The Vancouver Sun gets the Headline Faux Pas Award of the week for stating “Same-sex marriages popular among couples with kids.”
Despite the misplaced modifier, they in fact provide some very interesting data from the just-released 2006 Canadian census, the first to count same-sex married couples. Same-sex couples with children are far more likely to marry than those without kids, with 24 percent of lesbian married couples living with at least one child, versus 13 percent of unmarried lesbian couples. For gay men, 6.8 percent of married couples live with children, versus 0.5 percent of unmarried ones.
Overall, reports Reuters, there were 7,465 married same-sex couples (0.12 percent of all married couples), and 45,345 same-sex couples of all kinds, married and not (0.6 percent of all couples). While the number of married same-sex families grew, the proportion of married-couple families overall fell, from 70.5 percent in 2001 to 68.6 percent of all census families in 2006. Common-law families rose from 13.8 percent to 15.5 percent, and single-parent families grew from 15.7 percent to 15.9 percent.
Destroying traditional marriage and family? I think not. It seems to be everyone else that is abandoning ship.
This data also suggests that in the U.S., same-sex couples with children are likely to remain a vital part of the fight for marriage equality.