How is Happiness Defined? Part 2

GUEST COLUMN

BY ANTON KAISER

Part 1

To make a long research story short, all three countries have legalized abortion, And not only do both Denmark and Colombia have legalized prostitution in common but also, increasingly, gay rights. In 1989, Denmark legalized same-sex relationships. Norway followed suit in 1993, Sweden and Greenland in 1994, and Iceland in 1996 - all granting some but not all of the same rights to gay couples as are provided to heterosexual marriages. Of course, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and Denmark are frequently touted as the “best” countries in many surveys on various topics. So we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the WVS Association is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden.

But how did Colombia, a country never before mentioned at the top of these lists, suddenly leapfrog the rest of the world? And how is it that Puerto Rico, a commonwealth of the U.S., ranks so much higher than the U.S.?

Not surprisingly, I discovered that Colombia began legalizing abortion in 2006, and in 2007 extended social security and health insurance benefits to same-sex couples, and on April 17, 2008, extended pension benefits to same-sex partners, moving itself rapidly toward legalized gay marriage. And, like the Lutheran church in Denmark, the Catholic church in Colombia is looking the other way.

To check my “tolerance” suspicions, I then analyzed Puerto Rico and, sure enough, its legislature had just rejected a gay marriage ban in June 2008.

Thus, on July 1, 2008, within two months of Colombia’s and Puerto Rico’s favorable gay rights legislation, we have the timely WVS release of “happiness” data (data that was actually collected in 2006) with standings apparently heavily weighted in favor of “tolerance,” and which miraculously vaults Colombia and Puerto Rico to new, unprecedented, and exalted international heights of happiness. I guess one could reasonably equate happiness with the word gay, but this is getting ridiculous.

Researchers of course will say that their data shows that legalized (tolerant) prostitution, abortion, and same-sex marriages raises a nation’s happiness quotient. But the U.S. mean happiness data, the highest in the world as shown on their own charts, disproves that outcome. Clearly, the WVS Association has a social agenda that ignores its own data.

For my part, maybe happiness is really just an individual’s measure of expectations as compared to our past difficulties or to the status quo, to which the Christian faith plays the more significant role. When asked if we are happy, do we really first check our wallets (wealth)? Or our neighbor’s habits (tolerance)? Or do we simply take a moment to search our souls? University researchers might benefit from asking themselves that question in the future before politicizing their WVS data and expecting us to swallow their results.

Anton Kaiser was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and retired in Rapid City after serving twenty-seven years as a U.S. Army infantry officer. He is a graduate of the United States Military Academy, West Point, and holds Masters Degrees in Business and in Public Administration from Webster College, St. Louis, MO. He is also a veteran of Vietnam, Berlin, Operation Just Cause (Panama) and an honor graduate of the Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, KS.