Not The Gays' Fault

It turns out the "threat to marriage" is a quite nuanced. According to a recent report, new marriages have dropped by 5% - in other words, people aren't getting married in as large a number as they used to. Many people are now staying single, living with their partner without marrying, remaining widowed, or are separated. In fact, the number of married people in America is so low that it's almost not even a majority anymore. As Stephanie Coontz, a family life historian at Evergreen State College says:

"...we can no longer pretend that marriage is the central organizing principle of society. We have to take account of the many, many social networks and relationships that people cycle through, marriage being just one of them." (Source: NPR News)

(Source: NPR News via Pew Research Center)

So what is the cause of this decline? Why is it that people aren't lined up to be married like they used to? What exactly is threatening this o most sacred of sacred institutions? Surely our bigoted presidential candidates Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and Mitt Romney would say it has something to do with Don't Ask, Don't Tell being repealed. But surprisingly - by which I mean "to nobody's surprise" - the lower marriage rates have nothing to do with homosexuality.

One non-gay reason people aren't getting married is simply that times are changing. For example, folks younger than 30 (my age group!) are getting married only 20% of the time compared to fifty years ago when it was 60%. My parents got married when they were 22 - I'm 23 and plan to be unmarried for years to come. I've had many a conversation with young'uns my age who are in the same boat: having reached the age their parents were when they married, we get a little freaked out that we, at this unstable phase of our lives where we don't have careers or even firmed-up plans, could be settling down and starting families.

This brings me to the most non-gay factor of all for these low marriage rates: the economy. People of marriageable age are less likely get married because they aren't in a stable enough situation to start a family. Jobs are hard to find, and good jobs even harder, especially for those who don't have graduate degrees (which require more years to delay attaining a career). Speaking of the economy, here's some food for thought: there's a distinct "marriage gap" between the rich and the poor. Wealthy people are much more likely to get married than working class people without college degrees. The threat to marriage, as it turns out, is "yet another consequence of the nation's widening economic inequality" (NPR News).

Very not-gay.

Not long after many huge multi-national corporations including Google, Microsoft, Levi, Nike, and CBS told a federal court that DOMA (the Defense Of Marriage Act) is bad for business, we learn that unregulated business, the cause of our crappy economy, is actually bad for marriage. Now, I'm not very sentimental about marriage and I believe LGBTQ activists could have other objectives - such as bully prevention, obtaining hospital visitation rights, and securing equal opportunity employment. On the other hand, I'm sick of fundamentalists blaming the gays for the destruction of family values when every indicator points to other factors. If preserving marriage is really a priority for fundamentalists (which I don't believe it should, but what do I know?), then what they need to do is fix the economy and close the gap between the rich and the poor. That would be a much better method for protecting marriage than bigoted discrimination.