> from Philanthropy News Digest/Foundation Center newsletter
> August 27, 2004
> Civil Society
>
> University of Massachusetts economist Lee Badgett has studied marriage
> customs in the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, where same-sex
> marriage or same-sex partnership rights have existed for up to fifteen
> years. She found, and noted in a briefing paper prepared for the Council
> on Contemporary Families and the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic
> Studies, that previously existing trends in marriage, divorce,
> cohabitation, and out-of-wedlock childbearing did not change. In fact, in
> Denmark, heterosexual marriage rates increased after the adoption of
> same-sex marriage and are now the highest they have been since the early
> 1970s. Divorce rates remained the same in the countries studied. The
> majority of families with children are headed by married couples. In
> Norway, 77 percent of couples with children are married and in the
> Netherlands, 75 percent, compared to 72 percent in the United States.
> According to Badgett, the Scandinavian and Dutch experience suggests
> there is little reason to think heterosexual couples would eschew
> marriage if gay and lesbian couples got the same rights.