Out of the
CROOKED TIMBER
of humanity, no straight thing was made
by
Henry on
January 24, 2010
Arthur Goldhammer’s
excellent blog on French politics and society points to
this article on the French
pact civil de solidarité
– a kind of civil union introduced in 1999/2000, largely as an
alternative to gay marriage. But the pacs has had very interesting
consequences for straight couples (95% of couples with pacs are
straight), as this chart shows.
The growth of the pacs’ popularity over its first decade is
striking. There are now two pacs for every three marriages.
Interestingly, this is because of both a significant decline in
marriage, and a significant increase in the overall number of people
willing to engage in some kind of state-sanctioned relationship. While
you would obviously need more finely grained data to establish this
properly, the obviously intuitive interpretation of this (at least to
me) is that the pacs have grown
both by providing an option for people who would probably not have gotten married in the first place,
and
attracted a number of people who otherwise would have gotten married,
but who prefer the pacs’ lower level of formality (it is much easier to
cancel a pacs relationship than to get divorced).
Perhaps this provides
grist for the mills of social conservatives (who could claim, stretching
the data a bit, that gay-appeasing civil unions are undermining the
sacred institution of marriage) – but it would oblige them to face up to
the question of whether they should
prefer gay marriage to
potentially corrosive civil unions that straight couples can take
advantage of too. Liberals and leftwingers don’t face nearly the same
dilemma, since they can reasonably assume that those who choose civil
unions over marriage have good reason for doing so (and perhaps will get
married later if they want to; obviously, you can’t tell from data like
this how many partners in pacs decide to get married later on).
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