I'm sorry to say it, but there is already a clear winner in the gay marriage debate: heterosexuals. In the 1970's we absolutely and flatly rejected marriage as oppressive, not to mention the ultimate definition of "square".
We tried every possible alternative. Vigorously.
And yet, we came crawling back, hat in hand, saying we want in too. A major defeat for gay liberation, a major coup for normative heterosexuality.
But, while we were out sowing our wild oats, we learned a few things - you could say we picked up a few tricks. We do marriage differently, and if straight people have any sense, they'll be paying attention. I'm not the first to say it, but in many ways, gay marriage has saved straight marriage from passing into obsolescence.
A lot of heterosexuals are paying attention. A couple weeks ago, Slate's Double X Gabfest had a good discussion about what straight people can learn from gay marriage. They dove deep into all the stuff about gender roles, and differentiation of tasks within couples, and how "gay" marriage shows that those two ideas can be de-coupled, re-arranged, and yet there are often strengths to being different, even unequal, in a relationship. But I was surprised that the Slate commentators didn't want to touch monogamy - or rather the ability to discuss its alternatives - the biggest and best innovation we've brought into the marriage covenant.
Showing posts with label similar gender marriage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label similar gender marriage. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Monday, May 20, 2013
Data Unicorns
How many unicorns are in your data? Sounds like a silly question. But there can be some major problems when we don't think to ask it. Because every dataset has what appear to be unicorns in it - impossible combinations of data made possible because of infrequent errors.
Usually it's not a problem because the unicorns make up a really small proportion of your sample. And if the data combination is in fact impossible, or makes up a tiny proportion of what you're really interested in, you can just ignore them, or even try to "correct" them if you have additional information. But when you're interested in a rare phenomenon, it can be hard to tell the difference between unicorns and the real cases you're interested in.
If the American Red Cross's procedures were followed to the letter, there shouldn't be any because any man who has "had sex with a man, even once, since 1978" is supposed to be excluded. In other words, any apparent gay blood donors should be unicorns –impossible data combinations.
We know that there are some, because every once in a while, someone tests positive during the blood donation screening process, and when they go back to interview the donor, some donors admit to "having sex with a man, even once, since 1978". But we have no idea how many HIV- gay blood donors there are, how many men who are giving on a regular basis without incident, despite the ban.
So, I've been looking at various datasets trying to get a rough idea of how many gay blood donors there are, trying to make the point that the ban on gay male donors isn't just discriminatory, it's also ineffective. And if we could talk with the men who are giving blood regularly without incident, maybe we could develop new exclusion criteria based on what they are doing.
It sounds simple enough, look up how many gay men there are in these datasets, and count how many of them are giving blood. But here's the problem. There are errors in counting who's a gay man, and also errors in counting who gives blood. So, any heterosexual male blood donor who is inaccurately coded as gay or bisexual will appear to be a gay/bi blood donor. As will any gay/bisexual non-donor who is accidentially coded as a blood donor. Let's start out with some plausible (but made up) numbers to illustrate...
Let's give ourselves a decent-sized dataset, with 100,000 men in it. Suppose that 95% of the male population has not "had sex with a man since 1978", and 5% of them have given blood. That's 4,750 straight men who are blood donors.
In the 1970's the Census did a big study where they interviewed people twice, and found that in about 0.2% of the cases, the two interviews resulted in a different sex for the respondent - about one in 500. So, what if 0.2% of these 4,750 guys who are giving blood without bending the rules at all get mis-coded as gay or bisexual - that's about 9 cases of what appear to be excludable blood donors.
Let's just make a guess that instead of 5% of heterosexual men giving blood, that 0.5% of gay/bisexual men do. Then we've got 100,000 x 5% x 0.5% = 25 cases of gay/bi men who are giving blood despite the ban.
So, all told, it looks like there are 34 gay/bi blood donors, but only 74% of them really are gay/bi blood donors.
But what if 0.06% of gay/bi men are really giving blood? Then there would be 3 real gay/bi blood donors, but there would appear to be 12, and only 25% of them would really be gay/bi blood donors. Most of the time, we'd be looking at unicorns.
What's frustrating is that I can't tell the difference between these two scenarios. I can't tell if my unicorn ratio is only 24%, or if it's 75%.
There's another problem, too - with the blood donation questions. Sometimes, people want to inflate their sense of altruism, and they'll say they gave blood in the last year even if it was closer to two years ago. That I can live with, but an even bigger problem is that people get confused by the wording of the question, and they say they've given blood even if all they did was have a blood test at the doctor's office. So, there are some surveys where the blood donation rate appears to be upwards of 25%.
Let's assume that 5% of the population (gay or straight) who haven't given blood say that they have because they mis-understood the question (or that the interviewer was inattentive and hit the wrong button).
Then the number of straight men who say they've given blood would be 10%, not 5%, or 9,500. And if 0.2% of them were mis-classified as gay/bisexual, that would be 19 men who appear to be gay/bisexual blood donors. Then, if we take 5% of the gay/bisexual men as being mis-classified as being blood donors, that would be another 250 men who really aren't blood donors, but appear to be. In that case, if there are really 25 gay/bisexual blood donors, they would make up only 9% of the 294 men who appear to be gay/bisexual blood donors, and if there were really only 3 gay/bisexual blood donors, they would be 1% of the 272 who appear to be blood donors, or in other words, 99% unicorns.
And just to underscore the point, that's coming from errors of 0.2% and 5%.
There is a way to sort through this mess. You'd just need to call the men who appear to be gay/bi blood donors and ask them to clarify on a second interview. The number who would be inaccurately coded twice would be really small, because the relevant error rates are small (0.2% and 5%). But it is unlikely that anyone will do that kind of call-back.
There are a number of other contexts where we should expect to see unicorns in LGBT health research.
One is transgender health. There are a number of States that have been asking BRFSS respondents if they are transgender, and it looks like about 1 in 500 say that they are. But we need to be very careful in researching this population, because if the 1970's Census estimates hold, it's probably not unreasonable to think that 0.2% of the population will inadvertently be coded as being transgender, and that could easily be most of the people identified as transgender in these surveys. Again, the easiest solution is to call people back to verify. But in the absence of a call-back survey, we won't know whether 70% of the people identified as trans are actually trans, or if only 7% are.
Another group heavily influenced by unicorns is married same-sex couples. Before 2004, almost all people identified as married same-sex couples in the United States were unicorns, because it wasn't a legal status available to anyone. Another analysis I'm working on shows that the proportion of people identified in surveys as married same-sex couples who are really married same-sex couples can be as low as 10%, and rarely gets above 50%, but it's getting better in states where marriage is legal.
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| Rob Kelly, Blackout Tattoo Studio, Hong Kong |
Gay Blood Donors
Take, for instance, a paper I've been working on for years about estimating how many gay blood donors there are.If the American Red Cross's procedures were followed to the letter, there shouldn't be any because any man who has "had sex with a man, even once, since 1978" is supposed to be excluded. In other words, any apparent gay blood donors should be unicorns –impossible data combinations.
We know that there are some, because every once in a while, someone tests positive during the blood donation screening process, and when they go back to interview the donor, some donors admit to "having sex with a man, even once, since 1978". But we have no idea how many HIV- gay blood donors there are, how many men who are giving on a regular basis without incident, despite the ban.
