Ok, Joe, I found an article(
http://cbn.com/CBNNews/News/040510a.asp ) , i read most of it, maybe you can find your answer here.
Cause and Effect: The Benefits of Traditional Marriage
By Paul Strand
Washington Sr. Correspondent
In Scandinavia, the first place where gay marriage was formally legalized, it appears it is actually helping to kill off the traditional form of marriage: a man and a woman committing for life and making babies.
CBN.com – (CBN News) - Scientific studies have now proven that married people are healthier, wealthier, and happier. For example, married men live about 10 years longer than unmarried men. And 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 a married man and woman raising their own children offers clear advantages to those kids no other family structure can.
One example is that children raised by both their parents are seven times less likely to be poor than those raised by never-married moms. They face hugely reduced odds of being beaten or molested.
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 says 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 added, " 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 that gay marriage will shake this tradition of commitment and monogamy because homosexuals are likely to bring their famously promiscuous lifestyle right into marriage.
In the Netherlands, where gay marriage is already legal, the average " committed" gay relationship is lasting just 1.5 years.
Dr. Timothy Dailey, Center for Marriage and Family Studies, said, " These so-called committed homosexual couples had an average of eight extra-sexual partners per year."
An even more startling statistic that one study found is that 43 percent of white homosexuals slept with 500 or more men, and 28 percent had sex with a thousand or more men.
Dailey said, " It' s really something radically different 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 activist 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." But why would they want to do that?
Talk show host Tammy Bruce is herself a lesbian, but she doesn' t support homosexual marriage. She warns that some gays are what she calls " malignant narcissists," striking out at whatever they think threatens them, or does not measure up to their idea of an acceptable lifestyle.
Bruce says, " 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 insist on having it both ways. They want 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 it 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 is 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 is actually helping to kill off the traditional form of marriage: a man and a woman committing for life and making babies.
Secular social scientist Stanely Kurtz said, " What we see in Scandinavia is marriage, quite literally, is dying." He points out gay couples can' t make babies. So their Scandinavian marriages are erasing the idea that making babies and being married are all wrapped up together and inseparable.
" The result," says Kurtz, " is that 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. And these are the most liberal districts where the acceptance of gay marriage is the highest."
Already, many Scandinavians weren' t marrying until after their first child. Now, since gay marriage there is furthering the idea 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 remarked, " In Scandinavia, same-sex marriage is part of a collection of factors, which first break marriage apart from the idea of parenthood and second, lead to the elimination eventually of marriage itself."
Social historian Allan Carlson, author of " The American Way," said, " Homosexuality, by definition, cannot create children, so it' s a trivialization of the institution."
The U.S. is ripe to have the same thing to happen here. Already 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 1.3 million babies out of wedlock in the average year.
Wilson said, " 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."
Starting next Monday, Massachusetts will legalize same sex marriage, the first American state ever to do so. It will literally be bucking all of history.
Wilson said, " 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 marriage, like bigamy and polygamy. Because, if it is 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 that advocates of polyandry, which is group marriage, have begun to use the same arguments that 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 (individuals who support multi-partner relationships and families) have already had a law case arguing that their marriages should be recognized."
Carlson says history shows the pairing up of men and women to form families is the very cornerstone of civilization, and it is fatal for a society to weaken that bedrock of marriage by encouraging alternatives.
" It' s a way of committing societal suicide," said Carlson, " because it winds up taking the one institution that is vital to the community' s future, and reducing it to simply another relationship."
Wilson said, " Every human society has depended crucially on the bonding of males and females."
In the 1930s, British anthropologist J.D. Unwin 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 culture 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.
Historians say it is not surprising that societies fall at such times. As citizens fail to re-populate, as they concentrate on their own pleasures, their society weakens. The aged are left with few to defend them.
Carlson said, " When all these things happen, societies begin to shrivel and die. And it' s happened many, many times. This is how civilizations disappear."
< Message edited by Alley_Hater -- 7/10/2004 3:06:45 AM >