Via Kos…  Your gay and lesbian neighbors have been watching this for decades…

The failure of the character assassination attempt, part II

I wrote earlier that Obama’s favorabilities have surprisingly survived this election intact, given the amount of shit that has been flung in his direction. Part of the reason is that the GOP overreached in their attacks. While arguing that he was inexperienced could’ve gained traction pre-Palin, the stuff about being a Muslim Marxist Manchurian candidate was simply, well, ludicrous.

In this narrative, Obama is “a Marxisant radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists,.” Once elected, presumably, will reveal himself to be the monster that he is, in the manner of Kang and Kodos in that classic 1996 Treehouse of Horror episode of The Simpsons.

If you want to take a look at their reasoning, I recommend the work of Stanley Kurtz over at the National Review…

Stanley Kurtz being the guy who doctored up marriage statistics from Scandiavian countries so he could claim that legal same-sex marriage resulted in the decline of heterosexual marriages and that children were being raised mostly by unmarried parents now.  Over at Slate, associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and research director of the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies, M. V. Lee Badgett shows how Kurtz did it…

Despite what Kurtz might say, the apocalypse has not yet arrived. In fact, the numbers show that heterosexual marriage looks pretty healthy in Scandinavia, where same-sex couples have had rights the longest. In Denmark, for example, the marriage rate had been declining for a half-century but turned around in the early 1980s. After the 1989 passage of the registered-partner law, the marriage rate continued to climb; Danish heterosexual marriage rates are now the highest they’ve been since the early 1970’s. And the most recent marriage rates in Sweden, Norway, and Iceland are all higher than the rates for the years before the partner laws were passed. Furthermore, in the 1990s, divorce rates in Scandinavia remained basically unchanged.

Of course, the good news about marriage rates is bad news for Kurtz’s sky-is-falling argument. So, Kurtz instead focuses on the increasing tendency in Europe for couples to have children out of wedlock. Gay marriage, he argues, is a wedge that is prying marriage and parenthood apart.

The main evidence Kurtz points to is the increase in cohabitation rates among unmarried heterosexual couples and the increase in births to unmarried mothers. Roughly half of all children in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are now born to unmarried parents. In Denmark, the number of cohabiting couples with children rose by 25 percent in the 1990s. From these statistics Kurtz concludes that " … married parenthood has become a minority phenomenon," and—surprise—he blames gay marriage.

But Kurtz’s interpretation of the statistics is incorrect. Parenthood within marriage is still the norm—most cohabitating couples marry after they start having children. In Sweden, for instance, 70 percent of cohabiters wed after their first child is born. Indeed, in Scandinavia the majority of families with children are headed by married parents. In Denmark and Norway, roughly four out of five couples with children were married in 2003. In the Netherlands, a bit south of Scandinavia, 90 percent of heterosexual couples with kids are married.

That’s a higher rate then some states here in America.  Mostly bible belt states.  But look at this.  First Kurtz gerrymanders the marriage statistics in Scandinavia by including time frames when it was declining Prior to the passage of same sex civil unions, to prove that those civil unions had an adverse affect on heterosexual marriage.  In fact, after civil unions passed heterosexual marriage rates Improved.  But that wasn’t enough.  Kurtz also pointed out the fact that many heterosexual couples have their first kid out of wedlock, deliberately omitting the fact that they almost always marry afterward, in order to lead people to believe that there was some sort of massive population of kids living with unmarried parents in Scandinavia now.  That this conclusion is absolutely false, that you can only arrive at it by concealing the fact that most parents do in fact marry after their child is born, mattered nothing to Kurtz.  He had something to prove, and damn the evidence.  This is what passes for virtue and morality among social conservatives.

Now he’s peddling the Obama is a marxist and/or muslim terrorist claptrap.  How…unsurprising…