Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby takes a run at showing how gay marriage hurts heterosexual marriage. He fails, utterly. His main point seems to be that: (1) Vermont has allowed 5,700 “civil unions” between homosexuals; and (2) Of those, 2,000 involve at least one partner who was formerly involved in a traditional marriage. From there, he finds the deep end:
Just a shred – but a jarring one. Of course, it doesn’t mean that Vermont’s civil union law broke up 2,000 straight couples. It does mean that where there used to be 2,000 traditional marriages, there are now 2,000 ruptured ones – and 2,000 gay or lesbian unions in their place. Were some of those marriages doomed from the outset? Probably. But it’s also probable that some of them weren’t. In another time or another state, some of those marriages might have worked out. The old stigmas, the universal standards that were so important to family stability, might have given them a fighting chance. Without them, they were left exposed and vulnerable.
How’s that again? Was there a causal relationship between the availability of de facto gay marriage and the breakup of those 2,000 unions? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t even try to say — to do so, he’d have to consider the time frame; however, he doesn’t even bother to ask how many of them broke up in the months after gay unions were legalized in Vermont. Instead, he commits the sort of error that a freshman statistics student should be ashamed of: he confuses correlation — and weak correlation at that — with causation. I wonder if he thinks that the availability of second (and subsequent) heterosexual marriages weakens initial unions? Should we ban those as well?
It’s time for right-wing closet cases to stop trying to tell people what they can and can’t do, who they can and can’t love, and how they can and can’t fuck. These characters would do well to revisit the documents that form the bedrock of our nation, and note well how the purpose of government in the eyes of the founders was to preserve rights, not restrict them.