One of the biggest arguments used against the legalization of marriage equality in the U.S. was the idea that straight men would leave their families if same-sex couples were allowed to get married, forcing women to raise children as single mothers.

While today that might seem silly, the right believed at the time that the argument was strong enough to be presented before the Supreme Court. The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) – which, despite its name, was the leading organization against marriage equality before the Supreme Court legalized it in all 50 states in its 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision – saw the argument as good enough to include in its brief filed with the Supreme Court urging them to rule against marriage equality in Obergefell.

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“Redefining marriage will also entrench an understanding of marriage that elevates adult fulfillment over children’s needs and that denies the benefits to children from being raised by their biological parents or from having both a mother and a father,” NOM argued. “This newfound meaning of marriage will result in fewer man-woman couples, specifically those in disadvantaged communities, who together persevere through marital difficulties for the well-being of their families.”

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“After all, if society understands marriage to exist predominantly for adult happiness, then the idea of sticking through hard times for the good of others, be it children or a spouse, will decline further.”

This month, LGBTQ Nation is celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the Obergefell decision, and I’m looking back at some of the wild predictions the right made to argue against marriage equality in the years leading up to Obergefell. So far, I’ve written about James Dobson’s claim that marriage equality will lead to father-daughter marriage and another claim on the right that same-sex marriages will be rife with fraud.

This one isn’t a slippery slope argument. NOM wasn’t saying that allowing same-sex couples to marry will allow something else to happen later on. And they weren’t arguing that fathers will go off and marry men because they will feel free to live their lives as gay.

Rather, the argument was pretty much the heart of their advocacy against marriage equality: times are changing, and that’s bad.

In reality, the cultural understanding of marriage since the mid-20th century had changed. It went from being seen as an institution meant to force men and women into certain patriarchal gender roles to instead being seen as something that people should want to enter. NOM was arguing that this is bad because what if people don’t want to be married? What if they’re free to choose another way to live?

It’s basically the other side of the coin of the argument queer couples were making, which is that the freedom to decide who you spend your life with is a fundamental freedom that everyone should enjoy. That already included divorce, and it should include same-sex couples, too.

If NOM came out and said, “Freedom is bad, actually,” well, that probably wouldn’t have gone over well in a country where the word “freedom” is basically a synonym for “good.” So instead, they fear-mongered about freedom without using the word.

Their brief in Obergefell claims that “studies have shown” that people who “embrace the adult-centered view” of marriage were more likely to divorce, which makes sense – people who are likely less religious, who don’t hold patriarchal views of marriage, are more likely to leave marriages that make them unhappy. NOM also argued that divorce can be bad for women’s finances, increasing their risk of poverty, which is still probably true.

But nowhere in the brief do they show that marriage equality would cause this change, and for good reason: They got the causation backward. People started considering marriage equality a viable policy in the late 20th century because of the changes to how people saw the institution that happened over the prior decades, not the other way around.

That is, straight people divorcing isn’t queer people’s fault. If a straight couple divorces and has a harder time paying the bills now that they have to maintain two households, it really has nothing to do with whether the family down the street has two mothers. Even if the parents became more liberal in their views on marriage as a result of Obergefell as NOM said they would – it’s already a stretch to believe that happened at any scale, but let’s entertain it for the sake of argument – they’re still adults and it was still their decision to get divorced.

There is also an argument to be made about the harm of parents sticking together even though they should get divorced, including emotional harm to the kids from having unhappy parents who can’t get along.

While being a single mother can be hard, women in heterosexual relationships are much more likely to file for divorce than men. People choose divorce because they think it’s necessary, not because they’re frivolous and don’t know what’s good for them. They don’t need the likes of NOM to make decisions for them.

Last, this prediction was just wrong. Divorce rates didn’t increase as a result of Obergefell. They actually decreased. The U.S. Census Bureau says that the marriage rate stayed about the same between 2012 and 2022, but that the divorce rate decreased from around 9.8 divorces per 1000 women over the previous year to 7.1. That’s a 28% decrease.

It’s unlikely that conservatives would admit that they were wrong because, like all of the arguments made against marriage equality, this one was made in bad faith. Conservatives oppose same-sex marriage rights either because of their religious beliefs or because they just plain don’t like LGBTQ+ people. They realize that they can’t present arguments like that in court, so they make up social scientific reasons to oppose marriage that have only tenuous links to reality.

That this argument was a prediction that didn’t come true doesn’t matter. If the Court overturns Obergefell one day and they get to argue about marriage again, they’re not going to concern themselves with the particulars of the truth.

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