So, I've been looking at various datasets trying to get a rough idea of how many gay blood donors there are, trying to make the point that the ban on gay male donors isn't just discriminatory, it's also ineffective. And if we could talk with the men who are giving blood regularly without incident, maybe we could develop new exclusion criteria based on what they are doing.
It sounds simple enough, look up how many gay men there are in these datasets, and count how many of them are giving blood. But here's the problem. There are errors in counting who's a gay man, and also errors in counting who gives blood. So, any heterosexual male blood donor who is inaccurately coded as gay or bisexual will appear to be a gay/bi blood donor. As will any gay/bisexual non-donor who is accidentially coded as a blood donor. Let's start out with some plausible (but made up) numbers to illustrate...
Let's give ourselves a decent-sized dataset, with 100,000 men in it. Suppose that 95% of the male population has not "had sex with a man since 1978", and 5% of them have given blood. That's 4,750 straight men who are blood donors.
In the 1970's the Census did a big study where they interviewed people twice, and found that in about 0.2% of the cases, the two interviews resulted in a different sex for the respondent - about one in 500. So, what if 0.2% of these 4,750 guys who are giving blood without bending the rules at all get mis-coded as gay or bisexual - that's about 9 cases of what appear to be excludable blood donors.
Let's just make a guess that instead of 5% of heterosexual men giving blood, that 0.5% of gay/bisexual men do. Then we've got 100,000 x 5% x 0.5% = 25 cases of gay/bi men who are giving blood despite the ban.
So, all told, it looks like there are 34 gay/bi blood donors, but only 74% of them really are gay/bi blood donors.
But what if 0.06% of gay/bi men are really giving blood? Then there would be 3 real gay/bi blood donors, but there would appear to be 12, and only 25% of them would really be gay/bi blood donors. Most of the time, we'd be looking at unicorns.
What's frustrating is that I can't tell the difference between these two scenarios. I can't tell if my unicorn ratio is only 24%, or if it's 75%.
There's another problem, too - with the blood donation questions. Sometimes, people want to inflate their sense of altruism, and they'll say they gave blood in the last year even if it was closer to two years ago. That I can live with, but an even bigger problem is that people get confused by the wording of the question, and they say they've given blood even if all they did was have a blood test at the doctor's office. So, there are some surveys where the blood donation rate appears to be upwards of 25%.
Let's assume that 5% of the population (gay or straight) who haven't given blood say that they have because they mis-understood the question (or that the interviewer was inattentive and hit the wrong button).
Then the number of straight men who say they've given blood would be 10%, not 5%, or 9,500. And if 0.2% of them were mis-classified as gay/bisexual, that would be 19 men who appear to be gay/bisexual blood donors. Then, if we take 5% of the gay/bisexual men as being mis-classified as being blood donors, that would be another 250 men who really aren't blood donors, but appear to be. In that case, if there are really 25 gay/bisexual blood donors, they would make up only 9% of the 294 men who appear to be gay/bisexual blood donors, and if there were really only 3 gay/bisexual blood donors, they would be 1% of the 272 who appear to be blood donors, or in other words, 99% unicorns.
And just to underscore the point, that's coming from errors of 0.2% and 5%.
There is a way to sort through this mess. You'd just need to call the men who appear to be gay/bi blood donors and ask them to clarify on a second interview. The number who would be inaccurately coded twice would be really small, because the relevant error rates are small (0.2% and 5%). But it is unlikely that anyone will do that kind of call-back.
Unicorns Ahead
One is transgender health. There are a number of States that have been asking BRFSS respondents if they are transgender, and it looks like about 1 in 500 say that they are. But we need to be very careful in researching this population, because if the 1970's Census estimates hold, it's probably not unreasonable to think that 0.2% of the population will inadvertently be coded as being transgender, and that could easily be most of the people identified as transgender in these surveys. Again, the easiest solution is to call people back to verify. But in the absence of a call-back survey, we won't know whether 70% of the people identified as trans are actually trans, or if only 7% are.
Another group heavily influenced by unicorns is married same-sex couples. Before 2004, almost all people identified as married same-sex couples in the United States were unicorns, because it wasn't a legal status available to anyone. Another analysis I'm working on shows that the proportion of people identified in surveys as married same-sex couples who are really married same-sex couples can be as low as 10%, and rarely gets above 50%, but it's getting better in states where marriage is legal.
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Research Directions
Hey there blogfriends, I'm super excited because I'm going to have a first-author paper coming out in a few days - about the racial distribution of trees and pavement across the US - and exploring a few reasons that may explain it, like segregation (yes) and poverty (no). It looks like there's going to be some press on it, so keep an eye out.
And my next first-author paper is getting really close to submission - so it's probably six months to a year from publication. That one's about the influence of living in more segregated cities on the probability of experiencing racial discrimination. That one's pretty interesting - lots of studies within one particular city or another have found that experiences of racial discrimination tend to be less common among Blacks who live in predominantly Black neighborhoods, and more common among Blacks who live in predominantly White neighborhoods. As far as I can tell, ours is the first to look at the degree to which the overall segregated character of the city (and her suburbs) affects reporting of racial discrimination experiences. We're seeing pretty dramatic results in that more segregation results in more experiences of racial discrimination, for Blacks, Hispanics, Whites and Asians.
But what I'm stymied with at the moment is where to go after my most recent first-author paper - showing that gay men are more likely to be in excellent health than straight men... I'd love to get another paper on TBLG health out there, relatively soon, but it's challenging, because I have to do the work on my own dime and my own time. So here's some ideas, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on what would be most helpful (helpful in any sense - informing policy, improving science, satisfying curiosity - whatever greases your gears).
ONE: Improving Identification of Same-Sex Couples in Large Probability Datasets
I know. Boring title. But here's why this has been floating my boat lately. When I was working on gay men in excellent health, I looked at the biggest dataset I could lay my hands on, the BRFSS. There were a fair number of same-sex married couples, even before same-sex marriage was legal anywhere in the US, which struck me as odd. Another thing that was odd is that their demographics (how old they were, how many kids they have, whether they served in the military, etc.) were a lot like heterosexually married people. I figured that what was most likely happening was that a small number of heterosexually-married people were accidentally mis-coded - and ended up being counted as same-sex couples. So, I threw them out of the analysis.
BRFSS is especially vulnerable to this kind of error, but the problem is ubiquitous in any of the large probability samples that get used for research on same-sex couples - and rarely acknowledged.
So what this project would be about is systematically going through the major datasets and trying to estimate how many of the same-sex couples identified are really same-sex couples, and how many are mis-coded heterosexually-coupled people.
The main reason that it's important to do this project is that there are a lot of publications out there claiming that same-sex married couples are "just like" heterosexually-married couples. That may be a comforting message, and there's probably something to it, but a likely explanation that is almost never discussed is that a lot of those same-sex married couples are in fact heterosexuals. If we want an accurate picture, we need actual same-sex couples.
