"[A]Polish bill banning discussion of homosexuality in the schools, ...supported by both Poland's President Lech Kaczynski and Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, would prohibit 'the promotion of homosexuality in the schools.'

Radical homosexual groups, the left generally and the European Union have been going nuts over this proposed legislation. They're calling the sponsors 'homophobes' and 'haters' - when, in reality, all the bill requires is neutrality on an emotionally-charged issue.

The bill does not require that schools warn against the palpable dangers of the gay acts. Rather, it bans any discussion of a lifestyle whose advancement offends people of faith.

By contrast, in the United States, many schools are used as propaganda forums. Children are taught that homosexuality is a perfectly acceptable lifestyle, that hatred of gays (so-called homophobia) is rampant, and that anyone who opposes the militant gay agenda is a bigot - comparable to a racist or an anti-Semite.

Some schools even give explicit instruction in how to perform various unnatural acts, in the guise of fighting AIDS.

On April 18, schools across the United States will participate in what's called a 'Day of Silence,' where students and staff refuse to speak, to demonstrate their opposition to so-called anti-gay hatred. In reality, this too is meant to advance the homosexual agenda. Only one point of view is presented. Last year, over 4,000 junior high schools, high schools and colleges participated in this indoctrination."

"Cindy and Dan O'Connor were very worried about Zach. Though bright, he was doing poorly at school. At home, he would pick fights, slam doors, explode for no reason. They wondered how their two children could be so different; Matt, a year and a half younger, was easygoing and happy. Zach was miserable.

The O'Connors had hunches. Mr. O'Connor is a director of business development for American Express, Ms. O'Connor a senior vice president of a bank, and they have had gay colleagues, gay bosses, classmates who came out after college. From the time Zach was little, they knew he was not a run-of-the-mill boy. His friends were girls or timid boys.

'Zach had no interest in throwing a football,' Mr. O'Connor says. But their real worry was his anger, his unhappiness, his low self-esteem. 'He'd say: 'I'm not smart. I'm not like other kids,' ' says Ms. O'Connor. The middle-school psychologist started seeing him daily.

The misery Zach caused was minor compared with the misery he felt. He says he knew he was different by kindergarten, but he had no name for it, so he would stay to himself. He tried sports, but, he says, 'It didn't work out well.' He couldn't remember the rules. In fifth grade, when boys at recess were talking about girls they had crushes on, Zach did not have someone to name.

By sixth grade, he knew what "gay" meant, but didn't associate it with himself. That year, he says: "I had a crush on one particular eighth-grade boy, a very straight jock. I knew whatever I was feeling I shouldn't talk about it." He considered himself a broken version of a human being. "I did think about suicide," he says.

Then, for reasons he can't wholly explain beyond pure desperation, a month after his Valentine "date" - "We never actually went out, just walked around school together" - in the midst of math class, he told a female friend. By day's end it was all over school. The psychologist called him in. "I burst into tears," he recalls. "I said, 'Yes, it's true.' Every piece of depression came pouring out. It was such a mess."

That night, when his mother got home from work, she stuck her head in his room to say hi. 'I said, 'Ma, I need to talk to you about something, I'm gay.' She said, 'O.K., anything else?' 'No, but I just told you I'm gay.' 'O.K., that's fine, we still love you.' I said, 'That's it?' I was preparing for this really dramatic moment.'

Ms. O'Connor recalls, 'He said, 'Mom, aren't you going to freak out?' I said: 'It's up to you to decide who to love. I have your father, and you have to figure out what's best for you.'"

Progressive activists in the United States have argued strenuously in recent years that giving homosexuals the legal right to marry will improve life for homosexual couples and will consequently benefit society as a whole.  A new study of same-sex marriage in Scandinavia, however, casts serious doubt on such assertions.  For, as it turns out, relatively few homosexual couples avail themselves of this revolutionary right. And a surprisingly high percentage of those who do so end up in divorce court.

