What are some ways, you might undermine the below statistic in an argument against marriage?
What are some ways, you might undermine the below statistic in an argument against marriage?
Next week, the justices of the Supreme Court will hear arguments for and against marriage equality. But hundreds of people have already tried to help the justices make up their collective mind by filing amicus briefs, which are “friend of the court” documents that offer unsolicited advice or information about the issues at stake in the case. Some of the briefs against national recognition of same-sex marriage get pretty creative — from arguing that it would lead to nearly a million abortions to claiming it would destroy the economy.
Just about anyone can file this kind of brief, and just about anyone has. There are well-established advocacy groups, and there are solo citizens who declare their qualifications as being married for 45 years, or being a “commercial property owner and citizen” who is “directly impacted by surrounding neighbors’ actions.”
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Plenty of anti-marriage equality briefs focus on states’ rights to limit marriage and when courts should overrule ballot measures, or the historic scope of the 14th Amendment’s due process and equal protection clauses. But just in case those theories can’t get five votes, opponents of marriage for same-sex couples have helpfully provided the smorgasbord below.
1. Marriage equality will kill people. The group Mike Huckabee Policy Solutions — which says it is “neither authorized, funded, directed nor controlled by Gov. Huckabee,” but simply advocates for his views — teamed up with Paul Cameron, an anti-gay researcher who has been repudiated by the major social science organizations, to make this argument.
They are concerned that “Justice Kennedy is apparently unaware of the strong scientific linkage that has been documented between same-sex marriage and early mortality.” The authors claim that “individuals who engage in homosexuality” die younger.
They perused newspapers for “homosexual obituaries” to measure whether being partnered at the time of death had any impact on the age a person died. Since they got inconclusive results, they conclude that marriage won’t make gay people live longer.
3. Marriage equality will cause 900,000 abortions. A brief from “100 Scholars of Marriage,” led by a former clerk of Justice Antonin Scalia, takes that same highly suspect argument that heterosexual marriage will decline if more states recognize the rights of gay couples.
Combining that with the unrelated data point that the abortion rate is higher among unmarried women, the “scholars” predict that “under reasonable assumptions,” the Supreme Court’s recognition of marriage for same-sex couples would lead to “nearly 900,000 more children aborted” in the next 30 years.
The authors explain, “The mechanism is simple and intuitive: Fewer opposite-sex marriages means more unmarried women, more children born to unmarried mothers, fewer total children born, and more children aborted.”
4. Marriage equality would destroy the economy. These “scholars of marriage and fertility” claim in their brief that, by implying that marriage is about more than “biological procreation,” same-sex marriage would mean everyone would have fewer babies, which in turn would “over time result in a reduced demand for goods and services and an aging work force, which results in fewer available workers to support social programs.”
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5. Marriage equality means that kindergartners will be taught that same-sex marriage is a “status to which they should aspire.” The Lighted Candle Society, co-founded by former Reagan attorney general Edwin Meese, asks, “What will kindergarteners [sic] be taught?” Already, the brief says, “Johnny is being taught that before he marries a girl, he may want to consider marrying another boy. Susie is being taught that before she marries a boy, she may want to marry another girl.
The lesson is that marrying someone of the same gender is a ‘good thing.’” The Supreme Court ruling for the same sex couples, they say, “would enshrine Queer Critical Theory (which says there are no real [gender] differences) into the Constitution.”