Why So Few?--Looking at what we know about same-sex marriage.

Why have so few gays chosen to marry? A new study by Maggie Gallagher’s Institute for Marriage and Public Policy (iMAPP) estimates that, in countries that legally recognize same-sex unions, typically between 1 percent and 5 percent of gays and lesbians have entered into a same-sex marriage. Obviously, that is a very low number. Much of the argument for gay marriage turns on the claim that same-sex couples need the cultural, legal, and economic benefits of marriage. Yet if only a small number of gays actually marry, the practical impact of the change on gays themselves would be minimal.

The fundamental purpose of marriage is to encourage mothers and fathers to maintain stable families for the children they create. It would be a mistake to undercut that purpose by redefining marriage, whatever the take-up rate for same-sex unions. Yet, for those receptive to arguments for same-sex marriage, the case for this reform would be greatly weakened if it turned out that only a few gays actually marry.

And there’s more at stake than numbers. Since the “conservative case” for same-sex marriage holds that marriage will import a more conservative ethos to the gay community, we need to know something besides how many same-sex couples actually marry. If substantial numbers of gay couples take advantage of the legal benefits of marriage, while simultaneously rejecting traditional marital norms (like monogamy), that would greatly weaken the “conservative case” for same-sex marriage.

Despite the few short years formal same-sex marriage has been available, we can now offer some preliminary answers to questions about why so few gays marry, and how those gays who have married understand their unions. The iMAPP study covered only countries that have formal same-sex marriage, with data going back, at most, five years (for the Netherlands). Yet a turn to Scandinavia provides a fuller story. A series of recent empirical studies on Scandinavian registered partnerships have made available a fascinating body of data about a same-sex partnership system that has been in existence for 17 years in Denmark, 13 years in Norway, and 12 years in Sweden (19 years if we go back to the same-sex unions Sweden created in 1987).

The new studies show that after nearly two decades of Scandinavian registered partnerships, only a very small number of gays have actually entered legal unions. And there are clear indications are that even many couples who have registered may be doing so more for legal benefits than because they aspire to traditional marital norms. In short, there are now clear signs that same-sex marriage is not working the way its defenders claim it should, even for gays.

De Facto Marriage
Before turning to the new Scandinavian studies, we need to consider an obvious objection. Scandinavian same-sex unions are “registered partnerships,” not “marriage.” Presumably, the iMAPP study excluded data on take-up rates for Scandinavian same-sex unions because they were not formal “marriage.” Yet there is good reason to believe that take-up rates for Scandinavian registered partnerships are not substantially different than they would be for formal marriage.

The title of an important new study by prominent Scandinavian demographers, Gunnar Andersson, Turid Noack (and associates) tells the tale: “The Demographics of Same-Sex Marriages in Norway and Sweden.”

Andersson and Noack use the terms “registered partnership” and “same-sex marriage” interchangeably, explaining that Scandinavians generally see registered partnerships as a de facto form of marriage. To be sure, in addition to their unions being called something other than “marriage,” Scandinavian registered partners were initially not permitted to adopt children, to receive state funded artificial insemination, or to be married in the state church. (Many of those differences have now fallen away, especially in Sweden and Denmark.) Yet few Scandinavian gays and lesbians consider these exclusions barriers to registration.

Along with the work of Andersson and Noack, a recent book by William Eskridge and Darren Spedale, Gay Marriage: For Better or for Worse? sheds light on Scandinavian registered partnerships. Eskridge and Spedale criticize me in their book, and I’ve responded to them in “No Nordic Bliss,” “Zombie Killers,” and “Smoking Gun.” Certainly, I find the rosy picture of Scandinavian registered partnerships painted by Eskridge and Spedale unconvincing and incomplete. Notwithstanding my objections to their broader approach, however, Eskridge and Spedale provide us with some fascinating material. And one point they make convincingly is that the differences between registered partnerships and formal same-sex marriage do not account for the low take-up rate.