TWO: BLG health in relation to voting on marriage restrictions
OK, so my thesis (never was able to get it published) was about the occurrence of suicide in relation to heteronormativity - the more heteronormative an area is, the higher the suicide rate there - especially for young men. I measured heteronormativity in three ways: the legal status of employment discrimination; how people voted on restricting marriage; how many same-sex couples the Census counted in an area.
Given that nobody seems to care about employment discrimination any more these days, I figure that I should focus on the voting thing. The way I see it, how people in an area vote on restricting marriage to "one man and one woman" is a pretty good heteronormativity thermometer. There are some complications in that the wording is different from State to State, and the change in public attitudes is so rapid that a 60% endorsement rate today probably corresponds to an 80% endorsement rate in 2004. But assuming I can figure out a way to handle that, the other part is finding a dataset that has good BLG health measures in it.
For my thesis, I used the overall suicide rate, and I didn't particularly care whether the people who died of self-inflicted injuries were "gay" or not. In fact, I suspect that the highest suicide risk associated with being gay or bisexual is before one declares openly to anyone else, and even before having sex, so it would be kind of silly to try to figure out who's who after they're dead. But I think that's one of the reasons I had trouble getting anyone interested in publishing it - it seems like people want to know how BLG people are affected by homophobia. Well, I'm interested in how heterosexuals are affected also. I very much doubt that it's a zero-sum game where heterosexuals gain some advantage while BLG people pay the price. I suspect it's much more likely that heterosexuals, too, are harmed by heteronormativity. And since there are a lot more of them, it should be even easier to pin that down. But I digress.
So, I need a dataset that A) is a probability (random) sample of the US, B) has a large sample size (ideally in the 10's of millions, but I'll have to settle for less), C) identifies who is gay, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual, D) has a high degree of spatial resolution so I can figure out what the local homophobia "temperature" is, and E) has decent temporal resolution so I can figure out when people were sampled relative to important dates, and F) has decent measures of health in it.
There are some datasets that come close to fitting the bill, but it's a challenge.
THREE: Transgender health from large population datasets
There's only one publication out there about transgender health based on a probability sample - from the Massachusetts BRFSS. But there's the potential to do so much more. There are seven States that have asked about transgender identity on BRFSS. I'd love to collect the data from all seven, compare the basic demographics of transgender-identified people across the different question wordings & hypothesize about which questions work best. And then get into the health outcomes, much like the Massachusetts study did, but with much more data. I suspect that all of the question wordings are going to have a significant problem much like the same-sex married people identified in large population datasets - that is, even a very small number of errors in the coding of cisgender people is going to be a major headache. There's really only one way to handle that that I can think of - call them back to verify it - but I really can't see that happening anytime soon.
FOUR: The Real Blood Donors of Gaytown, USA
There are just so many things wrong with banning gay blood donors. It made sense in 1985 (and frankly, it would have made even more sense earlier). But it doesn't make sense now, and everyone knows it. Including lots of gay men who donate blood anyway, and increasing numbers of young straight people who won't donate because they don't feel right about the discrimination. I'd love to be part of qualitative research on gay men who give blood. Why do they do it? How does it make them feel? What 'rules' about donating have they made for themselves to decide when they should and should not donate?
There's a lot of interesting policy angles to wrangle through on this issue, but I think getting to know these guys would be really interesting - and informative in coming up with better deferral guidelines.
FIVE: Wage Gap and Death
Strangely enough, there are only a handful of studies out there measuring how sexism affects health at a population level. Most of them use some sort of complicated mash of different ideas into an "index", and I hate indices - you never know what's really going on in there. So I took a simpler approach, just looking at the wage gap between men and women. It varies a lot - there are some parts of the country where women make almost as much as men, and some parts where men make about twice as much as women. What I expected to see was that women's mortality would be higher in areas where men make more. But I saw something completely different: where men make more relative to women, they live longer, but women's mortality is unrelated to the wage gap. I basically put this project on ice because I can't figure out a narrative that makes sense. But I could go back to it if y'all have fresh ideas.
So let me know, what do you think I should work on? And if you're feeling especially generous, for only $62,000, you get to decide.
And my next first-author paper is getting really close to submission - so it's probably six months to a year from publication. That one's about the influence of living in more segregated cities on the probability of experiencing racial discrimination. That one's pretty interesting - lots of studies within one particular city or another have found that experiences of racial discrimination tend to be less common among Blacks who live in predominantly Black neighborhoods, and more common among Blacks who live in predominantly White neighborhoods. As far as I can tell, ours is the first to look at the degree to which the overall segregated character of the city (and her suburbs) affects reporting of racial discrimination experiences. We're seeing pretty dramatic results in that more segregation results in more experiences of racial discrimination, for Blacks, Hispanics, Whites and Asians.
But what I'm stymied with at the moment is where to go after my most recent first-author paper - showing that gay men are more likely to be in excellent health than straight men... I'd love to get another paper on TBLG health out there, relatively soon, but it's challenging, because I have to do the work on my own dime and my own time. So here's some ideas, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on what would be most helpful (helpful in any sense - informing policy, improving science, satisfying curiosity - whatever greases your gears).
ONE: Improving Identification of Same-Sex Couples in Large Probability Datasets
I know. Boring title. But here's why this has been floating my boat lately. When I was working on gay men in excellent health, I looked at the biggest dataset I could lay my hands on, the BRFSS. There were a fair number of same-sex married couples, even before same-sex marriage was legal anywhere in the US, which struck me as odd. Another thing that was odd is that their demographics (how old they were, how many kids they have, whether they served in the military, etc.) were a lot like heterosexually married people. I figured that what was most likely happening was that a small number of heterosexually-married people were accidentally mis-coded - and ended up being counted as same-sex couples. So, I threw them out of the analysis.
BRFSS is especially vulnerable to this kind of error, but the problem is ubiquitous in any of the large probability samples that get used for research on same-sex couples - and rarely acknowledged.
So what this project would be about is systematically going through the major datasets and trying to estimate how many of the same-sex couples identified are really same-sex couples, and how many are mis-coded heterosexually-coupled people.
The main reason that it's important to do this project is that there are a lot of publications out there claiming that same-sex married couples are "just like" heterosexually-married couples. That may be a comforting message, and there's probably something to it, but a likely explanation that is almost never discussed is that a lot of those same-sex married couples are in fact heterosexuals. If we want an accurate picture, we need actual same-sex couples.
TWO: BLG health in relation to voting on marriage restrictions
OK, so my thesis (never was able to get it published) was about the occurrence of suicide in relation to heteronormativity - the more heteronormative an area is, the higher the suicide rate there - especially for young men. I measured heteronormativity in three ways: the legal status of employment discrimination; how people voted on restricting marriage; how many same-sex couples the Census counted in an area.
Given that nobody seems to care about employment discrimination any more these days, I figure that I should focus on the voting thing. The way I see it, how people in an area vote on restricting marriage to "one man and one woman" is a pretty good heteronormativity thermometer. There are some complications in that the wording is different from State to State, and the change in public attitudes is so rapid that a 60% endorsement rate today probably corresponds to an 80% endorsement rate in 2004. But assuming I can figure out a way to handle that, the other part is finding a dataset that has good BLG health measures in it.
