Unfortunately believing something doesn't make it true, and clearly, demonstrably, she has relied on false information from other people, and not researched this for herself. The academic research does NOT support her claims.
For example, if you look at the National Marriage Project, which generates lots of reports cited by the anti-marriage equality crow, I could not find peer reviews that appear to be both academically rigorous and supportive, but I did find some very interesting criticisms that indicate that the National Marriage Project significantly skews data to support their position of one man and one woman as the only desirable family for raising children. It isn't only the National Marriage Project, addressed below that has that problem of misrepresenting data to conform to what appears to be a pre-existing bias.
Ten Problems (Plus One Bonus Problem) With The
National Marriage Project's Cohabitation Report
1. The cohabitation report says: "Living together before marriage increases the risk of breaking up after marriage" (page 4). Yet the research the report cites on this isn't nearly as straightforward as its authors represent it to be. For instance, one study they cite (DeMaris and MacDonald, 1993) found that the only situation in which cohabitation is associated with a higher divorce rate is among "serial cohabitors" -- people who have cohabited with more than one partner. That's a small portion of all cohabitors. The study actually concluded that for first-time cohabitors who then marry their partners, there's no increased risk of divorce. Most of the fuss about this link is bogus. Also, the National Marriage Project is misrepresents the research by saying that cohabitation increases the risk of divorce (implying a causal relationship). Some research has found an "association" between the two, but association is not the same as causation. Maybe a higher divorce risk makes one more likely to cohabit. Or perhaps there's some outside factor that causes both.
2. The cohabitation report says: "Cohabiting couples report ... lower levels of happiness" (page 11). A 1998 Roper poll of 1,200 affluent Americans found that the rich are happier than Americans overall. Rich people are happier than other people. Married people are more likely to be rich. Isn't it likely that the increased "happiness" we hear so much about is actually because people are wealthy, not because they're married? The same poll found that the affluent are more likely to have a happy marriage than average Americans: 77% vs. 47%. Source: "Money Does Buy Happiness Proves New Poll." Roper Starch Worldwide, January 22, 1998. Cohabitors and unmarried people include many people who have good reason to be unhappy. The poor are much less likely to marry than middle or upper-class Americans. Many disabled people can't marry because they would lose benefits. The same is true for senior citizens who depend on pensions. The "unmarried" category includes many people whose situations prevent them from getting married. The National Marriage Project's report doesn't consider the very reasonable possibility that it's not their marital status that keeps them unhappy, but rather their underlying situations. According to the 1987 National Survey of Families and Households, 83% of cohabitors say they are 5s, 6s, or 7s (out of a happiness scale of 1 to 7) -- heavily on the happy end. Only 7% put themselves on the "unhappy" side of the scale (1s, 2s, or 3s). Pro-marriage-only groups like to talk about how much happier married people are, implying that cohabitors are unhappy. In reality, the difference between the two is quite minimal, with both groups saying they are quite happy. For more on the subject of cohabitor happiness, see our Frequently Asked Questions About Cohabitation page.
3. The cohabitation report says: "Cohabiting unions tend to weaken the institution of marriage" (page 4). This is only a problem when you've started with the pre-conceived "truth" that marriage must be "revitalized" -- one of the National Marriage Project's stated key missions. If your first goal is to help people have happy, healthy families and relationships, and you're open to learning about how that can best happen, marriage may be much less important. One of the studies they cite (Schoen and Owens, 1992), seems to disagree with them. It says, "Because marriage has declined more than cohabitation has increased, there is little reason to think that the rise in cohabitation has caused the decline in marriage. What is much more likely is that the same set of factors are responsible for both the rise in cohabitation and the fall in marriage" (116).
4. The cohabitation report says: "Some research has shown that aggression is at least twice as common among cohabitors as it is among married partners" (page 12). They've misrepresented this research. The study they cite here, by Jan Stats, actually found that the probable cause for the "aggression" is the demographic profile of the average cohabitor (young, black, and more likely to have depression and alcohol problems). Although the National Marriage Project would like the reader to believe that the aggression is because they're not married, it's more likely because of these other factors, which are all linked more with poverty than with marital status. Again, correlation is not the same as causation.
5. The cohabitation report says: "One of the greatest problems for children living with a cohabiting couple is the high risk that the couple will break up" (page 13). Contrary to what marriage-only groups would have you think, the research does not show that divorce/breakup is generally catastrophic for children. Kids from amicably divorced couples actually do better than kids from high-conflict married couples (who stayed together "for the kids"). As the National Marriage Project admits in footnote 25, research shows that cohabitors who have kids are more likely to stay together. Why, then, does the marriage movement want to make unmarried couples ineligible for domestic partner health benefits, re-create a climate of stigma, and shut unmarried people out of the circle of what they consider "families"? Their policy recommendations hurt the National Marriage Project's so-called "fragile families" instead of helping them.
6. The cohabitation report says: "[Many children living with cohabiting couples are from a previous relationship of one of the parents.] This means that they [the children] are living with an unmarried stepfather or mother's boyfriend.... These children have no claim to child support should the couple separate" (pages 13-14). This implies that children born "out of wedlock" have no claim to child support. But all children have the right to child support from their father (their biological father or the man married to their mother). The percentage of babies who have identified fathers is very high, so this is not an issue for the vast majority of children. As we have seen, marriage is not a very strong guarantee of paternal support during the marriage or after it ends.