In their conversations with registered partners, and in an online survey of 812 Danish gays and lesbians, Eskridge and Spedale found that most gay Danes consider registered partnerships and marriage to be “about the same thing.” Words like “marriage” and “spouse” are frequently used to describe the relationship of registered partners. And very few respondents said they would be any more likely to enter a union if “partnerships” were converted to formal “marriage.” Eskridge and Spedale note that the lifting of adoption restrictions in Sweden and Denmark has had no discernable effect on partnership registration rates.

The experience of the Netherlands with a system of registered partnerships also suggests that take-up rates for such an institution do not substantially differ from rates of same-sex marriage. After an initial surge of 3,010 Dutch same-sex partnership registrations during the first year of availability in 1998, registrations leveled off to 1,757 in 1999 and 1,600 in 2000. When Dutch same-sex marriage came into effect in 2001, there was an initial surge of 2,414 marriages (many converted from prior registered partnerships), followed by a leveling off to 1,838 in 2002, 1,499 in 2003, 1,210 in 2004, and 1,166 in 2005. So in both the initial surge pattern, and in absolute amounts, the take-up rates, first for Dutch registered partnerships and then for Dutch same-sex marriage, have been about the same. If anything, the Dutch same-sex marriage rate is down somewhat from the earlier rates of registered partnerships.

In short (and following Andersson, Noack, Eskridge, and Spedale), it seems perfectly fair to take the nearly two-decade-long experience of Scandinavia with same-sex registered partnerships as a rough approximation of what take-up rates would have been had full and formal gay marriage been in effect during the same period.

Very Low Numbers
According to Andersson and Noack, the incidence of same-sex marriage in Norway and Sweden is “not particularly impressive.” As Eskridge and Spedale put it, the number of same-sex couples in legal unions is “at best, modest.” Given the numbers, even these characterizations border on understatement. Andersson and Noack’s data on Norway run from 1993 through 2001. In that time, a mere1,293 same-sex partnerships were contracted. During the same period, 196,000 heterosexual marriages were entered into in Norway. That indicates a ratio of about 7 new same-sex marriages for every 1,000 new opposite-sex marriages. The Swedish numbers are starker still. Andersson and Noack show a mere 1,526 same-sex partnerships registered in Sweden between 1995 and 2002. Given the 280,000 heterosexual marriages recorded during the same period, we are talking about 5 same-sex partnerships per thousand heterosexual marriages. These ratios of same-sex partnerships to opposite-sex marriages are considerably lower than various estimates of the proportion of gays in the population.

These comparisons are important, because one of the key objections to the iMAPP study was that it did not offer a clear juxtaposition of the yearly marriage rates of heterosexuals and homosexuals. Drawing on comments by UCLA demographer, Gary Gates, same-sex marriage advocate Jonathan Rauch argued that it was unfair to compare the small percentage of gays who had married in just a few years (in, say, the Netherlands) with the massive accumulated number of heterosexual marriages contracted over decades. Yet the Andersson-Noack study does give us a comparison of yearly marriage rates between heterosexuals and homosexuals, and the results continue to show a strikingly low rate of same-sex marriage.

In fact, the differences are larger than the numbers indicate. In a response to Rauch, Maggie Gallagher noted that comparisons of yearly marriage rates have their own drawbacks. After all, said Gallagher, since gays start out with 0 percent married, you would expect them to get married at a higher yearly rate than heterosexuals, many of whom are already “taken.” Given that, the striking discrepancies in yearly marriage rates between Scandinavian heterosexuals and homosexuals are all the more impressive.

Any way you slice it–whether as a proportion of the total gay population, or as a likelihood of getting married in any given year–Scandinavian gays are far less likely to get married than heterosexuals. In contrast to Andersson and Noack’s yearly-marriage-rate comparison, Eskridge and Spedale offer an estimate of married gays as a proportion of the total gay population. Using estimates of the gay population ranging from 1 percent to 5 percent of national populations, Eskridge and Spedale say that anywhere from less than 10 percent (they don’t give an actual figure) to less than 1 percent of Scandinavian gays have taken advantage of registered partnerships.

