Maggie Gallagher recently wondered if it were wise for me to “devote a whole column to the idea that people who haven’t denounced a particular website don’t really care about marriage?” As she asked: “I mean, really Deroy. Wasn’t that silly?”
No, that was not silly. In fact, it was both sensible and necessary. Somebody had to say it, so I did.
Many gay-marriage supporters worry that at least some of those who loudly defend the sanctity of traditional marriage are more interested in stymieing homosexual aspirations than in preserving heterosexual matrimony. While these suspicions may be totally unfair, it must be hard for opposite-sex-marriage advocates to fend them off when they spend seemingly every waking moment railing against what gays may do to conventional marriage rather than what straights are doing today to undermine that worthy institution.
Quick: Which is the bigger threat to marriage — gays who want to wed or the roughly 50 percent of straight couples who march into court yelling, “Free us from our vows!”
AshleyMadison.com is not some secret society — like Skull & Bones, but for adultery. This “married dating site” earns perhaps $100 million annually by helping husbands and wives cheat on their spouses. Among other TV outlets, it advertises on Fox News, conservatives’ channel of choice. Given its high profile, even among center-right cable TV viewers, I would have expected some criticism or at least an acknowledgement of the damage AshleyMadison.com is doing and the horrible example it sets.
Instead, as my Nexis research demonstrated, neither Gallagher, nor Rick Santorum, nor Mitt Romney, nor Focus on the Family was quoted even once about AshleyMadison.com in the last six months. Over the same period, however, they respectively addressed gay marriage in 41, 22, 276, and 389 stories. Did Gallagher, Santorum, Romney, and Focus on the Family’s 900-member staff all miss AshleyMadison.com’s commercials on Fox News?
If silliness is what you seek, look to traditional-marriage defenders’ tendency to blame gay people for virtually every supposed familial ill. Gallagher wrote on March 10:
[I]n the last five years, unmarried childearing [sic] has resumed its inexorable rise. 38 percent of all babies are born out of wedlock, which implies probably more than half of women who become mothers for the first time do so while not married.
Is it mere coincidence that this resurgence in illegitimacy happened during the five years in which gay marriage has become (not thanks to me or my choice) the most prominent marriage issue in America — and the one marriage idea endorsed by the tastemakers to the young in particular?
In a piece for that day’s Independent Gay Forum — headlined “Do Married Gays Cause Single Moms?” — Jonathan Rauch, a libertarian scholar at the Brookings Institution, responded to Gallagher’s bizarre argument. Rauch posted a chart that obliterates her hypothesis.
“Can you spot the effect of same-sex marriage?” Rauch asks.
As the graph from the National Marriage Project clearly shows, out-of-wedlock births began their ascent in 1960. There appears to be no relationship between homosexuality and the heterosexual women who have children outside heterosexual matrimony.
But what if Gallagher is right? If so, homosexuals started perpetrating out-of-wedlock births way back in the late Eisenhower years. Amazingly, this was nine years before the Stonewall Riots launched the gay-rights movement.
This chart also shows that white illegitimacy waned in 2000, about when gay marriage popped up on the radar. Meanwhile, black illegitimacy keeps climbing. Maybe this means that blacks are more open to gay marriage than are whites, so much so that black women deliver some 70 percent of their babies out of wedlock. This could be a mass expression of solidarity with same-sex couples. What could be more life-affirming to a single-black mom than to have a kid without a husband present, so she can stand shoulder to well-toned shoulder with pairs of dudes who fly into Boston Logan to get hitched? Perhaps young black women think to themselves: “Elton John and David Furnish got married. So, we just cannot wait to have our kids out of wedlock!”
I sometimes remind paranoid black radio callers and audience members at my speeches that it is not true that most white folks sit around all day long plotting new ways to oppress black Americans. For every David Duke who does exactly this, a million whites stay busy, mind their own business, and try to survive until tomorrow. Likewise, defenders of traditional marriage and its myriad, genuine benefits should realize that for every sequin-drenched drag queen who fantasizes about igniting wedding gowns, a million gay Americans do nothing more to undermine conventional marriage than go out for Sunday brunch rather than cook pancakes at home.