Nate Silver has an interesting post up on constitutional bans on same-sex marriage and divorce rates, the results of which may be surprising to some. Says Silver,
Overall, the states which had enacted a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage as of 1/1/08 saw their divorce rates rise by 0.9 percent over the five-year interval. States which had not adopted a constitutional ban, on the other hand, experienced an 8.0 percent decline, on average, in their divorce rates. Eleven of the 24 states (46 percent) to have altered their constitutions by 1/1/08 to ban gay marriage experienced an overall decline in their divorce rates, but 13 of the 19 which hadn’t did (68 percent).
Following up on the above table, Silver adds,
The differences are highly statistically significant. Nevertheless, they do not necessarily imply causation. The decision to ban same-sex marriage does not occur randomly throughout the states, but instead is strongly correlated with other factors, such as religiosity and political ideology, which we have made no attempt to account for. Nor do we know in which way the causal arrow might point. It could be that voters who have more marital problems of their own are more inclined to deny the right of marriage to same-sex couples.
Noting Silver’s comment about causation, what I think is most interesting about these numbers is that they seem to debunk the notion that the introduction of same-sex marriage into a given population will in some way devalue the institution of marriage, which, one would assume, would be likely to result in an increase in divorce rates.
The numbers north of the border seem to offer the same basic conclusion. A recent study from professor emeritus Anne-Marie Ambert for the Vanier Institute for the Family shows that divorce rates in Canada are down significantly from their peak in 1987, as the below graph from HRSDC demonstrates,
The drop in Canadian divorce rates between the late 1980s/1990s and present is less interesting to me vis-a-vis this discussion than is to note that Ambert’s study and the latest numbers from Statistics Canada place current rates of divorce in Canada at approximately 38%, as compared to 2003 rates of 35.3%. At a time when Canada’s overall population grew by approximately 5% between 2003-2008, those numbers strike me as statistically insignificant.
And what happened smack in the middle of that time frame? That’s right, on July 20, 2005 same-sex marriage was legalized in Canada.
The take home message? There might not be any reliable data demonstrating that legalizing same-sex marriage strengthens the insitution of marriage by reducing rates of divorce, but there is reliable data that demonstrates legalizing same-sex marriage does not weaken the insitution of marriage by increasing rates of divorce.
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Oh Lord, expect National Review to paradrop Stanley Kurtz in to bombard you with quack statistics any moment.
Statistics, alas, are like dogs. If you know how you can get them to do all kinds of tricks either which way. I imagine that the net effect is probably a wash. The gays and the lesbians probably will be just as dysfunctional as the heteros. They’re all humans after all.
Scott,
While the data points are interesting, he has not correlated anything and the use of the term “statistically signficant” is a bit of a misnomer unless he has done some regression analysis and has a statistically significant t-statistic.
The increase is miniscule.
Dave, we’re on the same page insofar as I described Silver’s post as “interesting” as opposed to earth shattering or ground-breaking or the like. Taking exception with Silver’s terminology of “statistically significant” is something you’d need to take up with him, I’m merely quoting his conclusion and don’t know whether he has done the things you mention. But I thought the numbers were interesting (and this is why I brought the Canadian context into focus) more for what they did not show than what they did.
There is a huge cultural shift of at least one kind:
The kids who grew up in houses where their parents got divorced and who said something to the effect of “I ain’t never gonna get me a divorce” have now grown up and found themselves married. Unsurprisingly, many of them did end up getting divorced… but many more of them did *NOT*. They said “I won’t get married until I’m certain”. Now, perhaps they did have all-but-marriage-in-name relationships with a significant other or two before finally “officially” tying the knot…
But I think that that spike in 1987 forced a lot of people to redefine marriage for themselves.
And the divorce rates we see around now are representative of that redefinition.
I honestly would be surprised to find that gay marriage had much more than diddly squat to do with the divorce rate one way or t’other.
It would seem statistically significant that same-sex marriage was introduced, hence bringing couples that would have wed were marriage to be legal when they desired marriage forward. For example, I would imagine the percent of couples that had co-habited for 5 years or more prior to marriage to be grater in the homosexual community than the heterosexual community due to same-sex marriage’s long standing illegality. There are other factors that complicate as well, like a couple marrying in Canada, say, and divorcing in New York. Since this isn’t a longitudinal study, we simply can’t know that, but we know that couples from states not recognizing homosexual marriage have sought marriages in states that recognize them in significant numbers.
All that said, I think people are misinterpreting the argument that the allowance of homosexual marriage will effect heterosexual marriage. While not a perfect example, given its erosion absent homosexual marriage, alimony (or spousal support) is being largely abandoned in divorce. Given that the norm homosexual marriage would be two partners with independent means of support, one could easily foresee alimony going away.
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