Advocates of gay marriage often argue that it is not gays wanting to marry that jeopardizes the institution of marriage, rather it is the high divorce rate among heterosexuals that poses the real threat.
Dennis Prager deconstructs this argument and leaves it lying in tatters. He gives four reasons why the argument fails, and although in our view any one of them by itself is decisive, the third one is perhaps the most interesting. Prager writes:
A third flaw in the argument is that it presupposes that every divorce constitutes a failure of a couple's marriage. Sometimes this is true; sometimes it is not. I know a couple married for 30 years who made a beautiful home for their three now-married children. The couple divorced last year because they had both concluded that they had drifted too far apart to continue living together in any meaningful way (one aspect of the drift was one partner's increasing devotion to religion and the other's decreasing interest in it).
Who has the hubris to call their marriage a failure? Their children surely don't think their parents' marriage was a failure. It produced three wonderful married adults, and it provided them a beautiful and loving home in which to grow up. One can only wish all marriages so "failed."
It is simplistic to maintain that the one criterion of success or failure in marriage is permanence. There are marriages that provided years of comfort to a couple and a fine home to their children that eventually end; and there are permanent marriages that have provided neither comfort to the couple nor a loving environment for their children. If the end of something renders it a failure, every one of our lives is a failure, since they all come to an end.
Read the whole column. It's very provocative and well-reasoned.