Brownback Flubs in Use of Gay Marriage Stats

By Blair Boyd and David Albrecht

Is there a relationship between gay marriage laws and out-of-wedlock births? Senator Sam Brownback says yes. Further research brings his claim into question.

At the Republican Party Presidential Primary Debate, Senator Sam Brownback addressed issues dealing with family values and structures. He discussed Northern European countries that are accepting same-sex marriage as a part of a changing culture. Brownback then made the following argument:

“… the marriage rates in those [nations] have plummeted to where you have ounties now in northern Europe where 80 percent of the first-born children are born out of wedlock.”

This was not the first time that Senator Brownback had used this statistic. His remarks on the U.S. Senate floor in June 2006 contained the same argument, including the exact same statistic.

“You have counties in Norway where over 80 percent of the first-born children are born out of wedlock and two-thirds of the second children are. The institution no longer means much of anything. It is defined away.”

Senator Brownback is citing a specific county in Norway, a nation that he claims has redefined marriage. In the quote at the Republican Presidential Primary Debate, he instead uses the phrase “counties in northern Europe,” making the claim more broad, instead of one specific county in a particular nation.

Senator Brownback also uses the idea “redefined” when speaking about nations in northern Europe where births out of wedlock have increased. Yet, the county from which this favored statistic (the “80 percent” increase) comes is in Norway, a country where same sex marriage is actually illegal. Norway has accepted the idea of civil unions, which are registered partnerships. However, individuals joined in civil unions are not defined as part of a same-sex marriage. Brownback’s “redefined” terminology implies that Norway has changed the law to accept same sex marriage.

So is it the case that there is a relationship between definitions of marriage and out-of-wedlock births? The evidence for this claim is less than clear. A discussion of the research on this question can be found in the Washington Post’s Fact Checker column here. The basic finding is this: out-of-wedlock births have increased in places like Holland, for example, that have recently moved to accept domestic partnerships. But other nations that made the same move at the same time (Sweden and Denmark, for example) have seen no increase in the rate of out-of-wedlock births. In fact, rates of out-of-wedlock births in Europe began to rise before contemporary debates in these nations about same sex marriage.

Lesson: Senator Brownback took a limited statistic and generalized it to a larger population of Europeans. His choice of words communicated the idea that the increase in out-of-wedlock births is prevalent in northern Europe, when in fact it is not. Brownback’s key statistic, one he used repeatedly, comes from a nation where civil unions (but not same-sex marriages) are legal.