Why Defend Marriage

One reason many Americans oppose same-sex marriage is their instinctive feeling we best not mess with a good thing. Well, groundbreaking research shows traditional marriage provides amazing benefits to those who will commit to it, and to their children as well. Many historians acknowledge it as the cornerstone that keeps civilizations from crumbling. But as Paul Strand reported on The 700 Club, now that may all be threatened.

Scientific studies have now proven married people live longer, they're healthier, wealthier, and happier. For example, married men live about 10 years longer than unmarried men. Marrieds spend only half as much time sick and in the hospital as unmarrieds. Linda Waite literally wrote the book on the case for marriage. Waite said, "The research evidence is just overwhelming that becoming married improves mental health."

And, on average, married people make three times as much money as singles. Family policy analyst Bridget Maher said, "The median income of a married-couple family is about $65,000, and this compares to about $21,000 for single parents." Former Harvard professor and noted social scientist James Q. Wilson writes frequently about marriage. He said, "The vast majority of people do better if men marry women. The sexes complement each other. Having a woman in your household makes men better and having a man in your household makes women better."

As for kids, social science has done more than 2,500 studies indicating that a married man and woman who raise their own children offer clear advantages to those kids no other family structure can. Example: children raised by both their parents are seven times less likely to be poor than those raised by never-married moms. They also face hugely reduced odds of being beaten or molested. In addition, Waite said, "Children raised by married parents complete more schooling. They achieve better occupations later, on average. They're more likely to stay married themselves. They are more likely to avoid teenage pregnancy and early sexual behavior." In other words, a successful marriage is the place most likely to produce successful children. Waite said what gives marriage so much magic is the vow at its core: a man and a woman promising to be true "till death us do part." Waite also stated, "The benefits of marriage come in large part because people make a public, legally-supported, socially-supported, religiously-supported vow to stay together for the rest of their lives."

But there is evidence gay marriage will shake this tradition of commitment and monogamy -- because homosexuals will bring their famously promiscuous lifestyle into marriage. In the Netherlands, where gay marriage is already legal, the average "committed" gay relationship is lasting just one-and-a-half years according to "AIDS Journal 17 (2003)." Dr. Timothy Dailey, of the Center for Marriage and Family Studies, reports that "These so-called committed homosexual couples had an average of eight extrasexual partners per year." Even more startling, one study found 43 percent of white homosexuals slept with 500 or more men, and 28 percent had sex with 1,000 or more men, according to 'Homosexualities,' pp. 308, 309 (1978)."

Dailey asked, "And do we really want to subject children to this kind of environment?" "Oh, don't worry!" say some same-sex marriage advocates. "Gays won't pervert marriage, marriage will tame gays." But gays may have no intention of being tamed. One popular homosexual activist, Michelangelo Signorile, wrote that homosexuals should seek to "...redefine the institution of marriage completely. ... The most subversive action lesbian and gay men can undertake ... is to transform the notion of 'family' entirely" in an article, 'Bridal Wave,' "Out, Dec.1994."

But why would they want to do that? Talk show host Tammy Bruce is herself a lesbian, but she does not support homosexual marriage. She warns some gays are what she calls "malignant narcissists," striking out at whatever they think threatens them or doesn't measure up to their idea of an acceptable lifestyle. Bruce said, "In the gay community, you are looking at a contingent that wants to literally destroy the nature of tradition in this nation because they feel, in their very narcissistic way, that it's not good for them." So, many homosexuals will insist on having it both ways: marriage, but without monogamy ... or all the benefits of marriage, but without the permanent commitment. And that will surely have ripple effects in the heterosexual world.

You can already see the effects in France and other European countries that recently created civil unions to give gays something that better fits their lifestyle -- something like "marriage lite" -- easy to get into and out of. But it's heterosexuals, by the tens of thousands, who are signing up for these civil unions, preferring to get the benefits of marriage without the marital vows.

And in Scandinavia, the first place where gay marriage was formally legalized, it appears it's actually helping to kill off the traditional form of marriage: a man and a woman committing for life and making babies. "What we see in Scandinavia is marriage quite literally is dying," reports secular social scientist Stanley Kurtz. Kurtz points out that gay couples can't make babies and as a result, "60 percent of first-born children in Denmark are born out of wedlock, and there are some parts of Scandinavia, believe it or not, where as many as 80 percent of first-born children are born out of wedlock . ." Many Scandinavians weren't marrying until after they had their first child. Now, since gay marriage there is furthering the idea that children and marriage are separate subjects, more couples are waiting to wed until after their second child. Soon, they may just skip wedlock altogether.

Kurtz adds, "In Scandinavia, same-sex marriage is part of a collection of factors which, first, breaks marriage apart from the idea of parenthood and, second, leads to the elimination eventually of marriage itself." Social historian Allan Carlson, author of "The American Way," stated, "Homosexuality by definition cannot create children, so it's a trivialization of the institution [of marriage]."

The U.S. is ripe to have the same thing happen here. The marriage rate is down almost half from a high in the 1950s. Five-and-a-half million American couples are deciding to just shack up rather than wed. And American women are having more than 1.35 million babies out of wedlock in the average year," according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Wilson stated, "When 30 to 70 percent of all children born in the United States this year will grow up with a single parent, you realize this is not a trivial matter."

On Monday, May 17, 2004, Massachusetts legalized same sex marriage, the first state ever to do so. It literally bucks all of history. And according to Wilson, "No human society has ever made homosexual marriage its norm." But once that begins, it could snowball into legalization of just about any relationship someone wants to claim is a marriage, like bigamy and polygamy. The idea is, if it's no longer fair to restrict marriage to one man, one woman, then how can you set any limits on it whatsoever? For instance, Kurtz warns advocates of polyandry (group marriage) have begun to use the same arguments gay marriage advocates use. Kurtz said, "They have all sorts of arrangements ... you know, two women and three men...any kind of a combination, a kind of group marriage. And polyamorists have already had a law case arguing that their marriages should be recognized."

Carlson said history shows the pairing up of men and women to form families is the very cornerstone of civilization, and it's fatal for a society to weaken that bedrock of marriage by encouraging alternatives. He states, "It's a way of committing societal suicide because it winds up taking the one institution that is vital to the community's future and reducing it to simply another relationship." Wilson added, "Every human society has depended crucially on the bonding of males and females."

British anthropologist J.D. Unwin in the 1930s studied 86 cultures that stretched across 5,000 years. He found, without exception, when they restricted sex to marriage, they thrived. Strong families headed by faithful spouses made for bold, prosperous societies. But not one survived more than three generations after turning sexually permissive. Noted Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin found no culture surviving once it ceased to support marriage and monogamy. None. He also connected the fall of civilizations and the rise of homosexuality. As Sorokin put it, "At their fullest flowering, the Persian, Greek, Roman and Moslem civilizations permitted a measure of homosexuality; as they decayed, it became more prevalent."

Peter Marshall, Jr. studies history from a Christian perspective. He said, "Rome was not conquered from outside by barbarians; they just finished it off. It crumbled from inside because it became immoral. And if you look at the last days of the Roman Empire: tremendous, rampant homosexuality the family unit disintegrated." Carlson adds, "Eventually the Roman Empire just sort of died at its core, not enough children being born, not enough stable families to maintain the society."

Historians say it's not surprising societies fall at such times. As citizens fail to repopulate, as they concentrate on their own pleasures, their society weakens. The aged are left with few to defend them. Carlson sums it up this way, "When all these things happen, societies begin to shrivel and die. And it's happened many, many times. This is how civilizations disappear."