I heard National Review Online's Stanley Kurtz talking about the evils of gay marriage on NPR this morning and I thought: Is this the best the Right can do? Here was his smoking gun: Scandinavian countries that have embraced gay unions for the past ten years have high illegitimacy rates now -- so one has to be related to the other. Any college freshman studying logic knows this as a logical fallacy -- post hoc, ergo propter hoc, B followed A, therefore B must have been caused by A.

I'd have to dig a lot deeper to find the numbers that properly refute this nonsense, but here's an academic paper (PDF here; HTML here) that gives rates of out-of-wedlock births in 1973 and 1996 for various European countries (the second Swedish number is for 1995). Here are the numbers (from Table 1 on page 25 of the paper):

France:

1973: 8%

1996: 39%

Belgium:

1973: 3%

1996: 18%

Netherlands:

1973: 2%

1996: 17%

W. Germany:

1973: 6%

1996: 14%

Italy:

1973: 3%

1996: 8%

Denmark:

1973: 17%

1996: 46%

Ireland:

1973: 3%

1996: 25%

UK:

1973: 8%

1996: 36%

Sweden:

1973: 29%

1995: 53%

You don't need a Ph.D. in statistics to recognize that (with the exception of Italy) all these countries saw comparable significant increases in illegitimacy over the period in question. So what's so special about the Scandinavian countries that legitimized gay unions?