FOR QUITE A FEW YEARS, the rallying cry of those attempting to prevent marriage equality has been that allowing gay marriage will undermine traditional family values. If this is true, traditional family values should be showing substantially frayed edges in Massachusetts, where gay marriages have been taking place for over five years. Now that nearly every New England state has formally recognized gay marriage, you should expect to see evidence of family values disintegrating all over the northeast.
My dictionary defines traditional family values as “values especially of a traditional or conservative kind which are held to promote the sound functioning of the family and to strengthen the fabric of society.” The epicenter of the “sound functioning of the family” is the marriage bond, so it is the basic spousal unit that logically should feel the impact and show the damage resulting from gay marriage. The divorce rate therefore should be one of the most substantial indicators of gay marriage’s destructive force.
Compare these statistics with the divorce rates reported in places that do not have same-sex marriage, especially those states that have codified a ban on such marriages. Mississippi, for instance, has a divorce rate of 4.5 per thousand, higher than the national average and more than twice that of Massachusetts. Utah’s is 4.0, and California, which immediately overturned its momentary acceptance of gay marriage, has a recent divorce rate of 4.3. In the South, “red” home states of traditional Christian conservative family values have some of the highest divorce rates anywhere. Alabama’s divorce rate is 4.9, Arkansas’ is 6.0, Florida’s is 4.6, Arizona’s is 4.1 , Kentucky’s is 4.5, and Tennessee’s is 4.6. All of these states ban gay marriage. While not every state’s individual statistics fall within this pattern, the highest divorce rates are found in the states with constitutional and statutory bans on gay marriage, and the lowest rates are found among the states that have granted marriage rights to their gay citizens. The states that have gilded their discriminatory laws with the allowance of some form of domestic partnership benefits fall in between. So what can explain the fact that the states with gay marriage have stronger family bonds than those that have refused to grant marriage equality? Perhaps the answer lies in another common thread running through the states which recognize same-sex marriage: their citizens appear to be smarter than those in the anti-marriage equality states, or at least better educated. According to the Education State Rankings 2008-2009 published by CQ Press (2009), the four smartest states in the U.S. are, in order, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Jersey, and Connecticut, all of which recognize the legitimacy of same sex marriages or at least (in the case of New Jersey) civil unions. The evidence is in: the smartest people hold the values that really hold families together, and that includes the value of marriage equality. The convergence of these statistics is remarkably revealing. If you make an overall comparison between the 2004-2005 educational rankings for states and the current list of the smartest states, another general trend emerges: the majority of the states with bans on gay marriage are slipping educationally, and those that have refused to codify homophobia are becoming even smarter. The four smartest states in 2008-2009 have held that distinction since gay marriage was first enacted in Massachusetts in 2004, albeit in a different order. Seven of the top ten states educationally have recognized some form of marriage rights for their gay citizens—and these states have generally moved up in the educational pecking order over the past five years. One of the states taking the biggest leap forward was Rhode Island, which was 23rd in 2004-2005 and made it all the way to fourteenth place in 2006-2007, the year its Attorney General issued an opinion recognizing gay marriages performed in Massachusetts (it is still fourteenth). Maine was eleventh in 2004-2005 but moved into fifth place the following year after initiating a domestic partnership law, and has remained in the top ten since doing so. All but one of the states that rank at the bottom ten educationally have passed statutes or constitutional amendments banning gay marriage. The exception is New Mexico, which has neither legalized same-sex marriage (or equivalent status) nor passed any new law expressly banning it. All but one of these states have either stayed the same in ranking since 2004-2005 or have lost educational ground. New Mexico, which was ranked fiftieth in 2004-2005, is now ranked at 47th. The reason for these parallel trends might not be immediately apparent, but it does make sense. You would think that legislators and policy-makers in Utah, for instance (28th educationally before its gay marriage ban, now 33; divorce rate 4.0) would be more concerned with how poorly their children are being taught to read, write, and think than with preventing people from getting married. You might expect that they