Foes of marriage equality have been grasping at straws to come up with any reason why same-sex marriage shouldn’t be legal.
Now a group of “scholars” in the anti-gay movement are claiming that the legalization of gay marriage across the country will lead to 900,000 additional abortions in the next 30 years.
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These Brainiacs filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court laiming that legalizing same-sex marriage “undermines” traditional man-woman marriage.
Their theory is that if traditional marriage loses its value, things like monogamy and waiting until marriage to have kids “will likewise crumble” and there’ll be a ton of unwed pregnant women banging on abortion clinic doors.
We didn’t do so great on the SATs, but ever we know that’s a pretty far stretch.
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Gene Schaerr, a former clerk of Justice Antonin Scalia who officially filed the brief and unsuccessfully defended Utah’s same-sex marriage ban, tells the Washington Post it’s just a theory—and not a very scientific one, at that: “It is still too new to do a rigorous causation analysis using statistical methods,” he admits.
Schaerr’s proof (and there aren’t quote marks big enough to indicate what a load it is) is that the marriage rate is declining in places like Vermont and Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage is legal.
Of course, the marriage rates are also declining in Texas and other anti-equality states, too. In fact its down all over the country.
Yet, Schaerr maintains that lower marriage rates mean more abortions, because unmarried women get more abortions than married women do. This represents “a short and simple causal chain that the Supreme Court would be wise not to set in motion,” Schaerr writes.
He conveniently ignores studies done both in the States and abroad that show opening marriage to same-sex partners has no discernible affect on straight people’s marriages.
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In a piece for the anti-LGBT Witherspoon Institute, Schaeer claims that marriage equality will also lead to “more childhood poverty; increased psychological and emotional problems; more teenage pregnancy; poorer performance in school; higher amounts of substance abuse; more youth committing crimes; and more girls undergoing abortions.”
About the only thing he doesn’t lay at the feet of same-sex marriage is the extinction of the northern white rhinoceros.
But he probably thinks that’s a good thing.