Maybe right-wingers can find space on their bookshelf to squeeze in a copy of a new UNICEF study on child welfare in wealthy countries. It might make a nice contrast to books on Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle and creation science already in their collections.
The UNICEF report attacks head on a long-cherished notion linking traditional marriage and raising children. The study finds that in nations like Netherlands, Sweden, Demark and Finland have the best record when it comes to child issues such as infant mortality, whether children ate dinner with their parents or were bullied at school. At the bottom were the United States and its stanch ally in the War on Terror, Great Britain.
These findings contradict what the right has been saying for years about marriage. Consider this from Fox News commentator, Bill O'Reilly:
"They did a sociological study in Sweden that said that marriage between men and women declined drastically since gay marriage was legalized there. And now up to, I don't know, 60, 65 percent of all Swedes are not married. So the institution of marriage, basically, in that country collapsed, because there was no tradition to it."
The new study contradicts what O'Reilly was saying. Of course, the study O'Reilly was referencing also contradicted what O'Reilly was saying:
The long-term trend in Scandinavia has been lower marriage rates, higher divorce rates, and higher rates of non-marital births. This has been a trend lasting at least two generations -- long predating registered partnership laws adopted in 1989 (Denmark) and 1994 (Sweden). The trend has mainly been cultural and social. To the extent that law has made a difference, one would expect the liberalization of alternatives (cohabitation) and exit (no-fault divorce) to be the key legal developments contributing to these changes in marriage and divorce rates. - William Eskridge, Darren Spedale and Hans Ytterberg in the journal Issues in Legal Scholarship.
The new study says that the US and Great Britain's poor showing can be attributed to economic inequality:
"What they have in common are very high levels of inequality, very high levels of child poverty, which is also associated with inequality, and in rather different ways poorly developed services to families with children," said Jonathan Bradshaw one of the authors of the study and professor of social policy at the University of York in Britain.
So in the US at least, the damage caused by President Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy has far outweighed any improvements to children's lives that could have been expected under the federal Defense of Marriage Act.
Such an outcome shouldn't be surprising. Another new study shows that, while Americans have improved their understanding of scientific precepts there has also been a growth in US fascination with pseudoscience. According to Jon D. Miller, a Michigan State University professor, the improvement in scientific understanding reflects a requirement that all college students have at least some science courses.
But at the same time the number of people who believe in evolution is on the wane; and the number of those who believe that humans were created about 10,000 years ago is on the rise.
These findings reflect the ongoing campaign by social conservatives to argue that Darwin's Theory of Evolution is still up for serious scientific debate at this late date. It's the same sort of mindset that allows people to believe in alien abductions and the Loch Ness monster.
And it is the same sort of belief system that allows people to believe that traditional marriage is the only thing that matters in determining the quality of a child's life.