For the BenEFITS
So the numbers of Scandinavian gays actually getting married are very low. But that’s only the beginning. What proportion of the already very small number of Scandinavian registered partners enter their unions with what we might call a reasonably “conservative” attitude? The answer is uncertain, yet there are strong indications that, despite the tendency to call these unions “marriage,” a great many registered partners have decidedly untraditional views about what their unions entail.

In that online survey of 812 Danish gays and lesbians run by Eskridge and Spedale, 49 percent of respondents claimed that their “primary” reason for entering into a registered partnerships was, or would be, to secure the legal rights of marriage. Only around 41 percent said that demonstrating their commitment to their partner or their community was, or would be, their chief motivation for registering. We don’t have results for a comparable heterosexual population, yet it’s striking that so many Danish gays see partnership as chiefly a matter of legal benefits. It seems unlikely that half of heterosexuals would say that securing legal benefits was their “primary” reason for getting married. At any rate, that sort of response from heterosexuals would indicate a significant hollowing out of marriage.

The reported focus of Danish gays on the legal benefits of marriage, rather than on the relationship, tells us something meaningful. As an explanation for low European take-up rates, University of Minnesota professor of law and same-sex marriage advocate Dale Carpenter notes that many gays take an “oppositional” stance toward social convention. “Just give us the benefits of marriage and you can keep the word,” is one way Carpenter describes that oppositional attitude. In her 1999 study, From This Day Forward, sociologist Gretchen Stiers found that even many of those American gays and lesbians who actually disdain traditional marriage (and even gay commitment ceremonies) might possibly get legally married. Why? For “the bennies”–the financial and legal benefits of marriage. So gay couples with an interest in the legal benefits of marriage can have a decidedly unconservative view of the institution itself. Returning to Denmark, the fact that fully half of those gays surveyed said benefits were their “primary” reason for marrying suggests that the number of Danish registered partners with a “conservative” attitude toward their unions may be far smaller than the already minimal partnership registration numbers would indicate.

To a degree, Eskridge and Spedale concede this. Same-sex couples approach legal union “with more pragmatism than their heterosexual counterparts,” they say. Even the couple Eskridge and Spedale select as their demographically “typical” registered partners saw no reason to register for years, until concerns about death benefits that made them change their minds. At that point, this typical registered couple, like many others, told no one about their registration, so as to avoid a wedding ceremony altogether.

Immigration Marriages

The pragmatic cast of Scandinavian same-sex unions likely goes further still. While half of Scandinavian partners say they marry chiefly for the benefits, as many as one third of Scandinavian partners likely have a very specific benefit in mind. Around one third of Scandinavian registered partnerships involve a foreign-born member. The numbers are particularly striking for men. In Norway, 43 percent of male partnerships include a non-Norwegian citizen. In Sweden, the figure is 45 percent. Many of these cross-national unions are with non-Europeans.

This huge disproportion of dual-nationality unions suggests that many Scandinavian same-sex couples have married chiefly to facilitate immigration. Andersson and Noack clearly recognize this phenomenon. Eskridge and Spedale downplay it. They call immigration rights “only the tip of the iceberg” when it comes to the benefits of same-sex unions. Yet the numbers say that unions contracted primarily for immigration purposes probably represent, not merely the tip, but a huge part of the base of the iceberg. This suggests that, among the already extremely small number of Scandinavian same-sex partnerships, a far smaller number are undertaken for anything like “conservative” reasons.

So after an experiment in same-sex marriage that has lasted between one and two decades, Scandinavian marriage rates are still exceedingly low. As many as half of all partnerships may be undertaken primarily for legal benefits, and only secondarily, if at all, out of a “conservative” attitude toward union formalization. About a third of all same-sex unions involve non-citizens, often from non-European countries. Many of these partnerships would likely not have been entered at all were it not for the immigration rights.

