Tony Perkins says that extending marriage to same-sex couples will lead to the breakup of the family and an increase in the prison population. Because more children being raised by two parents leads to… divorce and crime?
For years, conservatives have been falsely claiming that marriage is an automatic cure for poverty because they falsely interpret data that shows that married couples overall are more financially secure than single parents with children. Getting married doesn’t automatically solve poverty, of course, but there certainly is something to be said – for those who wish to marry – that marriage can help increase financial and emotional security.
Most people will agree that the institution of marriage itself is a societal good.
So why do anti-gay activists insist that a man and a woman who marry and raise children are a societal good, while two men or two women who marry and raise children are actually harmful to society?
Enter Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, whose latest embarrassingly ludicrous and wholly unsubstantiated theory is, well, embarrassingly ludicrous and wholly unsubstantiated.
Perkins this week on his radio show suggested that same-sex marriage will lead to the breakdown of the family, and to an increase in the prison population.
Think about that for a moment.
Marriage is a societal good, most people will agree. But to Perkins, same-sex couples marrying is a societal evil.
Perkins was responding to a listener’s question about the Supreme Court and same-sex marriage, and explaining why government should not get out of the marriage business.
“Government has a vested interested in seeing those children grow up with a mother and a father,” Perkins said on his radio show Wednesday. “Now they’ve changed that policy,” meaning, now they’ve let same-sex couples marry, “obviously, with this and we’re going to suffer the social consequences as a result.”
What “social consequences”?
“When you look at, for instance, our prison system today, and there’s a lot of effort, some of which I’m involved in, prison reform to try to scale back the prison population which is getting out of control, but 70 percent of most of the men in the prison have had little or no interaction with a father in their life,” Perkins says.
“There is a direct correlation between increased social costs and the breakup of the family,” he adds, claiming that same-sex marriage “will only exacerbate that situation and take us further down this path.”
In other words, same-sex couples marrying will lead to the breakdown of the family, and to an increase in the prison population.
Or, something.
Have you ever heard such “logic”?
Listen:
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Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license
Hat tip and audio via Right Wing Watch
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