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WARNING: The page you have accessed is dependent on JAVASCRIPT which is not supported by your browser. Due to this limitation, you may experience unexpected results within this site. From the May 31, 2004 issue: Lessons of the same-sex marriage debate in the Netherlands.
ONLY A FEW YEARS AGO, two prominent demographers hailed the Dutch family as a model for Europe. Somehow the Dutch had managed to combine liberal family law and a robust welfare state with a surprisingly traditional attitude toward marriage. Even as a new pattern of highly unstable parental cohabitation was sweeping out of Scandinavia and across northern Europe, the Dutch were unswayed. To be sure, premarital cohabitation was widespread, but when Dutch couples decided to have children, they got married. In the mid-1990s, out-of-wedlock births, already rising, began a steeper increase, nearly doubling to 31 percent of births in 2003. These were the very years when the debate over the legal recognition of gay relationships came to the fore in the Netherlands, culminating in the legalization of full same-sex marriage in 2000. A careful look at the decade-long campaign for same-sex marriage in the Netherlands shows that one of its principal themes was the effort to dislodge the conviction that parenthood and marriage are intrinsically linked. Even as proponents of gay marriage argued vigorously--and ultimately successfully--that marriage should be just one of many relationship options, fewer Dutch parents were choosing marriage over cohabitation. No longer a marked exception on the European scene, the Dutch are now traveling down the Scandinavian path. Call it the end of the Dutch paradox, the distinctive combination of liberal social policies and traditional behavior. On euthanasia, prostitution, drug use, and now gay marriage, Dutch law is the cutting edge of Western liberalism. Yet among Dutch people, drug use and sexual license are far from rampant. Many have asked whether this balance of tolerance and tradition, with its deep roots in Dutch culture and history, is sustainable over the long term. THE ORIGINS of Dutch tolerance lie in the mercantile pragmatism of Holland's Golden Age, under the republic of the 17th and 18th centuries. Back then, the Dutch had their own Puritans, who, as American gradeschoolers used to learn, harbored the English religious dissenters for more than a decade before they set sail on the voyage that would take them to Plymouth Rock. More recently, Holland's blend of tolerance and tradition found expression in the late 19th- and early 20th-century policy of "pillarization." Calvinists, Catholics, and socialists lived in self-contained worlds, each with its own universities, newspapers, football leagues, and eventually radio and television stations. Working together, the elites of the three pillars kept conflict at bay by setting principle aside and adopting an attitude of pragmatic toleration. Today, the ghost of pillarization survives in the Dutch tendency to cede a large degree of cultural liberty to others, while behaving traditionally themselves. When a new social movement presents itself to a Dutchman, he typically says, in effect: Do as you please, but I'll go on as before. This tolerance for what is culturally alien is a legacy from a world built on religion. Not obvious is what happens when tolerance remains and religion disappears. No Western society has secularized more radically or rapidly than Holland. The cultural revolution of the 1960s weakened the churches. Once faith became too fragile to sustain the social order, the pillars collapsed. The Netherlands changed from one of the most religious countries in Europe to one of the most secular. Today, nearly three-quarters of the Dutch under 35 claim no religious affiliation. The very speed of the collapse virtually guaranteed that some traditional patterns of behavior would linger at first. Sooner or later, though, would Dutch society fray, as one social experiment after another drew down the cultural capital of the past? This question has come into sharp focus around the family. Even as premarital cohabitation became nearly universal, and as cohabitation acquired virtually equal status with marriage under Dutch law in the 1980s, scholars attributed Holland's continuing attachment to parental marriage to the persistence of the Calvinist and Catholic moral codes. Many of Europe's social scientists and public intellectuals are cultural radicals who hope to see marriage replaced by cohabitation and an expanded welfare state. But in 2002, British demographer David Coleman coauthored an article with one of Holland's premier demographers, Joop Garssen, that held up the Netherlands as an alternative to the Swedish model. Noting Sweden's falling fertility rate, unsustainable welfare system, and burdened children reared in fragile cohabiting families, Coleman and Garssen proposed Holland's combination of liberal laws, liberal social welfare policies, and relatively traditional marriage as a better pattern to sustain the European family. Coleman and Garssen, who focused on the years through 1998, noted the beginning of what would turn out to be an unusual annual increase of two percentage points in Dutch out-of-wedlock births. It would continue for seven consecutive years (and counting), as parental cohabitation spread and Holland's vaunted marriage traditionalism waned. One thing that happened was the push for same-sex marriage. After several attempts to legalize gay marriage through the courts failed in 1990, advocates launched a campaign of cultural-political activism. They set up symbolic marriage registries in sympathetic cities and towns (although the marriages had no legal force), and the largely sympathetic news and entertainment media chimed in. The movement picked up steam after the election of a socially liberal government in 1994--the first government since 1913 to include no representatives of the socially conservative Christian Democratic party. A series of parliamentary debates and public appeals began that would run through the end of the decade. In 1996, the lower house of parliament passed a motion calling for gay marriage, and the government began to plan for full-fledged same-sex marriage. The following year, parliament legalized registered partnerships. Same-sex couples appeared on a honeymoon television show and the like. By then, large majorities in parliament had come around: The lower house passed gay marriage 109-33, the upper house 49-26. Before meeting this defeat, the defenders of traditional marriage, needless to say, fought back. With one voice, they swore that procreation and parenthood were the essence of marriage. In the first serious national debate on the issue, in 1996, Christian Democratic party chairman Hans Helgers made this case. And in 2000, Kars Veling, speaking for three of the smaller religious parties, repeatedly highlighted what he called the unique and universal procreative structure of marriage. The most sustained and acute presentation of the argument from procreation probably came from Cees van der Staaij, a member of parliament from one of the small religious parties, the SGP. Van der Staaij argued in 2000 that the principle of equality cannot by itself resolve the issue of same-sex marriage. The equality principle applies only to those who are similarly situated. If procreation is essentially related to marriage, and even the possibility of procreation is "structurally missing" in same-sex couples, then heterosexual and homosexual couples are differently situated, and the equality principle does not apply. Van der Staaij pointed out a critical problem in the government's proposal for same-sex marriage. Would the law recognize the usual ties of descent between children and married couples? Would, say, the female spouse of a mother who conceived a child automatically become the parent of the biologically unrelated child? If so, the implication was, might such a child have three simultaneous legal parents? And if so, would this not set off a cascade of legal pressures to repudiate the two-parent standard (a process that is playing itself out...
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