For my thesis, I used the overall suicide rate, and I didn't particularly care whether the people who died of self-inflicted injuries were "gay" or not. In fact, I suspect that the highest suicide risk associated with being gay or bisexual is before one declares openly to anyone else, and even before having sex, so it would be kind of silly to try to figure out who's who after they're dead. But I think that's one of the reasons I had trouble getting anyone interested in publishing it - it seems like people want to know how BLG people are affected by homophobia. Well, I'm interested in how heterosexuals are affected also. I very much doubt that it's a zero-sum game where heterosexuals gain some advantage while BLG people pay the price. I suspect it's much more likely that heterosexuals, too, are harmed by heteronormativity. And since there are a lot more of them, it should be even easier to pin that down. But I digress.
So, I need a dataset that A) is a probability (random) sample of the US, B) has a large sample size (ideally in the 10's of millions, but I'll have to settle for less), C) identifies who is gay, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual, D) has a high degree of spatial resolution so I can figure out what the local homophobia "temperature" is, and E) has decent temporal resolution so I can figure out when people were sampled relative to important dates, and F) has decent measures of health in it.
There are some datasets that come close to fitting the bill, but it's a challenge.
THREE: Transgender health from large population datasets
There's only one publication out there about transgender health based on a probability sample - from the Massachusetts BRFSS. But there's the potential to do so much more. There are seven States that have asked about transgender identity on BRFSS. I'd love to collect the data from all seven, compare the basic demographics of transgender-identified people across the different question wordings & hypothesize about which questions work best. And then get into the health outcomes, much like the Massachusetts study did, but with much more data. I suspect that all of the question wordings are going to have a significant problem much like the same-sex married people identified in large population datasets - that is, even a very small number of errors in the coding of cisgender people is going to be a major headache. There's really only one way to handle that that I can think of - call them back to verify it - but I really can't see that happening anytime soon.
FOUR: The Real Blood Donors of Gaytown, USA
There are just so many things wrong with banning gay blood donors. It made sense in 1985 (and frankly, it would have made even more sense earlier). But it doesn't make sense now, and everyone knows it. Including lots of gay men who donate blood anyway, and increasing numbers of young straight people who won't donate because they don't feel right about the discrimination. I'd love to be part of qualitative research on gay men who give blood. Why do they do it? How does it make them feel? What 'rules' about donating have they made for themselves to decide when they should and should not donate?
There's a lot of interesting policy angles to wrangle through on this issue, but I think getting to know these guys would be really interesting - and informative in coming up with better deferral guidelines.
FIVE: Wage Gap and Death
Strangely enough, there are only a handful of studies out there measuring how sexism affects health at a population level. Most of them use some sort of complicated mash of different ideas into an "index", and I hate indices - you never know what's really going on in there. So I took a simpler approach, just looking at the wage gap between men and women. It varies a lot - there are some parts of the country where women make almost as much as men, and some parts where men make about twice as much as women. What I expected to see was that women's mortality would be higher in areas where men make more. But I saw something completely different: where men make more relative to women, they live longer, but women's mortality is unrelated to the wage gap. I basically put this project on ice because I can't figure out a narrative that makes sense. But I could go back to it if y'all have fresh ideas.
So let me know, what do you think I should work on? And if you're feeling especially generous, for only $62,000, you get to decide.
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Insight on Why Gay Marriage is Threatening to Some Christians
New to the blog? Skip to the Highlight Reel.
To me, one of the great mysteries is why so many people feel "threatened" by similar-gender marriage.
To me, one of the great mysteries is why so many people feel "threatened" by similar-gender marriage.
I think I get why some people are skeeved by (male) homosexuality - frankly for the same reason I was before I tried it - the "ick" factor of imagining sexual acts themselves in the abstract before you have any idea what they actually feel like.
So there's the "ick" factor, and its close kin, rank homophobia. And that's probably 80-90% of it right there.
I listen to certain religious right commentators every day - one might say religiously. In particular Bryan Fischer and Tony Perkins. In part because I want to know what they're talking about - they drive so much of the political and social opposition to me just having a normal day - so I want to know what's coming next from them. But I also listen to them because I'm curious, and I really do struggle to understand how they see the world.
I start from the supposition that people usually try to tell the truth (to the degree it is apparent to them), and that people at their base nature are good-hearted. I want to believe that these rabidly anti-gay commentators are honestly representing their perspective. Very often people like Tony and Bryan get written off as being cynical, dishonest, hypocritical. But I don't think that's the case. I actually think that they are giving a full-throated defense of their deeply-held beliefs. We've certainly seen plenty of cases (Larry Craig, Ted Haggart, Eddie Long, George Rekers...) of vehemently anti-gay men who turned out to be turning tricks.
But I think there are also plenty of people, like Tony and Bryan, who aren't hypocritical - they're just critical.
So, that's the crux (so to speak) of the mystery for me - how could a man who is heterosexual to the core, who does not hate homosexuals, yet feels so threatened by homosexuality? So threatened that they can't let a week go by without railing against it on a nationally syndicated radio program.
I finally had an insight about that. Unlike my assumption that people are basically good, and want to tell the truth, a key belief for many Christians is that we are born with a sinful nature, that without the restraints of morality, without the constraints of vows and pledges, we would naturally sin in any and potentially every way. In other words, without their faith and adherence to religious principles and practices, they would be unable to help themselves, and it would only be a matter of time before they finally got around to sinning in a homosexual fashion.
I know that sounds simple, and I can't believe it took me so long to figure it out. I have vague memories of a ninth grade teacher trying to explain "original sin" to me. It sounded like the weirdest work-around. In a lot of ways, listening to these guys is like being in a dream where you understand all the words someone is saying, but the meaning is absent. Except that I think I understand what they mean, but what they are really saying escapes me.
I'll keep listening - so you don't have to.
Monday, November 12, 2012
Minnesota Precinct-Level Marriage Vote Map
New to the blog? Skip to the Highlight Reel.
On November 6, the voters of Minnesota rejected a proposed amendment to their state Constitution:
"Only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Minnesota." It got 48% support, but that support is not at all evenly spread across the state.
Red is in favor of the amendment, green opposed.
The overall trend is that the lowest levels of support were in Minneapolis/Saint Paul, with growing support further from the capitol. It also looks like support for the amendment tended to be a bit lower near the lakes than in land-locked rural areas.
And yeah, it was a lot of work to put this together.
On November 6, the voters of Minnesota rejected a proposed amendment to their state Constitution:
"Only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Minnesota." It got 48% support, but that support is not at all evenly spread across the state.
Red is in favor of the amendment, green opposed.
The overall trend is that the lowest levels of support were in Minneapolis/Saint Paul, with growing support further from the capitol. It also looks like support for the amendment tended to be a bit lower near the lakes than in land-locked rural areas.
And yeah, it was a lot of work to put this together.
Saturday, September 1, 2012
Research Worth Reading: the Regnerus Study
OK, I'm probably not going to make a lot of friends with this posting, but I think most people read this blog because they want to hear my contrarian viewpoints, not because they agree with me.
By now pretty much everyone's heard of the "Regnerus Study" or the "Family Structure Study". Praised by the religious right & a scorpion in the boot of the gay movement, the study leaves precious few without a strong opinion. If you have no idea what it's about, a good summary of the study and the controversy surrounding it was written by William Saletan at Slate.