would place more value on keeping families intact than on promoting homophobia. But, then again, most of those same legislators and policy-makers probably went to school in Utah. If they didn’t learn about civil rights, history, separation of church and state, or the rest of the Constitution as students, they are in all likelihood poorly equipped to pass effective legislation on educational policy or to favor boosting state aid to education. Nor are they likely to be able to think through the interconnection between strong families and their state’s high divorce rate, not to mention its ban on gay marriage. Alas, logic does not appear to factor into the way they see family values. Poor education breeds a lack of critical thinking, which in turn leads to unthinking acceptance of unsubstantiated, inflammatory, homophobic rhetoric. The cycle continues. The fact that families are strongest where gay marriage is recognized is a bitter pill for conservatives to swallow. Focus on the Family’s website offers various rationalizations for the divorce data, but even they accept them as true. Since they don’t care for the implications of these statistics, they shift attention by pointing out that the Northeast is a more affluent area of the country and people there tend be older when they marry for the first time, both factors that contribute to marital success. But they once again miss the point: the northeast is wealthier and more stable precisely because its focus is on such social values as education and equal protection under the law for all marriages. People who have a strong educational background and abundant opportunities tend to delay marriage until they’ve completed college or finished an advanced degree. People who achieve higher levels of education are more likely to obtain higher paying work. And people with a good education and higher paying work are more likely to understand discrimination for what it is. Non-discriminatory family values pay off in economic terms as well as in terms of family stability. Unfortunately for Focus on the Family, the fact that the Bible Belt states have higher levels of poverty and earlier marriages does not excuse their divorce rates; rather, these facts demonstrate that these states do not promote family values effectively through sound education and economic policies. The lack of marriage stability in these states proves that pushing a discriminatory agenda under any guise, even a religious one, does not actually help families at all, especially those families most likely to heed this message. You can argue about the definition of “family values,” but it is indisputable that those values that are actually responsible for keeping families intact are found in greatest abundance in the states that have recognized gay marriage, which also happen to be the most educationally advanced states in the country. The rhetoric about gay marriage threatening family values does not stand up to scrutiny and has not held up under the test of time. The numbers speak for themselves. 
It turns out that family values have not come apart at the seams since same-sex marriage came to Massachusetts. Even more surprising and intriguing is the fact that gay marriage and strong families actually go statistically hand in hand. The states that recognize gay marriage have some of the highest rates of family stability. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2008, Massachusetts has one of the lowest divorce rates in the country. The Abstract lists the United States’ national divorce rate as 3.6 per thousand citizens; Massachusetts’ rate is only 2.2. Other states that have legalized same-sex marriage more recently have similarly low divorce rates, suggesting that states where marriage as an institution is the strongest are the ones most likely to accept same-sex marriage. Connecticut’s rate is 2.7, Vermont and New Hampshire each has a rate of 3.3 divorces per thousand, and Maine has 3.5. Iowa, another state to grant marriage equality to its gay citizens, has a divorce rate of 2.7. Rhode Island, which does not perform gay marriages but recognizes those performed elsewhere, has a divorce rate of 2.9. New Jersey, which adopted civil unions in 2006 and also recognizes gay marriages performed elsewhere, is close behind with a rate of 2.9.
On the other hand, one of the largest drops in smartness was New York, which managed to fall from sixth place in 2004-2005 to sixteenth in the year its Court of Appeals denied equal marriage rights to its gay citizens. Since then, New York has joined New Jersey in recognizing gay marriages that take place in other states and has begun to recover the educational ground it lost, climbing to number thirteen. After anti-gay marriage sentiment was spun into political gold in the election of 2004, a number of the states taking that opportunity to pass constitutional bans on same-sex marriage have experienced a downward educational slide: Ohio fell from twentieth to 31st, Mississippi went from 47th to 48th (it is now fiftieth), Oregon dropped from 35th to 38th, and Georgia slipped from 38th to 40th.
