Cato Institute
Policy Forum – “Gay Marriage: Evidence from Europe?” by William N. Eskridge, Jr. of Yale University Maggie Gallagher, Institute for Marriage and Public Policy

On Thursday, June 1, WIP interns went to the Cato Institute to hear William Eskridge, Jr., a professor of law at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut and coauthor of Gay Marriage: For Better or Worse? What We've Learned from the Evidence (Oxford University Press, 2006), and Maggie Gallagher, president of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy and coauthor of The Case for Marriage. As the United States Senate was debating the Federal Marriage Amendment, many scholars looked to Belgium and the Netherlands for the social implications of similar legislation. Some observers argued that legal recognition of same-sex unions led to a decline in traditional marriage and marital child rearing within these countries. A new book by William Eskridge and Darren R. Spedale from Yale University challenges this position as inconsistent with the Scandinavian evidence. The authors found that marriage in these Nordic nations did not suffer from the legalization of same-sex unions. Data suggests that sanctioning gay marriage in the United States would neither undermine heterosexual marriage as an institution nor harm the well-being of children. Nevertheless, Maggie Gallagher argued that the move toward gay marriage in Europe is part of a larger crisis, including a trend away from marriage as the social norm for child bearing and rearing.

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