I spend a lot of time listening to broadcasts from the religious right: Bryan Fischer at American Family Radio, Liberty Counsel, Family Research Council, National Organization for Marriage, etc. You may drink coffee to get up & going - I listen to these folks.
I think it's important to understand where they are coming from, to understand what arguments they use, what they assume to be true, what they believe about people like me, etc. Often people seem to think these folks are crazy, stupid, or both. I don't think that they are, for the most part. The major spokespeople are far from crazy or stupid. However, they are strong partisans, and have interpreted the Regnerus study with a very partisan bias. They have claimed that it proves that children do best when raised by their biologic mother and father, and that children raised by gay or lesbian parents do worse in most areas than children of single parents. It proves no such thing, but I think it is a valuable addition to the discussion.
As many others have pointed out before me, the study does not have a sample of children raised by gay or lesbian parents upon which to make these claims. They asked a bunch of adults some questions about their parents, and classified anyone who claimed to know that their parent had had a same-sex experience as having been raised by gay or lesbian parents. The study had less than a handful of respondents who had been raised by same-sex parents from infancy.
Many people who I agree with on the substance of family studies have said that the Regnerus study should be pulled, that it is fraudulent and academically dishonest. I don't think it is. I think he clearly and accurately described what he did, and although I encourage people to vehemently disagree with his interpretations and conclusions, that the methodology of the study is not inherently flawed, and was not dishonestly presented in publication. As a result, I don't think it should be pulled.
The controversy around this piece has got me thinking in a lot of different directions, so I hope you'll forgive the scattered nature of the next few paragraphs.
Reaction A: Lots of crap gets published. I'd say over 98% of the studies I read have major methodologic weaknesses, and/or come to conclusions not supported by the underlying data they report. And don't get me started on plagiarism - that problem is out of control, and can even be found in esteemed academic publications. When I started trying to write a series on 'research worth reading' about gay health, it was a real struggle to find anything worth encouraging others to read. I went through hundreds of abstracts, read dozens of papers, and came down to a small handful of papers I thought were 'worth reading'.
Which is a far cry from saying that there isn't a lot to learn from all the crud that gets published.
But it does make me reticent to say that the Regnerus study, with all its flaws, is out of bounds when compared to the vast majority of academic publications. Is it 'worth reading' from the perspective that it skillfully addresses the underlying research question with precisely targeted methodology and conclusions that are well founded in the work itself? No on all counts. But, it is worth reading because it presents a very different perspective than most of the family structure studies out there currently, and it provides a methodologic contrast to them that makes it worth thinking about how to build from the methodologic weakness of the entire field something that would be more reliable.
So, if the Regnerus study frosts your buns, as it should, get off your duff and do a better study. The gauntlet has been thrown down & there's no way to force them to pick it up again and say 'my bad'.
Reaction B: Religious right commentators have claimed that there is a strong liberal bias in this field, and that any study like Regnerus's that challenges the pro-LGBT bias is unlikely to get a fair chance at publication. I'm afraid that they may be right on the first of these, although I doubt the latter.
The larger field of marriage and family structure studies has been very heteronormative with respect to lesbian and gay families, to the point that even when there is a same-sex household included in these studies it usually gets classified as a mixed-sex household because the researchers don't even consider the possibility that there might be same-sex households. But among the small number of studies that do acknowledge same-sex parents, this small subfield has been conducted and interpreted largely by partisans on our side of the debate.
I don't know how many anti-gay studies have been precluded from publication, but I doubt it is very many, if any. It is more likely that these studies just haven't been done. A couple possible reasons: 1) our adversaries often claim that it is obvious common sense that lesbian or gay parents are harmful, so there is no reason to confirm common sense (I'm not agreeing with that, just trying to explain why I think only one anti-gay study has been done so far). 2) Lots of people on the right say that they are tired of talking about homosexuality - by which they mean they wish we would just go away and not ever be part of their lives - ouch! But that sentiment, that they are tired of talking about us, carries through to why they would be unlikely to do a scientific study of family structure, valid or otherwise. Why would you invest time and effort into such a study if you were tired of thinking about it and just wished it would go away? 3) Putting the time and effort into such a study thus requires a significant investment in a heteronormative worldview, an obsession that is unusual in society in general, and academia in particular. Gay and lesbian researchers have an obvious interest in this sort of work, but it takes a heterosexual with a real bone to pick to become similarly invested.
Reaction C: I've been perplexed by the widely-held beliefs among the religious right that they are being persecuted by homosexual activists, and that our gains in society have come at their expense. I know that there's no conspiracy to reign in the religious right because I've seen first-hand how LGBT folks organize. We are way too fractious to pull something like that off intentionally. By the same token, I'm deeply suspicious of claims that "the church" or "the Mormons" are acting in concert as often as we think they are.
In the 90's I tried to do a lot of activism around victimization, and I really think that is a self-defeating way to go. It makes you more paranoid and can become self-fulfilling. So my word to both sides - leave the persecution stuff off the table - it doesn't help anyone.
Reaction D: I wonder how a study on family structure could be done in a methodologically convincing way. It's not easy. Regnerus tried (and failed) to get something close to a random sampling of the general population. That's a tough approach to use because children of lesbian and gay parents are still pretty uncommon, and that's the main reason his method failed. The approach mainly used by our side is to find families headed by same-sex parents and try to find a comparable comparison group of mixed-sex-headed families. That's a tough approach because it is very hard to be sure that the comparison group really is comparable. I think the best approach that might be feasible in the short-term would be to piggy-back on some other very large random sample of Americans and do a follow-up survey with all the same-sex-headed households and a matched sample of mixed-sex-headed households. The Current Population Survey would be, I think, an ideal vehicle for such a call-back survey. They interview about 50,000 Americans every month, so there might just be enough same-sex-headed households contacted through that survey to make it feasible. The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System might work too, but it would be a huge logistic challenge to get permission from each state to call people back. The American Community Survey could work too, but because that is done by the Census, we would first need to get Congress to admit that same-sex marriages do in fact exist, and are worth studying.
Reaction E: Why is it important to compare the children of same-sex to mixed-sex households? I'll admit that it is interesting from an academic perspective, but I think most of the interest is generated by the desire to use evidence in policy debates. But should it matter?
A lot of the debate so far has centered on whether the children of same-sex couples are more likely to "turn" lesbian or gay themselves. Most of the studies on 'our' side have claimed that the answer to that question was no -- because our opponents were so fiercely complaining about gay contagion. But I think it's safe to say that the evidence is that kids of lesbian and gay parents are in fact more likely to realize that they are gay, lesbian, and especially bisexual. In 2009, I heard a great talk by Clifford Rosky which really pushed the audience to ask, "So what?". So what if gay, lesbian, and bisexual kids are more comfortable, more self-realized, after growing up in our households? Isn't that a good thing? (The Regnerus study counts being openly GLB as a 'negative' outcome, by the way!)
