the West) cohabiting couples with children break up at two to three times the rate of married parents...
...In 1993, as the Norwegian legislature was debating gay marriage, Moxnes published an article, Det tomme ekteskap ("Empty Marriage"), in the influential liberal paper Dagbladet...
...scandinavia has long been a bellwether of family change...
...The Nordic countries are the leaders in cohabitation and out-of-wedlock births...
...Without deeming a shift inevitable, Kiernan openly wonders how long America can resist the pull of stages three and four...
...In 1989, a couple of years after Sweden broke ground by offering gay couples the first domestic partnership package in Europe, Denmark legalized de facto gay marriage...
...Gay marriage lessened the church's authority by splitting it into warring factions and providing the secular media with occasions to mock and expose divisions...
...Marriage is now so weak in Scandinavia that shifts in these rates no longer mean what they would in America...
...Sixty percent of first-born children in Denmark have unmarried parents...
...The nineties began with conservative churchmen in control...
...Swedes marry less, and bear more children out of wedlock, than any other industrialized nation...
...This is a mistake...
...But celebrity culture is both a product and influencer of the larger culture that gives rise to it...
...She obviously decided to become a single mother without bothering to see whether she and Haakonsen might someday marry...
...Growth in the out-of-wedlock birthrate is limited by the tendency of parents to marry after a couple of births, and also by the persistence of relatively conservative and religious districts...
...Norway's Lutheran state church has been riven by conflict in the decade since the approval of de facto gay marriage, with the ordination of registered partners the most divisive issue...
...Inspired by her time with Haakonsen's son, Hundvin decided to have a child...
...More precisely, it has further undermined the institution...
...Even when Swedish couples bear a child out of wedlock, they tend to reside together when the child is born...
...An important 2003 study by Gunilla Ringback Weitoft, et al...
...You can't divorce without first getting married...
...Many Danes have stopped holding off divorce until their kids are grown...
...If Scandinavian out-of-wedlock birthrates had not already been high in the late eighties, gay marriage would have been far more difficult to imagine...
...The press treats gay partnerships more as relationships than as marriages...
...But that's because the pool of married people has been shrinking for some time...
...For years, Popenoe's was a lone voice...
...So children born out of wedlock are raised, initially, by two cohabiting parents, many of whom later break up...
...That is why the Nordic pattern is spreading...
...Drawing on Spedale, Sullivan and Eskridge cite evidence that since then, marriage has strengthened...
...The forces pushing nations toward the Nordic model are almost universal...
...This suggests that gay marriage is both an effect and a cause of the increasing separation between marriage and parenthood...
...The massive Swedish welfare state has largely displaced the family as provider...
...Yet Popenoe has documented the slow motion collapse of the Swedish family, and emphasized the link between Swedish family decline and welfare policy...
...The association between marriage and parenthood is partly a mystique...
...Take divorce...
...In comparison to Europe, Americans are more religious and more likely to turn to the family than the state for a wide array of needs—from child care, to financial support, to care for the elderly...
...As Danish sociologists Wehner, Kambskard, and Abrahamson describe it, in the wake of the changes of the nineties, "Marriage is no longer a precondition for settling a family—neither legally nor normatively...
...About 60 percent of first born children in Denmark now have unmarried parents...
...Popenoe's 1988 book, Disturbing the Nest, is still the definitive treatment of Scandinavian family change and its meaning for the Western world...
...Less than half of America's twentysomethings consider it wrong to bear children outside marriage...
...That shift masks the 25 percent increase during the nineties in cohabitation and unmarried parenthood among Danish couples (many of them young...
...beyond 50 percent, it is reaching the toughest areas of cultural resistance...
...As a scholar who sees both marriage and at-home motherhood as inherently oppressive to women, Moxnes is a proponent of nonmarital cohabitation and parenthood...
...Developments in the last half-century have surely weakened the links between American marriage and parenthood...
...Sweden is probably the most secular country in the world...
...Yet America's individualism cuts two ways...
...Nor does Catholicism guarantee immunity...
...No, and yes...
...Particularly in Nor-way—once relatively conservative—gay marriage has undermined marriage's institutional standing for everyone...
...There are plenty of reasons to think that, in contrast to race, sexual orientation will have profound effects on marriage...
...Months before Moxnes clashed with Haugland, social historian Kari Melby had a very public quarrel with a leader of the Christian Democratic party over the conduct of Norway's energy minister, Marit Arnstad...
...But of course, an expansion of the welfare state would only lock the weakening of Britain's family system into place...
...Ultimately, mothers and fathers can get along financially alone...
...Euro-stat's just-released marriage rates for 2001 show declines in Sweden and Denmark (Norway hasn't reported...
...In stage one, cohabitation is seen as a deviant or avant-garde practice, and the vast majority of the population produces children within marriage...
...Yet to a remarkable degree, Americans still take it for granted that parents should marry...
...Norway was at this third stage, but with recent demographic and legal changes has entered stage four...
...These changes, along with the movement of women into the workforce, enabled and encouraged people to marry at later ages...
...Melby defended Arnstad, and publicly challenged the claim that children do best with both a mother and a father...
...The father of Hundvin's child may well be Haakonsen, but neither Hundvin nor Haakonsen is saying...
...These couples belong to the first generation that accepts rearing the first born child out of wedlock...
...Marriage in Scandinavia is in deep decline, with children shouldering the burden of rising rates of family dissolution...
...Scholars have long suggested that the relatively thin Christianization of the Nordic countries explains a lot about why the decline of marriage in Scandinavia is a decade ahead of the rest of the West...
...So let's have a look at the decline of Swedish marriage...
...As rising out-of-wedlock birthrates disassociate heterosexual marriage from parenting, gay marriage becomes conceivable...
...Conservative advocates of gay marriage want to test it in a few states...
...As they bear second children, some finally get married...
Vol. 9 • February 2004 • No. 20