In short, if registered partnerships were designed to bring a more stable and conservative family ethos to Scandinavia’s gays, far too few have married for this to have happened. And the actual attitudes of Scandinavian gays toward their marriages may be even less conservative than the numbers we’ve seen so far indicate. In Part II of “Why So Few?” we’ll see why.

—Stanley Kurtz is a fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Although de facto gay marriage has been available in Scandinavia for well over a decade, very few same-sex couples have chosen to marry. Given the fact that they are starting from 0 percent married, you might expect Scandinavian gays to get hitched at a fairly high rate. In fact, they marry at a very low rate. Relatively few of the very small number of Scandinavian gay marriages that actually do take place seem to be motivated by “conservative” considerations. As many as half of Scandinavian same-sex partnership registrations appear to be driven by a largely instrumental interest in legal benefits, particularly immigration benefits. Nearly a third of Scandinavian registered partnerships involve a non-citizen, many from outside Europe. This is what we learned in Part I of “Why So Few?” Here in Part II, we’ll find out more about why so few Scandinavian gays have chosen to marry.

Cruising to familyland
The extraordinarily high rate of cross-national marriages by gay Scandinavian men (43 percent of male registered partnerships in Norway and 45 percent of male registered partnerships in Sweden) calls for closer consideration. You might think lesbians would be more likely to marry than gay men. Yet in Scandinavia it’s been quite the reverse. Gays are significantly more likely to form partnerships than lesbians. The high rate of international marriages among men seems to be the reason.

We also find substantial age differences between same-sex partners, more so than in opposite-sex marriages, and substantially more so among gay partners than among lesbians. Around one third of male partnerships in Sweden and Norway were formed by men with an age difference of ten years or more. Cross-national marriages and marriages with high age differences are commonly more subject to divorce. This may help explain why divorce risk for Scandinavian male partnerships is 50 percent higher than for heterosexual marriages. (Divorce risk for lesbian partnerships in Scandinavia is far higher than the already high divorce risk for male partnerships. But that’s another story.)

So among the very few Scandinavian gay men who do marry, one of the most popular reasons seems to be to facilitate the immigration of a much younger, foreign partner. In their book Gay Marriage: For Better or for Worse?, William Eskridge and Darren Spedale draw on interviews with 24 carefully selected registered couples. A few of these pairings are cross-national: For example, a female American Ph.D. on a Fulbright scholarship in Denmark meets and marries a Dane. Yet nowhere do we see clear examples of the more typical sort of union suggested by the numbers: older gay men who have entered partnerships with much younger, non-European foreigners to facilitate their immigration to Scandinavia.

While Eskridge and Spedale downplay this trend within Scandinavian partnerships, unions between older gay men and younger Third World immigrants are the focus of “Cruising to Familyland: Gay Hypergamy and Rainbow Kinship,” a March 2004 article by Judith Stacey in Current Sociology. Stacey is a prominent family sociologist with radical leanings. (For more on Stacey, see my “Zombie Killers.”)

While Stacey is a strong proponent of same-sex marriage, her feminism makes her unfriendly to marriage itself. Stacey’s hope is that gay marriage will help to undermine marriage from within. One of the ways Stacey hopes this might happen involves unions between older gay men and younger immigrants.

Stacey studied gay male unions in Los Angeles, a metropolis Stacey says is linked into an international gay “cruising” culture of recreational sex. According to Stacey, cruising culture “disrupts conventional family norms and practices.” While the majority of such encounters may be fleeting and anonymous, Stacey notes that the sheer volume of sexual contacts creates opportunities to form unconventional unions that affirm “the distinctive character of non-heterosexual family and kinship.” Chief among these unconventional family forms is something Stacey calls “gay hypergamy,” meaning the tendency to “marry up” through “an exchange of beauty and youth for cultural status and material resources.” Stacey gives numerous examples of relatively poor, young third-world immigrants who draw on the cultural and material resources of successful older gay American men, to illustrate her point.