And that leads me to wonder what possible relevance the Regnerus study, or the studies on our side, should have in regards to public policy. Of course it would be easy and convenient if the children of same-sex parents were equal in all regards to the parents of mixed-sex parents. But would it really matter if that weren't the case? Shouldn't we expect that the children of same-sex parents would be worse off in some ways and better off in others? And even if the impossible were true: that children of same-sex parents were, on average, worse off in every possible measure, should that preclude every same-sex couple from having children or being able to marry? I'm struggling to see the relevance. The children of wealthy parents are much more likely to be diagnosed with autism - should we sterilize the rich?
No easy way I can see to wrap this all up. Thanks for listening, and feel free to chime in!
By now pretty much everyone's heard of the "Regnerus Study" or the "Family Structure Study". Praised by the religious right & a scorpion in the boot of the gay movement, the study leaves precious few without a strong opinion. If you have no idea what it's about, a good summary of the study and the controversy surrounding it was written by William Saletan at Slate.
I spend a lot of time listening to broadcasts from the religious right: Bryan Fischer at American Family Radio, Liberty Counsel, Family Research Council, National Organization for Marriage, etc. You may drink coffee to get up & going - I listen to these folks.
I think it's important to understand where they are coming from, to understand what arguments they use, what they assume to be true, what they believe about people like me, etc. Often people seem to think these folks are crazy, stupid, or both. I don't think that they are, for the most part. The major spokespeople are far from crazy or stupid. However, they are strong partisans, and have interpreted the Regnerus study with a very partisan bias. They have claimed that it proves that children do best when raised by their biologic mother and father, and that children raised by gay or lesbian parents do worse in most areas than children of single parents. It proves no such thing, but I think it is a valuable addition to the discussion.
As many others have pointed out before me, the study does not have a sample of children raised by gay or lesbian parents upon which to make these claims. They asked a bunch of adults some questions about their parents, and classified anyone who claimed to know that their parent had had a same-sex experience as having been raised by gay or lesbian parents. The study had less than a handful of respondents who had been raised by same-sex parents from infancy.
Many people who I agree with on the substance of family studies have said that the Regnerus study should be pulled, that it is fraudulent and academically dishonest. I don't think it is. I think he clearly and accurately described what he did, and although I encourage people to vehemently disagree with his interpretations and conclusions, that the methodology of the study is not inherently flawed, and was not dishonestly presented in publication. As a result, I don't think it should be pulled.
The controversy around this piece has got me thinking in a lot of different directions, so I hope you'll forgive the scattered nature of the next few paragraphs.
Reaction A: Lots of crap gets published. I'd say over 98% of the studies I read have major methodologic weaknesses, and/or come to conclusions not supported by the underlying data they report. And don't get me started on plagiarism - that problem is out of control, and can even be found in esteemed academic publications. When I started trying to write a series on 'research worth reading' about gay health, it was a real struggle to find anything worth encouraging others to read. I went through hundreds of abstracts, read dozens of papers, and came down to a small handful of papers I thought were 'worth reading'.
Which is a far cry from saying that there isn't a lot to learn from all the crud that gets published.
But it does make me reticent to say that the Regnerus study, with all its flaws, is out of bounds when compared to the vast majority of academic publications. Is it 'worth reading' from the perspective that it skillfully addresses the underlying research question with precisely targeted methodology and conclusions that are well founded in the work itself? No on all counts. But, it is worth reading because it presents a very different perspective than most of the family structure studies out there currently, and it provides a methodologic contrast to them that makes it worth thinking about how to build from the methodologic weakness of the entire field something that would be more reliable.
So, if the Regnerus study frosts your buns, as it should, get off your duff and do a better study. The gauntlet has been thrown down & there's no way to force them to pick it up again and say 'my bad'.
Reaction B: Religious right commentators have claimed that there is a strong liberal bias in this field, and that any study like Regnerus's that challenges the pro-LGBT bias is unlikely to get a fair chance at publication. I'm afraid that they may be right on the first of these, although I doubt the latter.
The larger field of marriage and family structure studies has been very heteronormative with respect to lesbian and gay families, to the point that even when there is a same-sex household included in these studies it usually gets classified as a mixed-sex household because the researchers don't even consider the possibility that there might be same-sex households. But among the small number of studies that do acknowledge same-sex parents, this small subfield has been conducted and interpreted largely by partisans on our side of the debate.
I don't know how many anti-gay studies have been precluded from publication, but I doubt it is very many, if any. It is more likely that these studies just haven't been done. A couple possible reasons: 1) our adversaries often claim that it is obvious common sense that lesbian or gay parents are harmful, so there is no reason to confirm common sense (I'm not agreeing with that, just trying to explain why I think only one anti-gay study has been done so far). 2) Lots of people on the right say that they are tired of talking about homosexuality - by which they mean they wish we would just go away and not ever be part of their lives - ouch! But that sentiment, that they are tired of talking about us, carries through to why they would be unlikely to do a scientific study of family structure, valid or otherwise. Why would you invest time and effort into such a study if you were tired of thinking about it and just wished it would go away? 3) Putting the time and effort into such a study thus requires a significant investment in a heteronormative worldview, an obsession that is unusual in society in general, and academia in particular. Gay and lesbian researchers have an obvious interest in this sort of work, but it takes a heterosexual with a real bone to pick to become similarly invested.
Reaction C: I've been perplexed by the widely-held beliefs among the religious right that they are being persecuted by homosexual activists, and that our gains in society have come at their expense. I know that there's no conspiracy to reign in the religious right because I've seen first-hand how LGBT folks organize. We are way too fractious to pull something like that off intentionally. By the same token, I'm deeply suspicious of claims that "the church" or "the Mormons" are acting in concert as often as we think they are.
In the 90's I tried to do a lot of activism around victimization, and I really think that is a self-defeating way to go. It makes you more paranoid and can become self-fulfilling. So my word to both sides - leave the persecution stuff off the table - it doesn't help anyone.
Reaction D: I wonder how a study on family structure could be done in a methodologically convincing way. It's not easy. Regnerus tried (and failed) to get something close to a random sampling of the general population. That's a tough approach to use because children of lesbian and gay parents are still pretty uncommon, and that's the main reason his method failed. The approach mainly used by our side is to find families headed by same-sex parents and try to find a comparable comparison group of mixed-sex-headed families. That's a tough approach because it is very hard to be sure that the comparison group really is comparable. I think the best approach that might be feasible in the short-term would be to piggy-back on some other very large random sample of Americans and do a follow-up survey with all the same-sex-headed households and a matched sample of mixed-sex-headed households. The Current Population Survey would be, I think, an ideal vehicle for such a call-back survey. They interview about 50,000 Americans every month, so there might just be enough same-sex-headed households contacted through that survey to make it feasible. The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System might work too, but it would be a huge logistic challenge to get permission from each state to call people back. The American Community Survey could work too, but because that is done by the Census, we would first need to get Congress to admit that same-sex marriages do in fact exist, and are worth studying.
Reaction E: Why is it important to compare the children of same-sex to mixed-sex households? I'll admit that it is interesting from an academic perspective, but I think most of the interest is generated by the desire to use evidence in policy debates. But should it matter?
