Conservatives on gay marriage...not always what you'd expect

Katherine Kersten, the Star Tribune's new conservative columnist, throws her 2 cents into the same-sex marriage debate. She doesn't do a very good job.

Other than taking a few jabs at liberals and Minnesota DFL, she simply regurgitates the talking points of anti-gay marriage amendment proponents.

She also tries to insinuate that same-sex marriage is legal in Scandinavia. Norway, Sweden, and Denmark have laws that resemble civil unions. Gay and lesbian couples have rights in those countries much in the way they do in Vermont, not Massachusettes. Same-sex marriage does not exist in these countries.

"If same-sex marriage prevails, I suspect we'll see both a decline in marriage and an upsurge in out-of-wedlock births, as Scandinavia has."

Katherine's statement is unsupported by the facts, and that same statement wasn't supported by the facts when Stanley Kurtz made it a year ago. Professor M.V. Lee Badgett last year in the Slate:

"Despite what Kurtz might say, the apocalypse has not yet arrived. In fact, the numbers show that heterosexual marriage looks pretty healthy in Scandinavia, where same-sex couples have had rights the longest. In Denmark, for example, the marriage rate had been declining for a half-century but turned around in the early 1980s. After the 1989 passage of the registered-partner law, the marriage rate continued to climb; Danish heterosexual marriage rates are now the highest they've been since the early 1970's. And the most recent marriage rates in Sweden, Norway, and Iceland are all higher than the rates for the years before the partner laws were passed. Furthermore, in the 1990s, divorce rates in Scandinavia remained basically unchanged."

Further, Katherine misses the mark from the conservative point of view. Conservative blogger Craig Westover picks her column apart, and shows what he calls an 'inverse liberal' argument. He also makes some very intriguing points:

"If social science tells us that “kids with a married mom and dad have the best chance of flourishing on every conceivable measure, from avoiding juvenile delinquency and out-of-wedlock births to forming successful marriages themselves,” then what does it tell us about kids that are denied married parents because the parents are of the same gender? They may not have the "best chance," but wouldn't they have a "better chance" than children whose parents weren't married?"

Craig basically says that stable families are good for society, and unless we are going to take the cruel step of removing children from their gay parents and assigning them to opposite-sex couples, then we should extend some of the rights of marriage that stabilize opposite-sex couples to same-sex couples. Stable families are good for society whether gay or straight.

Unlike Katherine Kersten, Craig Westover presents a rational conservative position on same-sex marriage.