[Grovenet] Lies, damned lies, and evangelicals . . .

[Steve Jerrett]

> The politically-religious should butt out of this one.

Geri,

Pun intended?

Steve

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Geri" <g-g-steele at comcast.net>
To: "Forest Grove local interests list" <grovenet at rdrop.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2009 11:00 AM
Subject: Re: [Grovenet] Lies, damned lies, and evangelicals . . .


> Nicely written by Brown ...
>
> I don't understand how some (often it is folks who consider themselves 
> fervently religious) equate homosexuality with pedophilia & polygamy 
> either! (Psst! Most pedophiles are heterosexual males.) Heterosexuals are 
> allowed the civil right of marriage without being frightened someone will 
> say they are preying on children or having more than one spouse. Allowing 
> the civil right of marriage does not force any church to perform or 
> recognize it -- The legality of marriage comes from government, not 
> church!
>
> Oh, the "certain groups" you refer to Bob just don't make any sense, do 
> they?! Example: the Catholic Church didn't recognize divorce, either. 
> However, you can get legally divorced, even if you are a Catholic and your 
> church then doesn't allow you to fully participate after that.
>
> The politically-religious should butt out of this one.
>
> My 2-cents. ; )
> Geri
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: Bob Browning
> To: Grovenet
> Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2009 9:54 AM
> Subject: [Grovenet] Lies, damned lies, and evangelicals . . .
>
>
> Here' another sign of how certain groups in America promote their agenda 
> by not only ignoring the truth, but by bending it to their own needed 
> outcome!!
>
> bob "lies, damned lies, and made up statistics" browning
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>
> Adventures in Math & Marriage or,
>
> Why Gay Marriage Does Not Decrease Straight Marriage
>
> by Barrett Brown
>
> Does the legalization of gay marriage contribute to the decline of 
> heterosexual marriage? A good portion of our fair republic's cultural 
> conservatives seem to believe that it does. Evangelical kingpin James 
> Dobson, head of Focus on the Family, told a typically credulous Larry King 
> in November of 2006:
>
> "In the Netherlands and places where they have tried to define marriage 
> [to include gay couples], what happens is that people just don't get 
> married. It's not that the homosexuals are marrying in greater numbers, 
> it's that when you confuse what marriage is, young people just don't get 
> married."
>
> If what Dobson says is true, New Jersey is going to be in huge trouble, 
> and Massachusetts, which legalized gay marriage in 2004, must already be. 
> Of course, Dobson is wrong. Here's why.
>
> First, let's think about this problem mathematically and prepare our 
> variables. X is any country "where they have tried to define marriage [to 
> include gay couples]," in Dobson's description. Y is the marriage rate 
> among heterosexuals before country X has "tried to define marriage [to 
> include gay couples]," and Z is the allegedly decreasing heterosexual 
> marriage rate that exists after ten years of gay civil unions. The Dobson 
> Theorem, as we shall call it, states that "if X, then Y must be greater 
> than Z." Or, translating math into English, "if a nation allows for civil 
> unions, the marriage rate among heterosexuals at the time that this occurs 
> will be higher than it is ten years later."
>
> Let us now test the Dobson Theorem. Like most things with variables, the 
> Dobson Theorem requires that X be substituted for various things that meet 
> the parameters of X-in this case, northern European countries. Luckily, 
> Dr. Dobson himself has provided us with some data. During the Larry King 
> interview, Dobson mentioned Norway and "other Scandinavian countries" as 
> fitting the description. We'll also need values to punch in for Y and Z. 
> These may be obtained from all of the countries in question, which have 
> famously nosy governments. Conveniently enough, these numbers may also be 
> obtained from the October 26, 2008 edition of the Wall Street Journal 
> op-ed page, where William N. Eskridge, Jr., the John A. Garver professor 
> of jurisprudence at Yale University, and Darren Spedale, a New York 
> investment banker, penned an editorial based on their new book entitled 
> Gay Marriage: For Better or For Worse? What We've Learned From the 
> Evidence.
>
> According to Eskridge and Garver, Denmark began allowing gay civil unions 
> in 1989. Ten years later, the heterosexual marriage rate had increased by 
> 10.7 percent. Norway did the same in 1993, and a decade later the 
> heterosexual marriage rate had increased by 12.7 percent. Sweden followed 
> suite in 1995, and ten years later the heterosexual marriage rate had 
> increased by 28.7 percent. And these marriages were actually lasting. 
> During the same time frame, the divorce rate dropped 13.9 percent in 
> Denmark, 6 percent in Norway, and 13.7 percent in Sweden. So, we may 
> probably dispense with the Dobson Theorem. But how did Dobson get this 
> relationship so wrong in the first place?
>
> The culprit may be the Weekly Standard and National Review gadfly Stanley 
> Kurtz, who took issue with Garver and Eskridge's preliminary findings back 
> in 2004, before they were published. Confronted with statistics indicating 