A lot of the debate so far has centered on whether the children of same-sex couples are more likely to "turn" lesbian or gay themselves. Most of the studies on 'our' side have claimed that the answer to that question was no -- because our opponents were so fiercely complaining about gay contagion. But I think it's safe to say that the evidence is that kids of lesbian and gay parents are in fact more likely to realize that they are gay, lesbian, and especially bisexual. In 2009, I heard a great talk by Clifford Rosky which really pushed the audience to ask, "So what?". So what if gay, lesbian, and bisexual kids are more comfortable, more self-realized, after growing up in our households? Isn't that a good thing? (The Regnerus study counts being openly GLB as a 'negative' outcome, by the way!)
And that leads me to wonder what possible relevance the Regnerus study, or the studies on our side, should have in regards to public policy. Of course it would be easy and convenient if the children of same-sex parents were equal in all regards to the parents of mixed-sex parents. But would it really matter if that weren't the case? Shouldn't we expect that the children of same-sex parents would be worse off in some ways and better off in others? And even if the impossible were true: that children of same-sex parents were, on average, worse off in every possible measure, should that preclude every same-sex couple from having children or being able to marry? I'm struggling to see the relevance. The children of wealthy parents are much more likely to be diagnosed with autism - should we sterilize the rich?
No easy way I can see to wrap this all up. Thanks for listening, and feel free to chime in!
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Hawai'i and Alaska
This is the fourth in a series of maps showing how people have voted on gay rights at a fine level of detail.
In this post, I showing maps of the first two states to vote on restricting marriage to "one man and one woman" - Hawai'i and Alaska.
In 1993, a Hawai'ian court found that denying similar gender couples the opportunity to marry was in violation of the equal protections guaranteed by the Constitution. After various legal wrangling issues that are too complicated for me to understand, in 1998 the Hawai'ian legislature put the following provision up as a state constitutional amendment, in order to prevent similar gender marriages from occurring.
It passed by one of the widest margins of any such amendments seen, with 285,384 (69%) of the 403,211 votes cast. As you can see in the map below, the vote was pretty uniform across the state, with most polling places voting 60% to 75% in favor.
In Alaska, a similar measure was also referred to the people for ratification to amend the state's constitution in 1998 (I'm still not sure why Alaska was so eager to get on board, or why so many other states held off until later years).
This measure also passed easily, with 152,965 (68%) of the 224,596 votes cast. As in Hawai'i, there was very little regional difference in how people voted on the measure. The inset of Anchorage shows that voters in the state's largest city were no less likely to support restricting marriage. Don't read too much into the large patches of different colors in the North & the panhandle, these are because very few people live in these areas (often fewer than 20 votes cast).
In 2007, the legislature put a non-binding question in front of the voters - basically asking "Hey, we want to make sure that no same-sex partners of state, county, or municipal government workers can get any health care, life insurance, inheritance or anything like that through spousal employment benefits, even if the local government wants to give those benefits - you cool with that?"
And indeed, the voters were cool with that. The measure passed with 60,896 (53%) of the 115,338 votes cast. As far as I know, the Alaska legislature did not go on to propose such a constitutional amendment to deny employment benefits - perhaps they figured out that it would be an easy call for pretty much any judge to see that it wouldn't pass constitutional muster.
In contrast to the vote 9 years earlier, there is a lot more regional heterogeneity in how Alaskans voted on this measure, and you an see a pretty strong gradient from North to South in Anchorage itself. I don't know jack about Anchorage, so I'd be curious if this looks "about right" to anyone with local knowledge. Again, you shouldn't read too much into the large patches in rural areas.
In 2012, Anchorage residents had the opportunity to add sexual orientation to the anti-discrimination statute in the city code. The measure failed, getting only 30,208 (43%) of the 70,431 votes cast. There were some shockingly inflammatory ads run by a group against the measure (for allowing discrimination) that certainly helped tip the balance.
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Sexual Orientation-Related Referenda in Maine, 1995-2009
Third in a series of maps showing how people vote on gay rights. Question 1 was put on the ballot by voter initiative in 2009 to repeal the legislature's act to grant marriages licenses without regard to the applicant's gender.
It passed by a small margin: 266,324 to 238,595.
In 2012, a similar issue will be up before the voters of Maine, essentially a repeal of this repeal, returning the right of Mainers to marry the ones they love.
Then, in 1997, the Maine legislature took the step of advancing civil rights protections to all of Maine's citizens, becoming the fifth state in New England to do so. This move also provoked a response from the same folks who got a "people's veto" on the ballot for 1998 to repeal the new law.
This time, they got their way--it passed by a slim margin in a special election: 145,452 (51%) to 138,153. You can see that the map has a lot more orange and red in it, and there is a more pronounced gradient from the coastal and Southern areas to the rural North.
The legislature took a break on the issue for a few years, but in 2005, again enacted protections for people based on sexual orientation, and this time also gender identity. Again, there was an initiative to veto the legislature's action, leading to an incredibly heated (and expensive) campaign. This time, however, the voters rejected the initiative, finally allowing the law to go into effect, the last state in New England to achieve this status. The final tally was 181,926 (45%) in favor, and 223,274 opposed. You can see in this map that the coastal regions became more supportive of civil rights again, while some of the central regions regressed a bit.
Help make the 2012 election look more like 2005! Lend a hand to Equality Maine.
It passed by a small margin: 266,324 to 238,595.
In 2012, a similar issue will be up before the voters of Maine, essentially a repeal of this repeal, returning the right of Mainers to marry the ones they love.
Want to get involved? Contact Equality Maine.
But 2009 wasn't the first time Maine voters confronted an anti-gay referendum at the polls. On four separate occasions, the voters were asked to consider whether it should be legal to discriminate against people on the basis of sexual orientation.
In 1995, the first of these initiatives asked voters broadly whether any new classification ought to be permitted in the anti-discrimination laws of Maine. In the preceding years, a number of cities and towns in Maine had added sexual orientation protections, and this provoked a vicious response culminating in this voter initiative. Although broadly worded, the referendum was largely understood to be about sexual orientation.
Maine voters rejected this initiative, 221,562 (53%) to 193,938.
Then, in 1997, the Maine legislature took the step of advancing civil rights protections to all of Maine's citizens, becoming the fifth state in New England to do so. This move also provoked a response from the same folks who got a "people's veto" on the ballot for 1998 to repeal the new law.
This time, they got their way--it passed by a slim margin in a special election: 145,452 (51%) to 138,153. You can see that the map has a lot more orange and red in it, and there is a more pronounced gradient from the coastal and Southern areas to the rural North.
The passage of the 1998 initiative in turn provoked a couple of interesting responses. First, the legislature introduced (and got passed) a constitutional amendment so that a voter initiative wouldn't be made into a special election, it would be rolled into the next primary or general election.
The second reaction was that the legislature again passed a law protecting the civil rights of gay men, lesbians and bisexuals, but built into the law that it would need to pass voter approval to become law. This legislative initiative was voted on in 2000, but failed by a tiny margin: 318,846 (50%) to 314,012. You can see in this map that approval increased in the Central part of the State, while the coastal regions became slightly less favorable to gay civil rights. Hmmmm.
The legislature took a break on the issue for a few years, but in 2005, again enacted protections for people based on sexual orientation, and this time also gender identity. Again, there was an initiative to veto the legislature's action, leading to an incredibly heated (and expensive) campaign. This time, however, the voters rejected the initiative, finally allowing the law to go into effect, the last state in New England to achieve this status. The final tally was 181,926 (45%) in favor, and 223,274 opposed. You can see in this map that the coastal regions became more supportive of civil rights again, while some of the central regions regressed a bit.
