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

[Geri]

Ha! Darn, Steve, if I'd known someone might think of that, I wouldn'a said it!

No, didn't think of that, actually, so no pun intended ...

Geri

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steve Jerrett" <stevedj at teleport.com>
To: "Forest Grove local interests list" <grovenet at rdrop.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2009 11:38 AM
Subject: Re: [Grovenet] Lies, damned lies, and evangelicals . . .


>> 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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