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Article Excerpt
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 radio personality 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...
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