To analyze the demographics of homosexual marriages, a team of German and Norwegian scholars recently examined data collected in Norway and Sweden since these bellwether countries discarded centuries of legal tradition by authorizing homosexual unions (in 1993 in Norway and in 1995 in Sweden).  Both countries have thus now enacted laws granting homosexuals "the legal right to registered partnerships, a civil status that [the researchers believe], in practice does not deviate much from the concept of marriage."  The legal equivalence of homosexual unions to heterosexual marriage indeed largely explains why the researchers use "the terms registered partnerships and same-sex marriage interchangeably."   Similarly, the researchers "use the term divorce to refer to [homosexual] partnership dissolution because the divorce procedures of the marriage act [in both countries] apply to registered [homosexual] marriages as well."

As the German and Norwegian scholars survey the available data for homosexual unions, they cannot avoid one obvious reality: "the incidence of same-sex marriage in Norway and Sweden is not particularly impressive."  Between 1993 and 2001, while Norway recorded 196,000 heterosexual marriages, the country witnessed the legal registration of only 1,293 homosexual partnerships.  Similarly, while Sweden recorded 280,000 heterosexual marriages between 1995-2002, the country saw the formation of only 1,526 registered homosexual partnerships.  The researchers accordingly calculate "a ratio of around 7 same-sex marriages to every 1,000 new opposite-sex marriages" in Norway and a comparable "ratio of 5 new partnerships to every 1,000 new opposite-sex marriages" in Sweden.  The researchers remark that the numbers of same-sex marriages have run "considerably lower" than might have been expected by those relying on recent surveys of sexual behavior.  These surveys have indicated that "well over 1%" of women and between 1 and 3% of men have had a same-sex partner during the last year, with between 4 and 9% of men and approximately 4% of women reporting that they have had a same-sex partner at some time during their lives.  (The authors of the new study are too well informed to rehash the now discredited absurdity-promulgated by Alfred Kinsey-that fully ten percent of the adult male population is homosexual.)

The data for same-sex unions in Norway and Sweden indicate, however, not only that such unions are relatively rare, but also that they are remarkably fragile, ending in divorce significantly more often than do the heterosexual marriages of peers.  The statistics indeed reveal "that the divorce risk for partnerships of men is 50% higher than the corresponding risk for heterosexual marriages and that the divorce risk for partnerships of women is about double (2.67) that for men (1.50)."   The researchers then re-examine the data in statistical models that take into account age, education, and other background characteristics, but these multi-variable models "do not alter the basic relation between divorce risks in different family types."

The German and Norwegian scholars acknowledge that "divorce-risk levels [that are] considerably higher in same-sex marriages" than in heterosexual marriages would hardly have been predicted by those who have supposed that "the symbolic meaning of partnership formation for a group that has just acquired the right to marry [would have been] related to a higher commitment to this civil status and to lower divorce risk."  On the other hand, homosexual couples' distinctively high propensity to break apart would not have surprised those who recognize "the group's lower exposure to normative pressure to maintain lifelong unions."  Among homosexuals, the researchers predict, "past relationship experience" is likely to cause "lesbians and gay men...[to] have lower expectations of relationship duration than will heterosexual couples." 

In their concluding comment on their groundbreaking study-the first such study of "an unambiguously defined population of gay and lesbian couples"-the researchers emphasize the applicability of their findings well beyond Norway and Sweden.  "Many of the demographic characteristics of our Scandinavian couples," they remark, "resemble those found for other populations of same-sex couples, such as same-sex co-residents in the United States.... Evidently, some aspects of gay and lesbian lifestyles are common for different countries."

Before American jurists and lawmakers press ahead with the dubious project of granting homosexuals a legal right to marriage or marriage-like civil unions, they should ponder this new study and its conclusions.  For the revolutionaries who congratulate themselves on having smashed centuries of tradition may soon realize that they have wrought this destruction for the benefit of very few couples, a high proportion of whom are soon separated.