Posted by Elaine Magliaro
Mark Fiore:
What do you do when you sign a law that is perfectly fine and simply safeguards Religious Liberty for All in the great tradition of apple pie and God? Why, you urge your state legislators to revise it and make it acceptable to all those meddling outsiders who just don’t understand the wisdom of your legislation! Or at least that’s what you do if you’re Indiana governor Mike Pence.
Religious Freedom and Gay Commerce
Ten Novel, Absurd, And Irrelevant Arguments Made In Supreme Court Briefs Against Marriage Equality
BY ZACK FORD POSTED ON APRIL 17, 2015
http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2015/04/17/3647431/ten-absurd-arguments-against-marriage-equality-scotus-briefs/
Excerpt:
If same-sex marriage is legal, fewer different-sex couples will marry.
According to 100 Scholars of Marriage, “the forced redefinition [of marriage] will undermine important social norms — like the value of biological connections between parents and children — that arise from the man-woman understanding; that typically guide the procreative and parenting behavior of heterosexuals; and that are highly beneficial to their children.” What they call the “institutional defense,” these scholars argue that marriage itself will be harmed if more people can marry.
Gene Schaerr, an attorney who defended Utah and Idaho’s same-sex marriage bans and who drafted the scholars’ brief, explained at Public Discourse that same-sex marriage will communicate to heterosexual men that society no longer needs them “to bond to women to form well-functioning families or to raise happy, well-adjusted children.” Thus, more procreation will happen outside of marriage and those children won’t have the benefit of a two-parent home.
This argument is supported by studies that actually reached the opposite conclusion. For example, a study from the Netherlands found, “Neither the legalization of same-sex marriage nor the introduction of registered partnership have had significant negative effects on the Dutch different-sex marriage rate in the aggregate.” The brief also suggests that states that have legalized same-sex marriage had declining marriage rates, but in almost every case, those states actually saw spikes in marriage (thanks to equality) then stabilized to their previous rates. The brief itself admits, “Obviously, one cannot fairly infer that a decision to redefine marriage caused (or did not cause) an increase in divorce or a reduction in marriage without controlling for confounding factors.” Indeed, there is no evidence to support that inference whatsoever.