Japan recently broke away from its G7 siblings and maintained a ban on same-sex marriage.
The Tokyo court upheld the country’s civil code, which limits marriage to opposite-sex couples. It was the first and only defeat among six appeals filed by same-sex couples that found parts of the current law unconstitutional. The recent decision creates a division that the Supreme Court must now resolve.
Judge Ayumi Higashi validated the current legal definition of marriage, which assumes a man-woman link and that a family consists of a couple and their children.
She rejected claims that the same-sex marriage ban violates Japan’s equality clause, saying the distinction between same-sex and opposite-sex couples does not amount to unconstitutional discrimination.
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In a Japanese hospital, a nurse holds a newborn baby.
In the face of the demographic winter affecting every G7 country, the judge in Tokyo has chosen to protect and elevate the only relationship that has the potential to reverse it.
Ten years ago, when our Supreme Court debated Obergefell versus Hodges, very few American scientists were honest about the demographic abyss that developed countries were approaching. Not so today.
Like 70% of the world’s countries, no G7 country is above the replacement fertility rate of 2.1. The United States (1.62), Canada (1.61), France (1.66), Germany (1.42), Italy (1.2) and Japan (1.2) have all seen sharp declines since the 1970s. But Japan may have suffered the worst and most precipitous fall. They lead the world in aging populations, with most of the population aged 65 and over, and the population expected to halve in the next hundred years.
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Japan is not debating marriage equality and the demographic vacuum. The court’s decision to anchor the definition of marriage in a married couple and their children is not bigotry, but demographic realism.
Whether or not the courts understand the direct connection between the redefinition of marriage and the demographic collapse, many scholars do. In reality, one group of whom submitted evidence in our own court a decade ago warning that same-sex marriage correlates not only with declining opposite-sex marriage rates, but also with declining birth rates.
The Brief of Amici Curiae Scholars of Fertility and Marriage in Support of Respondents & Affirmance noted that five of the seven states (including Washington, DC) with the lowest fertility rates all allowed same-sex marriage (or its equivalent in a civil union). In contrast, none of the nine states with the highest fertility rates allowed this before 2010.
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They predicted that marriage rates would fall between 5.1% and almost 9% after the introduction of same-sex marriage. On the conservative side, a 5% reduction means 1.275 million women abandoning their marriages during their most fertile years, resulting in nearly 2 million fewer births over the course of one generation.
Those figures are no longer theoretical. National marriage rates fell from 6.9 per 1,000 in 2015 to a projected 5.8 in 2025. The CDC notes that the US total fertility rate has fallen every year since 2014.
Judge Ayumi Higashi validated the current legal definition of marriage, which assumes a man-woman linkage and that a family consists of a couple and their children.
The demographic regression, evidenced by the declining number of preschools and kindergartens, is now making its way onto more headlines, warning of a shrinking working-age population, slowing economic growth and a healthcare desert. It is a trend that is both fueled and fueled by a culture of despair and futility. Add to that the very real possibility of a long-term population collapse, and we are staring at a five-alarm demographic fire.
Assuming that no gay adults will disappear from the heterosexual marriage market, how do you explain the declining birth rates after gay marriage? One author explains that ignoring “the inherently generative nature of heterosexual marriages sends a strong message that reproduction is not a valued social priority.”
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The national implications of deemphasizing procreation within this fundamental social institution make the situation worse, as same-sex marriage has already systematically stripped parenthood laws of the recognition that children come from both a man and a woman. How does the culture understand the importance of men and women coming together to have babies, when our laws can’t even say the words mother and father?
It is reasonable to define marriage around and promote the formation of opposite-sex couples, because only they are capable of producing the next generation. A capability that assisted reproductive technologies will never be able to match in terms of their benefit to children, nor their national scalability.
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The United States and the other 37 countries that have legalized same-sex marriage have made a mistake by reducing this species-sustaining institution to a vehicle of adult emotional validation. We must follow Japan’s example and recognize that we can and must grant dignity to our friends who identify as LGBT, while at the same time protecting the only relationship in society that creates and nurtures new life.
A nation that forgets the purpose of marriage will ultimately pay the price. Not only through the victimization of individual children, but also through empty classrooms, shrinking families and a future that no country can survive.
