[Grovenet] Lies, damned lies, and evangelicals . . .
Geri
g-g-steele at comcast.net
Wed May 13 12:07:50 PDT 2009
Sorry, Carol, not understanding your comment ... ?
Geri
----- Original Message -----
From: Carol Morgan
To: Forest Grove local interests list
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2009 11:45 AM
Subject: Re: [Grovenet] Lies, damned lies, and evangelicals . . .
The relationship is that if men just happen to like men boys or multiple women, what's the difference?
------ Original Message ------
Received: 11:41 AM PDT, 05/13/2009
From: "Geri" <g-g-steele at comcast.net>
To: "Forest Grove local interests list" <grovenet at rdrop.com>
Subject: Re: [Grovenet] Lies, damned lies, and evangelicals . . .
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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