> that marriage in Scandinavia is in fine shape, Kurtz instead proclaimed 
> that "Scandinavian marriage is now so weak that statistics on marriage and 
> divorce no longer mean what they used to." Brushing aside numbers showing 
> that Danish marriage was up ten percent from 1990 to 1996, Kurtz countered 
> that "just-released marriage rates for 2001 show declines in Sweden and 
> Denmark." He failed to note that they were down in 2001 for quite a few 
> places, including the United States, which of course had no civil unions 
> anywhere in 2001. And having not yet had access to the figures, he 
> couldn't have known that both American and Scandinavian rates went back up 
> in 2002. As for Norway, he says, the higher marriage rate "has more to do 
> with the institution's decline than w
> ith any renaissance. Much of the increase in Norway's marriage rate is 
> driven by older couples 'catching up.'" It's unclear exactly how old these 
> "older couples" may be, but at any rate, Kurtz thinks their marriages 
> simply don't count. But even if we arbitrarily strike such nuptials from 
> the record, we're still left with an increase in Norway's marriage rate, 
> as Kurtz himself acknowledges that these oldster nuptials only constitute 
> "much" of the increase, not all of it or even most of it. So Kurtz's 
> position is that Norwegian marriage is in decline because not only are 
> younger couples getting married at a higher rate, but older couples are as 
> well.
>
> Kurtz applies a similar level of statistical acumen to divorce rates. 
> "It's true that in Denmark, as elsewhere in Scandinavia, divorce numbers 
> looked better in the nineties," he wrote. "But that's because the pool of 
> married people has been shrinking for some time. You can't divorce without 
> first getting married." This is true. It's also true that Denmark has a 
> much lower divorce rate than the United States as a percentage of married 
> couples, a method of calculation that makes the size of the married people 
> pool irrelevant. Denmark's percentage is 44.5, while the United States is 
> at 54.8 percent. Incidentally, those numbers come from the Heritage 
> Foundation, which also sponsors reports on the danger that gay marriage 
> poses to the heterosexual marriage rate.
> Still, Kurtz is upset that many Scandinavian children are born out of 
> wedlock. "About 60 percent of first-born children in Denmark now have 
> unmarried parents," he says. He doesn't give us the percentage of 
> second-born children who have unmarried parents, because that percentage 
> is lower and would thus indicate that Scandinavian parents often marry 
> after having their first child, as Kurtz himself later notes in the course 
> of predicting that this will no longer be the case as gay civil unions 
> continue to take their non-existent toll on Scandinavian marriage.
>
> Since the rate by which Scandinavian couples have children before getting 
> married has been rising for decades, it's hard to see what this has to do 
> with the more recent advent of gay marriage-unless, of course, you happen 
> to be Stanley Kurtz. "Scandinavia's out-of-wedlock birthrates may have 
> risen more rapidly in the seventies, when marriage began its slide. But 
> the push of that rate past the 50 percent mark during the nineties was in 
> many ways more disturbing." Of course it was more disturbing to Kurtz. By 
> the mid-1990s, the Scandinavians had all instituted civil unions, and thus 
> even the clear, long-established trajectory of such a trend as premature 
> baby-bearing can be laid at the feet of the gays simply by establishing 
> some arbitrary numerical benchmark that was probably going to be reached 
> anyway, calling this milestone "in many ways more disturbing," and hinting 
> that all of this is somehow the fault of the gays.
>
> By the same token, I can prove that the establishment of the Weekly 
> Standard in 1995 has contributed to rampant world population growth. Sure, 
> that population growth has been increasing steadily for decades, but the 
> push of that number past the 6 billion mark in 2000 was "in many ways more 
> disturbing" to me for some weird reason that I can't quite pin down. Of 
> course, this is faulty reasoning. One could just as reasonably argue that 
> by virtue of its unparalleled support for the invasion of Iraq, the Weekly 
> Standard has actually done its part to keep world population down.
>
> Why is Kurtz so disturbed about out-of-wedlock rates? Personally, I think 
> it would be preferable for a couple to have a child and then get married, 
> as is more often the case in Scandinavia, rather than for a couple to have 
> a child and then get divorced, as is more often the case in the United 
> States. Kurtz doesn't seem to feel this way, though, as it isn't 
> convenient to feel this way at this particular time. Here are all of these 
> couples, he tells us, having babies without first filling out the proper 
> baby-making paperwork with the proper federal agencies. What will become 
> of the babies? As long as we're looking at trend lines, we may conclude 
> that they'll continue to outperform their American counterparts in math 
> and science, as they've been doing for quite a while.
>
> From:
>
> eSkeptic: the email newsletter of the Skeptics Society
> Wednesday, May 13th, 2009  |  ISSN 1556-5696
> View at:   www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/09-05-13
>
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