7. The cohabitation report says: "By all of the empirical evidence at our disposal, not to mention the wisdom of the ages, the institution of marriage remains a cornerstone of a successful society" (page 23). This sweeping generalization begs to be disproved -- and the report itself provides several counterexamples. Just a few pages earlier, the report calls Sweden and Denmark "the world's cohabitation leaders" (21) (in many Scandinavian countries, the majority of babies are born to unmarried parents). This seems to be the perfect contradiction to the report's own claim that nations need marriage to succeed: these countries exceed the United States and other more "married" countries on many scales of well-being. Anthropologist Leanna Wolfe discusses other successful societies where marriage is less than a "cornerstone" in her book Women Who May Never Marry.
8. The cohabitation report says: Married couples are better connected than cohabitors "to the larger community. This includes other individuals and groups (such as in-laws)" (12). This theory was disproved by a researcher who set out to test it in an article called "Cohabiting and Marital Aggression: The Role of Social Isolation (Journal of Marriage and the Family, 1991)" The researcher found that cohabiting couples are actually more likely to be tied to informal networks of family and friends than married couples. In its "comprehensive review of recent research," the National Marriage Project "coincidentally" missed any study that weakens its hypothesis.
9. For instance, one study threw out the traditional marital status categories and instead divided people into 4 categories: married, living with a partner, having a partner you don't live with, and people without partners. It found that people living with a partner had the highest levels of emotional support (higher than married couples) and the same low distress levels as married couples. Ross, Catherine (1995). "Reconceptualizing Marital Status as a Continuum of Social Attachment." Journal of Marriage and the Family. 57:1, 129-40.
10. Another piece of information they neglected to mention: This study found that 76% of cohabitors plan to get married to their partner (another study the cohabitation report cites, Brown and Bumpass, found that 80% of young adults plan to marry their partner). It also found that among cohabitors who plan to marry, there is no difference in terms of relationship quality when compared to married people. Therefore most of the concerns the National Marriage Project expresses about relationship quality only apply to a small minority of cohabitors. Susan L. Brown and Alan Booth. 1996. "Cohabitation Versus Marriage: A Comparison of Relationship Quality." Journal of Marriage and the Family. 58:668-678.
Plus one bonus: The cohabitation report says: "If a woman truly wants a man to marry her, wisdom dictates a measure of playing hard to get" (page 23). We'd hoped that we had moved beyond this kind of dishonest game-playing.
I couldn't agree more with that last observation. It is on a par with advocating women putting an aspirin between their knees as birth control instead of either accurate knowledge about conception, contraception and STIs (formerly called STDs), or having real contraception available to men and women.
It is an anti-sex and sexuality position that posits sex as bad, and tries to put women in the position, not of engaging in open and mutually shared emotional and physical intimacy, but in bartering sex, which amounts to institutionalized prostitution.
The premise of using sex as a payoff or as leverage, to coerce someone into taking an action they would not take otherwise is demeaning. Giving or withholding either sex or affection, or both, as an ultimatum is a method of interaction in a relationship that it destructive to real intimacy and commitment. It is one which denies both women and men more responsible and mature facets to their character in terms of how they view their own sexuality and enjoyment of sex.
This kind of thinking advocates for the worst kind of manipulation of the person who should be one's closest partner. It is antithetical to genuine loving, and it sets a basis for the worst kind of relationships not only with a spouse, but by extension in every other human relationship one manipulates using other rewards.
I can't find any highly regarded studies which arrive at their conclusions fairly and which represent their data honestly that support the claim that marriage is better in any way, including for raising children, with one man and one woman rather than with similarly committed and loving same sex couples.
I did find this report from 2005 from the American Psychological Association, Lesbian and Gay Parenting, intended for use by psychology professionals as well as other professionals, such as lawyers for use in court:
page 6,
LESBIAN AND GAY PARENTS AND THEIR CHILDREN :SUMMARY OF RESEARCH FINDINGS Charlotte J. Patterson:
Systematic research on the children of lesbian and gay parents began to appear in major professional journals in the late 1970s and has grown into a considerable body of research only in recent years (Allen & Demo, 1995; Patterson, 1992, 2000). As this summary will show, the results of existing research comparing lesbian and gay parents to heterosexual parents and children of lesbian and gay parents to children of heterosexual parents are quite clear: Common stereotypes are not supported by the data.
Those 'stereotypes' mentioned above are the notion that there is something wrong with same sex individuals, and with same sex couples, so that cannot parent fully and adequately. That is an out of date, inaccurate and biased position.
I did find however, overwhelmingly the extensive studies done in the fields of sociology and psychology, along with the expressed formal position on this topic from the major professional organizations, like the APA, confirms that two parents, either a man and a woman, or two same sex parents, are, statistically, more successful raising children than single parents, but that neither same sex or heterosexual couples are better than the other. Marriage does promote the stability of these relationships, but that is an argument for allowing same sex marriages, not against allowing them.
So long as we do not REQUIRE reproduction from people who marry as a condition of allowing them to marry, the biological potential to do so is irrelevant. We do, and always have, allowed people to marry without reproducing. To the extent that marriage is stabilizing for society, and therefore a positive social result of recognizing it, we should for that reason extend it to same sex couples, with or without children. It is important to be factual, not promote fiction as fact to serve an out of date and inaccurate ideology that is simply backward for no other reason than some people can't handle change very well.
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