The Fact-Checker, by Michael Dobbs

A step into reality. Thank you for doing this, just a note of caution-- thought I don't see evidence of it here-- in the St. Pete Times factchecker they have awarded their worst whopper label to statements that appear to have been intentional exaggerations or attempts at humor. I like the context you gave on the Gravel statement. It helps. We all exaggerate or say outrageous things for emphasis; hmmm, this comment may be one example. :-)

Ignoring Brownback's citations is not checking facts. You dismiss the Kurtz citation without facts and then put in a real whopper of a citation "She said the recent increase in the percentage of births to unmarried women was due to a declining birth rate among married women and a rising birth rate among unmarried women." Are you kidding? someone needs to check the checker.

Slate ran a piece examining -- and debunking -- Kurtz's theories in 2004. The author's conclusion about Kurtz's (and by extension, Brownback's) charge that the rise in gay marriage leads to the downfall of straight marriage and in-wedlock births: It's a canard. I.e., "Kurtz's smoking gun is really just smoke and mirrors." The discussion is extensive and can be found here: http://www.slate.com/id/2100884/

It seems fairly clear from the Rutgers paper that the places that have passed laws permitting gay marriage, marriage in general is relatively disfavored and thus have higher out-of-wedlock births.

I do not think that gay marriage is a cause of higher out-of-wedlock births but rather (and somewhat ironically) a characteristic of a society than values marriage less.

(Before people scream, this is different than saying a gay marriage is somehow less valuable than a straight marriage. It is also not saying that a society which values marriage should exclude gays from marriage.)

Sounds like my stats are better then your stats. Now you can argue he is wrong by listening to those other stats but you can not say he is lying or something else because he chooses to use data other then yours. I think your path here is clearly wrong and proves you are just trying to find something to fight. There has to be something better then my data is better then your data. Try looking up Hillary's claim she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary because of climbing Everest.

The most important point about this entry is one Rob implies when he says "I do not think that gay marriage is a cause..." Nowhere does Brownback explicitly assert that permitting gay marriage *causes* higher illegitimate (in its technical, not perjorative meaning) births.

One of a dishonest speaker's favorite tricks is to juxtapose two loosely related (or even completely unrelated) facts in the hope that the audience will perceive a cause-and-effect relationship.

Throwing in a couple statistics merely lends the speaker a "my, he must have reseached this! If his statistics are correct, then the implied correlation must be!" veneer.

As Fact Checker points out, a correlation is (only) implied - and this perceived correlation has a favorable (to Brownback's mind) conclusion: IF the US permits gay marriage, THEN its illegitimacy rate will increase.

Drawing this "conclusion" from a spurious pairing of premises is the true falsehood. But Brownback himself never draws it...his audience does (just as he and his speechwriters hoped). So who gets the noses??

"She said the recent increase in the percentage of births to unmarried women was due to a declining birth rate among married women and a rising birth rate among unmarried women."

That's a tautology: the rising unmarried birth rate is because of the rising unmarried birth rate. Not exactly telling us something we don't know.

Not telling us something we didn't know? I think you may have misread the woman's quotation. She basically said that married women are choosing to have fewer kids and at the same time, birth rates among unmarried women are increasing. It's not tautology: it's actually a very interesting social phenomenon which speaks directly to the issue of whether or not there is a cause and effect relationship between permitting gay marriage and out-of-wedlock births. Cat52 actually makes an excellent point.

Gee Sam

Sam Brownback writes :

"In countries that have redefined marriage, where they've said, 'OK, it's not just a man and a woman, it can be two men, two women,' the marriage rates in those countries have plummeted to where you have counties now in northern Europe wher...."

Gee Sam, can't you put some positive spin on it and say- well - less marriages, less divorces ?

come on - put your head into it Sam.

I see those MArriage rates in the chart above...

Forget the genitalia obsession here folks...

Is it possible to talk about Marriage rates without the full context of DIVORCE rates?

that chart is USELESS

it doesn't handle Second time marriages, third time - I mean, sure - those get aggregated in -but

The chart means NOTHING without considering divorce rates.

that's like talking about Terry Schiavo and where life ends without realizing that you are inviting to the table the very question of where life begins (this is why Fox News was obsessed with this, it was a sneaky way in to abortion issues ).

OR this is like talking about deaths in a war without bringing in new births.

TRy a basic 200 level class in geography to whoever authored this article, start with a population pyramid, THEN - open the yellow pages, count the # of justices of the peace -heh- or churches to marry people, and count the # of divorce attorney's...

Divorce attorney's profit everytime someone fails to commit - I do say - someone oughta be making a killing from bush's foreign policy.

btw-

I PERSONALLY feel - if marriage ends in divorce, by very definition, there can be no second marriage, unless it was through death.

I know that's messed up -but really, if it doesn't mean what it says it means - what does it mean ?

I mean to say - if I bought a product, and it failed, and it was promoted as 'Lifetime guarantee ?'

and the company's policy upon calling was:

"well, we didn't mean YOUR lifetime silly, we meant the lifetime of the product"

I'd be saying, sure, you CAN actually divorce and then re-marry- but - that's insane to misunderstand or fail to educate yourself on what it means.

THEN AGAIN, I AM a realist, and I DO believe each persons PERSONAL perception of marriage is just that, unique.

I USED to promote 7 year contracts- you know, like we do with a president...

I find Brownback, McCain and Duncan Hunter as lairs,this are the same people that stood in front of the Americian people during the contract with America....
What the heck are they still doing in congress when the signed up for term limits, or are we the American people to dumb to let the same people lie to us again and again..I hold my self to a high standard than this JackA$$....So, dont vote for them....

I checked out Brokeback's life history and we might have another light in the loafer Senator like Craig. Look the dude is 51 years old and has adopted children it's old school for years back then that gay guys would use a wife/children to cover up who they were as they stayed in the closet. So don't be surprised if Brownback aka Brokeback is leaked out. All people should be treated equal yet most of the Senators yelling the loudest are the closet guys.

As a demographer, I just need to point out that the numbers displayed in the table were erronously refered to as "marriage rates." A marriage rate is the number of single women in a certain age group that marry in a year over the total number of single women in that age group - usually around 7 per 1000 currently for US adults. The numbers in this table are the percent of adults who are currently married. If a lot of people get divorced, our marriage rate may be high while the percent of people married at any point in time is low (i.e., marriage is an event, being married is a status). Sorry, I just had to call a fact checker out on an incorrect use of facts.

Besides the fact that the Kurtz article is bunk, it doesn't even apply here - there is no same-sex marriage in Norway. Why didn't that fact make the post? No causation, not even using statistics from the right country, all to prove a really, really tenuous point.... Why's that not a four?

It was agreed by the review that marriage rates have been on the decline and out-of-marriage births have been on the increase. What then is the cause of this trend?

Stanley Kurtz is a gay-obsessed, homophobic propagandist with no qualifications to engage in empirical research on this question. It is amusing that the right wing is so afraid to just be honest; they oppose same-sex marriage because they hate gay people and would like to see them all eliminated from the face of the earth. Because that honesty doesn't sell very well, however, right wingers try to trump up empirical arguments to serve as pretexts for what at base is just plain old ugly bigotry.

...that means that it makes no difference what Kurtz' statistics are. He wouldn't change his position on same-sex marriage if the numbers showed that same-sex marriage increased marriage rates because this silly correlation argument has nothing to do with his motive for opposing same-sex marriage. We make fools of ourselves even taking seriously an argument that he offers only as a pretext.

Spain has full marriage rights for all couples (gay and straight) and I believe the rate of children born out of wedlock is quite lower than that of the US. The sky is not falling here in Madrid. Quite the contrary.

Oddly enough no-one (not even fact-checker) seems to notice there is the inherent assumption or implication that being born out-of wedlock (even for heterosexual couples) is a bad thing (for children), which is entirely unproven.
Furthermore the only criterion seems to be that the parents are not married at the time child is born. That they may marry later does not show up in any statistic.
Additionally, contrary to anglo-saxon countries, most of europe does not know or recognize 'common-law' marriage.
In fact what may drive the change is that in the Netherlands there have been changes in law that on the one side equate anyone who is living with an other person as similar to a married couple for tax purposes, and on the other side allow people to enter into a 'living-together' contract, to get some of the benefits usually granted only to married people.

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