Divorce Has Declined Since Gay Unions Were Legalized, So Where Is Threat to ‘Opposite’ Marriage?
For people who aren’t tuned into the debate, the canard that gay marriage threatens heterosexual marriage sounds vaguely reasonable — like marriage is a zero-sum game and that as gay marriage increases so will the divorce rate among straight couples.
A recent report from Pew Research indicates that the opposite of that is true:
The national divorce rate is higher now than it was a century ago, but it has been declining for the past two decades. According to provisional data for most states from the Centers for Disease Control, there were 3.5 divorces per 1,000 people in 2008, compared with 4 per 1,000 people in 2000. (Marriage rates have also declined but the divorce rate also has declined if expressed as the number of divorces per 1,000 married couples.) [Emphasis added.]
The year 2000 is key here. Before 2000, anti-gay activists had been winning their war against gay marriage, including the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act by Congress in 1996. In 2000, however, the course of the war began to change, and the good guys started to win:
