Newsflash: Stanley Kurtz is still talking out of his ass

... when it comes to the harmful effect of gay marriage.

But I am beginning to see that I was wrong about him when I dubbed him the Colonel Kurtz of gay bashing (no method, just plenty of madness).

The madness is the method.

Were Stanley Kurtz able to make his case using logical argument or statistical analysis based on sound data, he might actually bother to do his homework, but as it is he must even shun from clearly defining his own hypothesis for fear of having that disproved (or worse, being told to find at least some data to support it).

After all, what is his hypothesis:

1. Lone parenting is bad for children.
2. Unmarried parents are more likely to break up then married partners.
3. Nowadays, less parents bother to get married.
   
4. This is because the traditional link between marriage and parenthood has been severed.
5. This link-severing has been caused primarily by the debate surrounding gay marriage and registered partnerships.

Therefore, gay marriage leads to a debate on marriage (and childrearing) which leads to less ostracizing of sluts unmarried parents and their bastard offspring which leads to more unmarried parents which leads to more break-ups which leads to more lone parenting which is bad for children.

Q.E. fuckin' D.

No wonder Kurtz limits himself to ranting like a madman and simply trying to throw enough shit around to keep the controversy alive. The madness is the method. He writes his drivel not to convince anyone, but to keep the argument from being settled.

That's why I am only gonna write this down once. I will link to Kurtz' two newest rants in the National Review, debunk them, and then, in the future, simply link to this here post whenever he manages to wriggle his arm out of his straightjacket (now there's an appropriate term) and write another piece on same-sex marriage. Life is too short, the job too onerous, Stanley's writing too dull and repetitious.

First, for completeness sake and for those idiots who actually need convincing about this, some holes in Stanley's theory:

1. Marriage has been in decline since the late 1960s, way before same-sex marriage (or registered partnerships).
   
2. Marriage has been in decline in places without same-sex marriage.
3. Marriage has held steady in places with same-sex marriage.
   
4. The biggest cause of marital decline is not same-sex marriage, it's divorce. Getting a divorce used to be legally difficult and socially frowned upon. Now people have prenuptial agreements. Why not re-outlaw divorce instead of outlawing same-sex marriage?
   
5. If marriage is all about childrearing and that is the reason gays should not be allowed to marry, how come infertile people are allowed to marry?
6. If the debate surrounding same-sex marriage is causing people to doubt their own convictions as to what marriage is all about, why not accept same-sex marriage and end the debate?
7. What about other social factors besides same-sex marriage? I already mentioned divorce, but what about the advent of reliable birth control, financial independence for women, the fact that nowadays most people no longer "marry from home" but first live independently in a single household? Kurtz should weigh the importance of these factors instead of just discarding them.
8. Having just one parent is bad for kids, which presumably means stuff like less household income, the kid doing badly at school, juvenile delinquency and the like. But who says that having two parents is the only solution to problems like that? What about extensive daycare, or more money for schools, cheaper higher education? And waddyuknow, countries with same-sex marriage have all that. That changes the equation for parents thinking about a divorce or a break-up. Kurtz doesn't even mention it.
   

Then, some holes in his data:

1. Kurtz posits that cohabitating (unmarried) parents break up more often than married parents. This may well be true, but:
• He's forgetting that a lot of cohabitating ends not with a split, but with a wedding. This skews the data because it takes couples who are not likely to break up and shifts them from one group to the other.
• The actual numbers he shows are for cohabitating couples, not cohabitating parents (let alone cohabitating biological parents). It is likely that unmarried childless couples do not have the same break-up rate as unmarried couples with children. Kurtz should quote the relevant data or admit that it just isn't available.
  
2. He is interested in couples with young children (because it's all about childrearing), so any older couples will just pollute his data. This would be bad enough if older couples were a constant confounder, but the fact is that yesterday's older couples (i.e., the greatest generation) were married for life, while today's boomers are more likely to have divorced, be in an unmarried partnership, be openly gay, etc. A lot of the "marital decline" has nothing to do with childrearing.
3. Because it often takes a lot of time to formalize a divorce, quite a few single parents are still officially married. In the Netherlands, one in ten single parents is married.
   
4. What's the deal with stepparents? If Kurtz considers childrearing as an something that ought to be done by the biological parents, if a stepparent just ain't good enough for him, then remarriage is counted in the wrong category. If, on the other hand, being raised by stepparents is fine, then the breaking up of biological parents is less of an issue, since most single parents will find a new partner. And what about informal stepparents?

Stanley has just posted two articles at the NRO, one on Scandinavian marital woes, the other on the Dutch decline. In them, he graciously responds to his critics. It took him more than a year (he is responding to articles published in 2004), but still. Let's take a look.

Here is Kurtz:

Many causes have contributed to the institutional decline of marriage in the West since the 1960s, so it's never easy to isolate a single one. What would a best-case scenario for isolating the causal effect of same-sex marriage look like? Well, the clearest case would be a Western country in which marital decline actually accelerated after the introduction of same-sex marriage, or its near equivalent.

And here are Eskridge et al. (pdf):

What we actually see is that the marriage rate went up after 1989. In 1989, the year the registered partnership statute was enacted, there were 602.2 marriages per 100,000 Danes (Table D-1). By 1995, that number had climbed to 666.0, or an increase of just over 10% from 1990. By 2000, the number was 720.2, the highest annual marriage rate Denmark had seen since 1970.
[...]
The average divorce rate went down. In 1989, the divorce rate was 295.4 per 100,000 Danes. That rate plummeted in 1991 to 245.8, the lowest level of divorce since Denmark introduced the no-fault regime.
[...]
We see something of the same pattern in Sweden.

And here are Garssen and Badgett:

The Dutch have become more likely to have children before marrying, but that shift also started before gay couples got partnership or marriage rights. It's true that the non-marital birth rate rose from 11% in 1990 to 31% in 2003. However, a similar increase in non-marital births occurred in Ireland, Luxembourg, Hungary and Lithuania, all countries that do not give same-sex couples partnership or marriage rights.

Not to worry: the Swedes and Danes don't count (although Kurtz only says so after being confronted with the data) because, get this, marriage was already ruined in those countries. Yes, that is how Kurtz defends his proposition that gay marriage is the main culprit in the decline of marriage. In his words: "Eskridge has absolutely nothing to say about the continued decline of marriage in Norway, the actual center of my Scandinavian case." Actually, after excluding Denmark and Sweden there isn't much of Scandinavia left besides Norway.

And this is Kurtz concerning out-of-wedlock births: Irish bastard children don't count because of a lack of birth control, in Hungary and Lithuania it is the end of communism, and Luxembourgois bastards do not matter because the rise of out-of-wedlock births was smaller in Luxembourg then in the Netherlands.

Whoever said that science has to be difficult? Just discard any data you disagree with.

Here are some examples of Stanley's scientific acumen:


"the decline in Swedish marriage since 1987 is obvious."


"the sharp increase in the Dutch out-of-wedlock birthrate began in 1997"

[...]

"In Holland, unlike Scandinavia, there was little or no pre-existing practice of parental cohabitation when same-sex partnerships were introduced."


Let's conclude here that Mr Kurtz is a liar, an idiot, or both. This saves me the headache of taking his preposterous claims seriously. Besides, Eskridge et al. provide a 52-page smackdown of poor Stanley, so if any of you think I treat him unjustly, go read that first and then we'll talk.

The more important question is this: why of why are his preposterous claims even taken seriously to begin with? As Eskridge et al. write (in a scientific paper no less):

[his]hypothesis strikes us as more than a little obscure, and perhaps quite goofy. At the very least, it suffers from some logical problems.

Why even bother?

The answer is easy: Stanley Kurtz has got a PhD from Harvard. He's a scientist. Eskridge plainly states this:

Most advocates of the defense of marriage argument are self-serving politicians, sectarian moralists, or thinly veiled bigots grasping at any straw they can to support policies reflecting their anti-gay prejudice. (Some are all three.) Stanley Kurtz, a resident scholar at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, is one of the few academics making this argument, and so his articles and congressional testimony are worth examination.

Except that Kurtz is no scientist, and he's only a scholar or academic in the sense that he has a background in academe.

His doctorate is in social anthropology. Which can, arguably, be science. Not, however, when you specialize in "psychoanalytical sociology". Yes, that is when you apply the claptrap of a 19th century Viennese quack not to individual psyches but to entire peoples.

Go ahead and read the rave review of his PhD-based book on Amazon:

Kurtz begins with Santoshi Ma, a slightly unusual form of the Indian Mother Goddess, and notes that really, she is the same as all the other mother goddesses; that Hindus see her that way, even if Westerners are more interested in her individual characteristics. From there, he goes on to describe a particular "common psychological profile" for Indian Hindus, stressing over and over that to focus solely on the natural mother-child relationship is mistaken in terms of Hindu culture.

What ever this is, science it is not. (And please note that even this admirer has to admit that "it seemed to me that his great weak point is lack of his own data, either anthropological or clinical".

As far as I can tell, Stanley Kurtz has not published a single paper since getting his PhD. I checked Pubmed and Google Scholar, and all I can find is some "essays" on what the Oedipus complex looks like amongs the natives of the Trobriand Islands. And even these are over a dozen years old. Maybe the Islanders have learned to cope since then.

Then I checked the Hoover Institution, to see if Kurtz had at least done some research for them. You know, written reports and papers even if they weren't peer-reviewed. Well, he hastn't. There is preciously little there (35 pages in all) and it's all OpEd-like material. Nothing with graphs or tables or statistical analysis (and no, pointing at a cherrypicked statistic is not the same as a statistical analysis).

In fact, his bio at the Hoover website says he's a former research fellow. He doesn't even work there anymore. Maybe someone (such as contributing editor Stanley Kurtz) could inform the good people over at the National Review?

A LexisNexis search did not help. I only sampled a few of the articles, and I hope to be mistaken, but I could not find a single article by his hand that could in some way be described as scientific. Just loads and loads of OpEds and "essays". The guy wouldn't know a p-value if it bit him in the ass.

To summarize: Kurtz got his PhD in psychoanalytical sociology, as crackpot and unscientific a subject as can be found on campus. Afterwards, he never, ever, published anything in a peer-reviewed journal, or even in some in-house think-tank pseudo-journal. He's no longer with the think tank. Yet his "obscure, and perhaps quite goofy" theories get serious attention because he succeeds in making other people think he is a real, above-board "social scientist" as his NRO bio claims. Well, he's not.

He's just a wingnut who has found a niche peddling utter nonsense.