Nervous Straights: Letting Gay People Marry Will Not Hurt You. At All.

Ouch, yet another loss for same sex marriage opponents! Just one week after a study out of Australia proved that the children of same sex couples grow up just as healthy (if not more) than the children of opposite sex couples, a new study comes along proving that same sex marriage has no negative effect on opposite sex marriage. In states where gay marriage is legal, the institution of marriage is as strong as it ever was.

The study, published in the Public Library of Science, looked at data from the 13 states and Washington, D.C. where same sex marriage or civil unions were made available prior to 2009. Then, using opposite sex marriage statistics collected by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) marriage publications from 1988-2009, researchers compared the rates in the number of opposite sex people who got married before same sex marriage was implemented and the number who got married after. (For more information on the researchers’ materials and methods, click here.)

People who are against gay marriage have long justified their opposition by saying that allowing same sex couples to marry will discourage opposite sex couples from tying the knot. Rick Santorum, king of bigoted and dickwaded opinions about gay people, has argued that gay marriage discourages straight marriage on loop. Unsurprisingly, it turns out this argument goes completely unsupported by the research.

From the Public Library of Science:

All short term and long term effects of same sex marriages and strong and weak same sex unions were close to zero and statistically undifferentiable from the null hypothesis of no effect on rates of opposite sex marriage with %95 confidence intervals uniformly spanning zero (Table 1).

In other words, implementing same sex marriage has had no negative effect on straight marriage. At all.

Hey Team Reason — are y’all getting tired of running all these victory laps? No? Good. Let’s run a few more.

Study: Same Sex Marriage Has No Effect on Opposite Sex Marriage Rates [Raw Story]