Maybe heterosexual marriage is a threat to same-sex marriage. From Frederick Hertz at HuffPo:
1. Nearly 150,000 same-sex couples have either married or registered civil unions or domestic partnerships, which constitutes about one-fifth of same-sex couples in the U.S. (or rather, a fifth of those who acknowledged themselves as such in recent United States Census reports).More on the divorce rate:
2. About 1% of the total number of currently-married or registered same-sex couples get divorced each year, in comparison to about 2% of the total number of married straight couples. Note that the percentage of couples that get divorced eventually is close to 50%, but only 1% or 2% of them get divorced in any particular year.
It would be wonderful to proclaim that this shows that gay folks are more committed to their marriages than straight folks -- and given the recent rash of near instantaneous divorces (think Kardashian) this wouldn't seem that crazy. However, I suspect that this can be attributed to the types of couples getting married in these early years of same-sex marriage, and not a testament to the stability of lesbian and gay relationships. There's no statistical data out yet on this particular dynamic, but in my experience as a lawyer working with same-sex couples, the partners getting married tend to be those who have already been together for some time. They already have weathered the stormy middle years of coupledom, and they are consciously committed to being a family. For that reason, we should not be surprised that they are not rushing to get divorced so quickly. Of course, there are a fair number of such couples whose relationships don't last, but on the whole it's a rather select group. Think about it -- the couples with shakier relationships are not likely to travel across state lines to get married -- and there certainly aren't any "shotgun" marriages in the gay community!
