Writing at the Cato blog, Walter Olson offers a succinct look at the research on what — if any — impact same sex marriage has had on marriage and family life in general in countries where it has been legalized,
How did the original letter writer come to imagine the reverse [That same sex marriage would produce negative family outcomes]? From her letter, she may have been relying on the work of Religious Right polemicist Frank Turek who in turn seems to have relied on the 2004 writing of Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow Stanley Kurtz. When SSM was brand new and first making legal headway in places like northern Europe, Kurtz advancedan exceedingly strained and much-criticized argument trying to blame it for Scandinavian family trends generally. Now, eight years later, there is vastly more data available from countries around the world (Canada, Spain, etc.) and from U.S. states confirming that SSM neither causes nor correlates with divorce or out-of-wedlock birth rates above Western norms …