A new study by a Spanish gay rights group reports that about 10,000 gay marriages have taken place since Spain legalized gay marriage in 2007.
Spain has about 30 million people in 2008 over the age of 15. If 3 percent of the population is homosexual, that would be about 900,000 gay and lesbian adults. So 20,000 gay people have chosen to marry so far -- about 2 percent of gay adults. Why so few?
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I know. It is because the institution of marriage is just not for the homosexual lifestyle. Marriage is about a lifetime commitment for the purpose of establishing a family environment to raise whatever children come from the union between men and women. Homosexuality just doesn't cover that. This is why marriage has been established in the first place since before recorded history across countless civilizations and societies.
Redefining marriage goes way beyond equality and tolerance for homosexuals. It is about the government backed approval and promotion of that lifestyle. Make no mistake.
It doesn't appear that heterosexuals marry at a much higher rate though - only 3%. Unless you start counting all the second and third marriages, and those aren't actually valid.
The US marriage rate is about 2 million a year (4 million people), so in 2007-2009 about 12 million got married. Out of a U.S. population of 300 million, that's only about 4%. I don't see much difference.
It's more than that. Why would anyone rush into a lite-time commitment when so many marriages fail?
It's always better to date a while, then take the relationship in stages, regarding each level of commitment as as a relationship in it's own right.
The first full year after the SSM merger with marriage in Spain was 2006; the merger was legislated in mid-2005.
The actual demand for one-sexed union (aka SSM) in Spain is reflected in the partipation rate which continues to be low and unsteady. Spain exports SSM through nonresident SSMs.
Meanwhile, the Spanish partipation rate in new unions of husband and wife (aka marriage) have been in a steady decline. This is the far more important participation rate.
The number of new (husband-wife) marriages has dropped by 34,700 since 2006; that's a decline of nearly 17% or more than 4% per year.
By comparison, the participation rate in marriage declined across Europe by about 24% since 1980. Spain is now rapidly catching up.
Spain has exprienced a prolonged and steady decline in the number of marriages annually, but that decline had stopped in the mid and late 1990s.
The SSM campaign accelerated in the early 2000s and the decline in marriage resumed apace. There is a correlation that SSMers glibbly dismiss by declaring that "correlation is not causation".
The original blopost asks a good question: why the low participation rates in SSM in Spain? The SSM campaign claimed there was a heavy demand just bursting to be fulfilled. And then there was the claim that the merger would strengthen marriage in that country. Both claims seem not to have been realized. Quite the opposite.
"The US marriage rate is about 2 million a year (4 million people), so in 2007-2009 about 12 million got married. Out of a U.S. population of 300 million, that's only about 4%. I don't see much difference."
You're not excluding those under the age of 18 years of age or those who are already married out of those 300 million. If you did, the percentage would be much higher.
ConservativeNY, that is a good point. Remember that the absolute number of new marriages is not a rate, but a count.
The marriage rate can be calculated in various ways. The crude rate is the ratio of the number of marriages to the number of people of legal age to marry. Sometimes you will see this ratio in terms of total population; sometimes in terms of the female population of childbearing age (15 to 45 years is the typical bracket).
To compare with SSM, we could use the Human Rights Campaign's estimate that 5% of the adult population is homosexual (they used that estimate in the own review of the Census on same-sex households) rather than the lower 3% estimate that sometimes is used by political activists to move ratios closer to those of the rest of the population.
It would make some good sense to compare first-time marriage rates -- husband and wife unions in which at least one of the spouses enters his or her first marriage -- with first-time same-sex union rates (or with the overall same-sex union rates to make it easier). In surveys of people in same-sex unions (SSM or civil union or whatever form of registered partnership), more than half of the participants had been previously married (i.e. married to the other sex), and so first-time rates of union would also shine a different light on the picture.
Food for thought.