Some of the “hypergamous” unions that come out of cruising culture can be completely monogamous. Yet Stacey notes that many such unions are not. Cruising culture, says Stacey, “directly challenges norms of heteronormativity and monogamy, and often leads to unions that are sexually open, or that involve multiple partnerships. For Stacey, the hypergamous and non-monogamous groupings that grow out of cruising culture are a hopeful sign that a freer form of family-life may emerge out of experiments with same-sex unions.

Does the large number of “hypergamous” international parings among Scandinavian registered partnerships mean that these unions have preserved the non-monogamous ethos of “cruising culture?” It’s tough to say without further research, but there are certainly indications. Stacey’s own account makes reference to cruising culture as a way of linking American gays with guest workers in Europe. And while Eskridge and Spedale offer no sense of numbers or proportions, they acknowledge that a number of the partnered gay men they spoke with had sexually open marriages. Eskridge and Spedale call these open marriages “something of an advance over the 20th-century marital norm of repeated, but secret, cheating.” They also stress the fact that partnership has increased safe-sex practices among non-monogamous married gay couples. Yet this touting of open marriage simply confirms concerns that sexually open gay marriages might undermine traditional marital norms.

Given what we know, it seems likely that something similar to what Stacey describes for Los Angeles may be playing out in Scandinavia as well. In any case, the question of hypergamous gay unions, monogamy, and cruising culture is an obvious lacuna in the work of Eskridge and Spedale. The effect of same-sex unions on the monogamous ethos of marriage is a central question in the gay-marriage debate and needs to be addressed more directly.

Formerly Married
Given the very small number of same-sex partnerships, the focus of many of those unions on benefits, the widespread use of same-sex marriage for immigration purposes, and the likely persistence of a non-monogamous ethos in many gay unions, one begins to wonder if any Scandinavian same-sex couples at all think about their unions in a “conservative” mode. Actually, there is one sub-group that may do so.

A high proportion of Scandinavian registered partners come from a previous heterosexual marriage. In Norway, 15 percent of male registered partnerships and 26 percent of all female registered partnerships have at least one member who has previously been in a heterosexual marriage. In Sweden, the numbers are 20 percent for men and 27 percent for women.

Eskridge and Spedale suggest that these men and women likely had a conservative upbringing, leaving them prone to reject their homosexual feelings early in life. Bowing to social pressure, they entered heterosexual marriages, against the pull of their own sexual tendencies. If Eskridge and Spedale are right, it suggests that, in a generation, same-sex-marriage rates may actually move down, rather than up. If nearly a quarter of the already very small number of registered partners are cultural hangovers from a socially conservative era rapidly disappearing in Scandinavia, then one expects fewer such recruits to partnership in the future. True, the numbers of Scandinavian registered partners are slowly moving up right now, although the absolute levels are still spectacularly low. Yet a significant portion of newly registered partners look like former spouses from heterosexual marriages (with conservative backgrounds) who have since decided they are gay. If so, then Scandinavian same-sex unions are being sustained less by a growing marriage culture among gays, than by the remnants of a weakening traditionalist culture among straights.

Patriarchy
Let’s return to our underlying question. Why so few gay marriages in Scandinavia? We’ve already seen (in Part I) that the differences between marriage and registered partnerships cannot account for the low take-up rate. Yet Eskridge and Spedale explore several other possible reasons. One important explanation is that many gay couples remain reluctant come “out of the closet.”

This undoubtedly helps explain the low take-up rate, although one wonders whether the situation will ever entirely change. Even if traditional religious attitudes about homosexuality entirely disappeared, life would still put unique pressures on gays. The illusion of the gay-marriage movement is that the deeper challenges faced by gays are rooted in the deprivation of marriage. In truth, marriage has neither caused, nor can it solve, the problem. Anyone whose sexuality is substantially different from the vast majority of people around them is going to face serious difficulties and life-challenges. So a reluctance to undertake public partnerships is likely to remain a permanent factor limiting the number of same-sex marriages.

