"Marriage is slowly dying in Scandinavia. A majority of children in Sweden and Norway are born out of wedlock. Sixty percent of first-born children in Denmark have unmarried parents. Not coincidentally, these countries have had something close to full gay marriage for a decade or more. Same-sex marriage has locked in and reinforced an existing Scandinavian trend toward the separation of marriage and parenthood. The Nordic family pattern--including gay marriage--is spreading across Europe. And by looking closely at it we can answer the key empirical question underlying the gay marriage debate. Will same-sex marriage undermine the institution of marriage? It already has."

(Source: Stanley Kurt, " The End of Marriage in Scandinavia: The 'conservative case' for same-sex marriage collapses," The Weekly Standard, February 2, 2004, Volume 009, Issue 20; http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/660zypwj.asp .)

"The president said there is no reason to press for the amendment because so many senators are convinced that the Defense of Marriage Act -- which says states that outlaw same-sex unions do not have to recognize such marriages conducted outside their borders -- is sufficient. 'Senators have made it clear that so long as DOMA is deemed constitutional, nothing will happen. I'd take their admonition seriously....  Until that changes, nothing will happen in the Senate.'"

"Mr. Bush's stated support for an amendment defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman was a rallying cry for many social conservatives in the presidential campaign.

...In interviews on Sunday on television news programs, Dan Bartlett, Mr. Bush's counselor, said Mr. Bush was referring in The Post interview only to the reality of legislative vote counting and was not suggesting that his support for the amendment had diminished.

...The president's statement in the interview with The Post, Mr. Bartlett said, 'does not change President Bush's view about amendment, the need for an amendment. And he'll continue to push for an amendment.'

(Source: Richard W. Stevenson, "White House Again Backs Amendment on Marriage," The New York Times, January 17, 2005; http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/17/politics/17bush.html?th .)

The politically correct crowd celebrates "diversity" in all forms, believing that it makes America strong, yet sociologists at Auburn University in Alabama have found that diversity in religious matters actually weakens a vital American institution: marriage.

The researchers compared divorce statistics from the 1990 U.S. Census Bureau against data from the Glenmary Research Center that measured the extent of religious homogeneity in 621 counties from each of the fifty states. They concluded that the religious makeup of a community - not simply the religiosity of a couple - "exerts a significant independent effect" on the likelihood of marital success. "Where people live in relatively homogeneous religious settings (and are presumably more tightly bound together), divorce is lower (and vice versa)."

Exploring this social dimension of religion, the study found that the impact of a county's religious uniformity on marriage remained statistically significant (p<.05) in a regression that controlled for eleven factors that other studies have correlated with divorce. Comparing the relative impact of all twelve independent variables on divorce rates, religious concentration ranked seventh. (Living in an urban environment and in a country with a high degree of population change ranked first and second.)

While the study does not call for the establishment of a state church as a means to reduce the divorce rate, the scholars nonetheless suggest that a higher degree of "cultural homogeneity" might be a good idea.