During oral arguments in Hollingsworth v. Perry—the Supreme Court case involving California’s Proposition 8—Justice Kennedy asked a very important question: In its potential impact on children and society, wouldn’t imposing same-sex marriage on unwilling states be akin to “jumping off a cliff” and subjecting the nation and its children to whatever unseen dangers might lurk at the bottom?
According to a group of 100 academic marriage scholars, Justice Kennedy was right to be concerned about the harmful social effects of such a redefinition of marriage—especially on the children of heterosexuals. In fact, according to an amicus brief recently submitted in the pending Supreme Court marriage case that I filed on behalf of those scholars, the results of such a ruling could well be catastrophic. As the brief demonstrates, based on data from nations and US states that have adopted same-sex marriage, it is reasonable to predict that, over a generation, a forced redefinition of marriage would produce at least a 5 percent reduction in heterosexual marriage rates. That would result in an increase of nearly 1.3 million never-married women, and an increase of nearly 600,000 functionally fatherless children.