Another explanation for the small number of Scandinavian marriages is the refusal of lesbian feminists to enter this “patriarchal” institution. Grudgingly, Eskridge and Spedale concede that this may be a factor in low take-up rates. To counter the point, however, they tell the story of a radical lesbian who once opposed gay marriage, yet eventually withdrew her opposition when she realized the potential economic benefits of marriage to her partner. Of course, that only drives home the point that many Scandinavian gays and lesbians marry, if at all, more for benefits than out of traditionalist motives.

Failed experiment
Radical feminist objections to what is seen as an outdated and oppressive patriarchal institution are only part of the story. As Eskridge and Spedale concede, Scandinavia’s gays are simply less likely to be in a committed long-term relationship than their straight counterparts. Advocates of the “conservative case” for gay marriage attribute this difference to a lack of pre-existing models of committed same-sex relationships, and the related lack of social pressure to marry. After the iMAPP report on low gay-marriage rates in Europe appeared (see Part I), these advocates assured us that, given time, the marriage numbers would go up. Gay-marriage advocate Paul Varnell said it would take 15 to 20 years for generational change to work its magic. Well, we’ve had 15 to 20 years in Scandinavia, and the same-sex marriage numbers are still minuscule. Now we’re being asked for another 15 or 20 years, by which time of course it will be too late to undo the “experiment.” The “conservative case” for same-sex marriage has always depended on the claim that failed experiments could be taken back. Yet the requirement that we wait generations to see if the experiments are a success makes nonsense of the promised revocation option.

The truth is that the inherent strains of being a sexual minority make large-scale adoption of conventional marital norms by gays unlikely. Not among all gays, but among a substantial proportion of gays, there is always likely to be a degree of reluctance to “come out” fully. And growing up as a sexual minority means that there will always be many who see themselves as rebellious outsiders, disinclined to adopt traditional attitudes. Nor will the public ever put the sort of pressure on gays to marry that is placed on heterosexuals, since that pressure is ultimately rooted in the potential to produce children. Waiting for a demographic upsurge of gay marital conservatism is waiting for Godot.

Of course, Eskridge and Spedale present a few examples of model gay couples. Yet given the numbers, these must be considered exceptions that prove the rule. How can registered partnerships help sustain long-term, monogamous relationships if virtually no one seems to want them? Even many who do register see their unions, first and foremost, as tickets to legal benefits.

America
It’s likely, I think, that rates of gay marriage in the United States would be somewhat higher than in Scandinavia. That’s because the legal-economic benefits of marriage are far more substantial in the United States than in Scandinavia. In Scandinavia, few benefits are linked to marriage. In America, a great many benefits depend upon marriage.

Yet a higher rate of gay marriages in the United States would hardly prove that the “conservative case” for same-sex marriage was working. Recall that many of even the most anti-marriage American respondents in the Stiers study said they would get married anyway, “for the bennies.” (See Part I.) In Scandinavia, gays and lesbians who reject traditional martial norms tend not to marry at all. Some may be tempted by immigration benefits and such, yet the absolute numbers remain exceedingly small. The danger is that the richer array of marital benefits in the United States will attract radicals who positively reject the traditional marital ethos. Then there will be more than an academic book touting the safe-sex practices of couples in sexually open marriages. Instead, movies and television shows will feature cutting-edge same-sex married couples “courageously” suggesting that we dispense with outdated norms of marital monogamy.

Start with an extremely small number of Scandinavian same-sex registered partnerships. Strip away the 50 percent who married chiefly for the benefits, then the 25 percent who married after leaving a heterosexual marriage, then the unknown but likely substantial portion with sexually open marriages. Even with some overlap, you’re left with a sliver of a sliver of a sliver. The more you peel this tiny onion, the more you realize that, when it comes to the “conservative case” for gay marriage, there’s just no one there.

—Stanley Kurtz is a fellow at the Hudson Institute.