Mexico City Invites us to Observe Their Same-Sex Marriage “Experiment”

With a population of nine million, Mexico City has more people than 40 of America’s 50 states. It also has more Catholics than any American state except California. In fact, Mexico City is the second-largest Catholic city in the world (after Sao Paulo, Brazil).

And it just legalized same-gender marriage.

Mexico, of course, is a conservative, highly traditional country–far more so than the United States. And yet, they’re doing something that 100 million Americans find terrifying. Shame on us.

Much of the opposition to same-gender marriage in America is explained by those who claim it will destroy traditional marriage. So let’s consider the situation in Mexico City as a kind of “experiment”–an example of what could happen in the United States if we were to embrace same-gender marriage nation-wide and a way to gauge if it really is the threat to traditional marriage that some fear. Will their divorce rate increase faster than comparable societies without same-gender marriage? Will more spouses have affairs? Abandon their families? Gamble away the rent money? Hit each other?

And, if not (as I imagine will be the case), can we finally expect our policy-makers to denounce “the gays are coming!” paranoia of some Americans and embrace a more rational position on the matter?

Americans have had this opportunity to observe such experiments before–and not just about same-gender marriage (which is already legal in Spain and Canada, with no ill effects observed). Those Americans panicked about children being exposed to nudity can check the results of the European “experiment” with nudity at beaches and on television (no increase in child molestation or sexual dysfunction). Those Americans panicked about pornography can check the results of the experiments in Japan, Germany and Sweden with lifting many restrictions on its availability (no increase in sexual violence).

Of course, we have such experiments with same-gender marriage currently underway in several of our own nation’s states with no ill effect. Hopefully, as such evidence continues to mount, the rest of our nation will soon come to realize that same-gender marriage poses no threat to traditional marriage. In fact, marriage equality is simply a way to-fairly and justly-bring more people into the fold.