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Evidence in Lewis v. Alfaro On Friday, March 5, 2004, the Alliance Defense Fund presented the California Supreme Court with evidence countering Attorney General Lockyer’s position that the Court may decide whether California’s marriage laws are constitutional without considering the differences between same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples. The AG, Gavin Newsom, Nancy Alfaro and the City and County of San Francisco assume that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to be treated the same as opposite-sex couples. However, the California Constitution does not require that persons be treated similarly if they are, in fact, different. And while ADF does not believe the Court should address the issue of the constitutionality of the marriage laws, if it does, it must look at the evidence supporting the traditional institution of marriage. ADF presented to the Court evidence showing that the state has a compelling interest in limiting marriage to the union of a man and a woman. Marriage has long been accepted as the basic building block of American society. Rather than strengthening that building block, extending marital rights to same-sex couples sounds the death knell of the institution. In Scandinavia, where same-sex marriage or de facto same-sex marriage has become well accepted, the institution of marriage is virtually dead. According to the original research of Stanley Kurtz, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, the institutionalization of same-sex unions in Scandinavia has led to the cultural separation of marriage and parenthood. This in turn has led to an increase in out-of-wedlock births and a decrease in marriages. In the most liberal areas of Norway in 2002, 67.3% of children were born out of wedlock. Kurtz’s soon-to-be-released research on the result of same-sex marriage in the Netherlands shows a similar cause-and-effect of the acceptance of same-sex marriage and the cultural separation of marriage and parenthood. Separating marriage from parenthood has a devastating impact on children. The social science evidence overwhelmingly supports the proposition that children do best when they are in a family with a married mother and father, both of whom are in the home and providing input into child rearing. The evidence is overwhelming that children without a father have a much higher likelihood of encountering a myriad of social, medical and emotional problems. Children from fatherless homes account for 63% of all youth suicides, 71% of all high school dropouts, 85% of all youths in prison, and well over 50% of all teen mothers. Children from motherless homes also experience heightened problems, but there is less research on motherless children because it is only recently that anyone even considered the possibility that children might not need mothers. ADF also presented evidence that opening the institution of marriage to same-sex couples creates not two but three kinds of unions: male/female unions; male/male unions; and female/female unions. Uncontroversial social science research shows that male/male unions and female/female unions are substantively different. If those unions are different from each other, they cannot both be the same as male/female unions. |
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