In May 1989, the Danish Parliament enacted the Registered Partnership Act and thereby made Denmark the first nation officially to recognize same-sex unions and to bestow on lesbian and gay couples most of the rights and duties associated with marriage. In 1993, Norway followed Denmark's lead, as did Sweden in 1995, Iceland in 1996, and Finland in 2002. The Nordic countries thus were trailblazers in granting same-sex pairs what are now termed civil unions or domestic partnerships in the United States.
Conservative U.S. commentators such as Stanley Kurtz and Robert Bork have made empirical allegations, based on the Scandinavian experience, that same-sex unions discourage different-sex couples from marrying and result in more children being raised outside of marriage. In 2004 and 2005, these assertions were the principal empirical grounds bolstering the Republican Party's “defense of marriage” argument in support of passage of the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would ban same-sex unions in the United States.
In Gay Marriage: For Better or for Worse? What We've Learned from the Evidence, Eskridge and Spedale rebut Kurtz, Bork, and Republicans such as former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum. The authors also address questions such as “Has the legal recognition of same-sex partnerships in other countries had positive consequences for citizens in those countries?” (p. 13)
The book's most compelling analysis directly confronts the defense-of-marriage contentions of Kurtz, Bork, and Santorum. Eskridge and Spedale convincingly demonstrate that a two-generation-long Nordic trend of declining marriage rates, rising divorce rates, and soaring rates of nonmarital births pre-dated, by well over a decade, the Scandinavian adoption of registered partnership laws and followed the liberalization of alternatives to marriage (such as cohabitation) and the expansion of exit options (such as no-fault divorce). Every bit as important, the introduction of registered partnerships did not at all accelerate those domestic-relations transformations. In fact, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden had more children raised by their biological parents after those countries adopted partnership laws (p. 172).
The volume is chock-full of human interest. The story of Eigil and Axel Axgil, a pioneering male couple who championed gay rights and same-sex unions in Denmark starting in the 1950s, introduces one chapter. Barry Winter and Per Kjaer, depicted as the authors' “bear” couple, begin another (“bear” is slang for gay males who are burly and hairy and thus resemble bears).
Unfortunately, the balance of the book's empirical investigation is less satisfying. A problem arises from the difficulties inherent in the sampling of virtually invisible gay and lesbian populations. The analysis of Eskridge and Spedale relies in part on a sample of 812 lesbian, gay, and bisexual Danes (solicited by means of gay and lesbian publications) who responded to an online survey. However, such nonrandomly generated data may not be generalized to the population of interest—the more than 50,000 lesbian, gay, and bisexual Danes (p. 94).
A second data source is in-depth interviews with 24 sets of registered partners “chosen to reflect a diverse set of demographic backgrounds, including geographic location, age, education, occupation, and nationality” (p. 300). Forty-eight is a modest sample size to adequately reflect an array of all of those demographic characteristics, especially when nearly 6,000 Danes were in registered partnerships as of 2005 (p. 94). Moreover, even if just 24 couples do satisfactorily represent the desired demographic heterogeneity, there is no way that they could do so and have been randomly selected and thereby be representative of the population of registered partners.
Finally, all of these primary data come exclusively from one country (Denmark), which the authors explain at length to be an exceptionally tolerant place, especially with regard to an unusual religious tradition that not only accepts, but in fact celebrates, social diversity. How can such idiosyncratic empirical information be pertinent to the American same-sex marriage debate and to the work's primary audience (described as “open-minded Americans” whose “point of view” requires that “any big change in public policy … be justified, and its risks carefully evaluated” [p. 13])?
Indeed, the book's title is misleading. As its authors acknowledge, the volume focuses on the experience of registered lesbian and gay partners, not married same-sex couples. Thus there is no “evidence” here regarding “gay marriage.”
The difference is more than semantic. In California, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Vermont, and other states, gay men and lesbians are fighting for marriage and not just civil unions or domestic partnerships. Many Americans see the latter categories as simply another experiment with the Plessy-esque “separate but equal” approach to social construction and wonder how fairly same-sex partners will be treated in a system where signs of “Heterosexuals Only” appear at the entrance to marriage bureaus.
