You are a brave man, Jasper. 
I remember vaguely something Chomsky said (I believe it was in the documentary Manufacturing Dissent) about facts and opinion. The concept he talked about went a bit like this:
When confronted with an authoritative opinion, you can bring dozens and dozens of files with statistical evidence to prove your case. They do not matter. A simple "What you say is not true" or "I do not believe you" will be enough to send you back to square one.
I think this is what the likes of Kurtz do for a living: add weight to their opinion and advertize it as the absolute truth.
In the end it is your word against theirs.
But it is good that you decided to add some counterweight, though. Thanks for that.
Thanks for the comment.
As a "Dutch cohabitating parent", it's weird to be talked about as if I'm some labrat and gay marriage was an external stimulus.
And as a researcher it's weird to read a discussion where one side analyses the available statistics using, you know, statistical analysis, while the other side thinks you can prove things using "qualitative cultural analysis".
As far as I can tell from reading the Kurtz article and the Eskridge / Spedale / Ytterberg article, there is a big difference in academic credibility. Spedale spent two years in Scandinavia specifically researching the partnership laws there, and Ytterberg is the Ombudsman for gays and lesbians in Sweden. Kurtz, on the other hand, has no knowledge of the field other than what he's seen in publicly available data - giving him only a small part of the story.
I'd rather rely on experts who have put work into their conclusions, than someone who's just looked at statistics to create the whole story of the effect of gay marriage on a society.
It might also be worth noting that Spedale and Eskridge are publishing a complete book on the subject of the "effect" of gay marriage in Scandinavia with Oxford University Press in the next month or two:
http://www.us.oup.com/us/
catalog...i=9780195187519
I'm afraid the only way a scientific, fact-filled book is going to shut Kurtz up is if it falls on his head.
This non-debate should be ended, and it's probably easiest to do by discrediting Kurtz. Which should be easy, seeing as he got no credentials.
The Oedipus complex on the Trobriand Islands.....
So far, he's the only one who can succesfully (albeit wrongly) claim a scientific, ehm, background. If he's the best they've got, he's probably the only one they've got.
That was a good post, but I would hope that anyone with half a brain will be able to read kurtz and, regardless of their views, see the holes, the shoddy thinking and the poor journalism. He's not presenting an argument, he's presenting his own ill-thought out prejudice - the sort of argument you get from your hairdresser (sorry to any hairdressers out there who are brighter than mine). Shame the guy has a print platform if you ask me.
How can you take a perfecly good word like gay and describe something as disgusting as what goes on when the lights go out. The asrticle and comments are spoken like true queers.
Commenting by HaloScan
