which was, only in America is gay adoption more acceptable than gay marriage, elsewhere these two things tend to happen in the opposite order. One possible reason for that that I see - but since that's a reason having to do with America's pecularities rather than with Europe's, I'm not particularly well-informed on the details - is the notoriously defective foster care / orphanage system in the US. Or at least the perception that said system is awful. Nobody wants to see children suffer, so if foster care is such a frightful prospect, one can see how conservatives would view gay adoption as a lesser evil to the child not being adopted at all.

Other than that, religion obviously has something to do with it. The obvious argument against gay adoption - "doesn't a child need a father and a mother both?" - can doubtlessly be a cover for mere homophobia in the US and Europe both, but it doesn't have to be, and it still has a certain respectability even on a scientific level as gay adoption is new enough as a societal phenomenon that scientific research on it is limited. Against gay marriage, on the other hand, no serious scientific arguments can be brought, and the opponents have little ammunition outside religion. Since religion is a far less powerful force in society in (most countries of) Western Europe than in the US, the case against gay marriage is far weaker than that against gay adoption.

If one is going to study this comparison in detail, though, Spain has to be the focus, I would think. Spain has a large conservative religious population that is not all that different from America's on topics like homosexuality or abortion (there's currently controversy over the government's recent loosening of abortion laws), so it must be very interesting to see how things are going there. As long as the socialists are in power, Spain's social policies will remain rather liberal, but I really wonder whether the conservatives will try to turn back the clock if they regain power, and how far if so. Real homophobia is not acceptable in any mainstream party in Western Europe anymore, including the Spanish conservative party (Partido Popular), but that certainly doesn't mean that that party approves of gay marriage.



As far as the rest of the article goes, I find it unforgiveable that the author acts as if higher studies are an essential part of every life path, and as if the millions of people who don't do higher studies are just failures. I realize that in the US, it's rather less socially acceptable than here to point out the obvious reality that some people are smarter than others, but surely it's not taboo to acknowledge that for millions of American high school kids, university would be aiming too high - and hence a gigantic waste of money. Millions of people will end up, even in modern service economies, in jobs that require at most a few years of community college after HS. And it's plenty natural that those people will have children earlier - at a biologically preferable age, one might add.

To add insult to injury and throw some more words around that are taboo in America, I might add that the author's "blue world and red world" sound rather a lot like "upper class and lower class", or "middle class and working class" if you will (since the real upper class is always so small in numbers). Because we all know that every state, Blue or Red, has its Blue and its Red areas, and within those areas some social circles that will be more Red and others that will be more Blue - generally the same kinds of circles in different places, too. And that the real divide in terms of too-young pregnancies, shotgun weddings, and the like, is more between rich and poor than it is between Democrat and Republican, or liberal and conservative, despite Bristol Palin.


Yet another entirely different quibble is that the author doesn't dwell much on divorce, its effect on children, and the entire topic of "serial monogamy" and its desirability. Obviously he can't tackle everything in one article, but I think it's unfair to social conservatives to ignore that issue, because with divorces being as harmful to children as they seem to be in most cases, "the defense of marriage" (in a literal sense without DoMA connotations) and the bringing down of the divorce rate is indeed important. To be sure, the way they're going about that goal is counterproductive in the case of "no sex before marriage", and irrelevant and pointless in the case of "no gay marriage", but it's natural enough for them to try and salvage what they can of the old model, which for all its faults did not saddle all these childrens with divorce traumas. (And then we get into how surely children back in the days suffered worse things, somehow without anyone noticing symptoms of a suffered trauma afterwards, which is an even bigger can of worms that I won't get into here...)



So yeah, it's absolutely a fascinating topic, but the author rubs me the wrong way a few too many times for me to like the article much. Part of that is no doubt due to the short format and the omissions that logically follow from that, but part is also really the author's fault.