Whither marriage?

Stanley Kurtz writes in The Weekly Standard on "The End of Marriage in Scandinavia: The 'conservative case' for same-sex marriage collapses." According to Kurtz,

Marriage is slowly dying in Scandinavia. A majority of children in Sweden and Norway are born out of wedlock. Sixty percent of first-born children in Denmark have unmarried parents. Not coincidentally, these countries have had something close to full gay marriage for a decade or more. Same-sex marriage has locked in and reinforced an existing Scandinavian trend toward the separation of marriage and parenthood. The Nordic family pattern--including gay marriage--is spreading across Europe. And by looking closely at it we can answer the key empirical question underlying the gay marriage debate. Will same-sex marriage undermine the institution of marriage? It already has.

Yet I wonder whether this will prove not to be true over the long term. If marriage is not a mere human institution, but is instead part of the deep structure of every society, then it may be more resilient than we give it credit for. Half a decade ago Francis Fukuyama wrote The Great Disruption, in which he observed that, after the troubling social indicators besetting the west after about 1965, these same societies began to reknit their social fabrics in the 1990s, leading, among other things, to a decrease in crime rates. This suggests that, as Christians would put it, God's creation order will reassert itself in ways forcing people to acknowledge the distinctiveness of marriage.