Help make the 2012 election look more like 2005! Lend a hand to Equality Maine.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
My Evolution on Gay Marriage
My Evolution on Gay Marriage
Back in college, I went to Caroline & Angela's wedding, with all our friends. I'd never been to a wedding before, and I didn't really know what to do. So I pulled out my camera and snapped pictures of everyone as they left the church. Lots of smiles and hugs. Thankfully I brought along a few extra rolls of film.
In the late 80's, there was no gay marriage issue. If two people of the same sex wanted to get married there were a thousand imaginative and creative ways to do it. It didn't occur to me that Angela and Caroline's wedding was representative of anything other than a 'wedding'. By that, I mean it wasn't a 'gay wedding', and I didn't think of it as something revolutionary or controversial. It was, if anything, a fairly conservative thing to do in those days (no offense intended!) And it would be hard to imagine homophobes having any more concern over gay people getting married that gay people buying milk. They would get exorcised about anything gay people might do, but not especially about gay people getting married.
It's hard to know when that changed. I guess it would have been in 1997 or so, when the Hawai'ian Supreme Court determined that the State either had to allow two people of similar genders to marry, or come up with some equivalent.
Still, it wasn't a mainstream issue in the gay community at all. We were focused on employment discrimination protections, hate crimes, and of course AIDS.
I don't remember talking with my friends about the issue at all then. Maybe it came up, maybe not. But if it did, I'm sure we would have talked about it as being an issue that was relevant chiefly to the couples bringing the suit, not something generally applicable to same-sex couples on a national level.
Then, there were referenda on restricting marriage in Hawai'i and Alaska in 1998, and Nevada in 2000. And it became clear that some Evangelicals were getting excited about 'gay marriage' in a way that they hadn't ever been before.
At that point, I was starting to 'feel the burn' as the rhetoric ramped up, but still it wasn't something I devoted much time to. Marriage was a right that I didn't want, and I think most political gays saw the emerging marriage debate as a distraction - it was a franchise very few of us wanted to exercise.
Let me take a step back on that for a minute. Why didn't many of us want to get married?
Because growing up in the 70s and 80s, "being gay" was a bit different than it is now. In order to become gay, to come out as gay, you had to consider the very strong likelihood that it would mean the end of all family ties. You had to essentially give up on the American Dream and start pursuing your own dreams instead. It meant giving up on giving your parents grandchildren. If the popular media was any guide, a sad, lonely life lay ahead.
After coming out, a very different picture was revealed, but before coming out, the whole gay thing looked pretty grim. And that before coming out period, that's when I and many others did a lot of hard work shifting assumptions about what life might lay ahead of us.
Then, once I did come out, I was skeptical when someone talked about getting married or having kids. I thought that was a sign that they hadn't become gay enough - they were still holding on to an impossible future, they needed a bit more time to fully blossom into imagining themselves in one of the many delicious alternative lifestyles we had cooked up.
So, coming back to 2000 or so, from my vantage point, marriage was a very curious right to seek. Marriage, after all, was the most visible symbol of heterosexism, something we felt oppressed by, and rebelled against. If anything, we hoped that heterosexuals would abandon this institution based on a transfer of property (a woman) from one man (her father) to another (her husband). This transfer is still the symbolic center of most heterosexual weddings - the father walks the bride up to the altar, the husband takes her away.
We felt like we were leading the way, creating many alternative models that radically reconceptualized kin relationships. When the subject of gay marriage came up during this time period (from about 2000 to 2004) I would mainly try to dismiss it with a joke like 'how did 3,000 years of enforced gender hierarchy become equality?' I didn't see being able to marry as a form of equality, I saw it as turning our backs on the progress we were making.
So when the radical right accused the gay community of 'wanting to destroy marriage' they were right, in a way. (notice how the language has changed- first we wanted to destroy marriage, then redefine it, now the latest meme they are trying out is that we want genderless marriage). The me in 2004 before the election would have been in complete agreement - genderless marriage would seem to be a great step forward, if the abolition of marriage was out of reach.
But then the 2004 election hit. In advance of the election, I ignored the various anti-gay referenda, still thinking it was a ridiculous sideshow, like banning flag-burning. The way I figured it, there wasn't any great harm in people voting on defining marriage - while we're at it, let's put in a definition saying that my mom bakes the best apple pies in the world.
But in the wake of that election, when it became clear that these referenda were only partly an expression of popular will, but also partly an attempt by Turdblossom and his henchmen to manipulate the election, my views began to shift again.
I still wasn't won over to the fight for gay marriage (or the right to wage war as an openly gay person, for that matter). I still thought (and still think) that the bread-and-butter issues of employment protections and hate crimes are more fundamental. Gay marriage wasn't my first choice, but if that's the battering ram the religious right was using to knock us around with, then we did need to fight back. The religious right had succeeded in putting our movement on the defensive.
And it showed - we had been making tremendously rapid progress, especially in the late 1990's and early 2000's in extending employment protections across the nation. That progress came to a screeching halt as nearly all of our political resources got re-oriented towards the marriage battles. There was still progress being made in adding gender identity protections, but this happened more in jurisdictions that already had gay rights laws than in extending protections in new states and cities.
Another important thing was going on in my life in 2004: I was working on my doctoral thesis. I had written a paper on the fact that teen suicides fell in every state that passed a gay rights law, and since employment protections would presumably have little impact on teens, that this was evidence that changing mores on heterosexism had a demonstrable health benefit.
I was looking for other ways to measure societal homophobia, ideally a continuous measure which could be measured in fine geographic detail, preferably with variation over time.
So from an opportunistic perspective, these votes were a terrific help to me in characterizing local-area sentiments - in the states where these referenda were held, there was a very strong correlation at the county level between higher proportions of people voting to restrict marriage to 'one man and one woman' and teen suicide rates.
Thus, I found myself in a conflicted position. Of course I would prefer it if there was never another referendum on marriage, but the lemonade to make out of those lemons was that how people vote on marriage seems to be an excellent measure of societal heteronormativity, probably down to the neighborhood level.
I must admit, I felt a tinge of glee poring over the 2006 election results, because they enabled me to measure homophobia in a bunch of additional states.
When I presented my thesis in 2006, I was still very much opposed to pursuing gay marriage, and felt that the efforts to engage the religious right over this issue were a huge distraction from a more pro-active agenda that would affect a lot more people on a more fundamental level: keeping a job, being hired, losing housing, etc.
But I also solidified my understanding that the true issue here wasn't marriage - but heteronormativity. And that what was happening was that the debate was becoming less about whether we should exist at all, less about whether hitting on someone was a justification for homicide, and that the fact that the religious right kept making a mountain out of the marriage molehill was because they realized they had lost the ability to keep us silenced, closeted , marginalized. The metaphor of 'the closet' only makes sense when you have to 'come out' of it to change the status of how you are perceived. It works as a metaphor when the assumption of straight until proven otherwise was so ingrained that it wouldn't even occur to heterosexual society to ask whether a fellow who was a bit light in the loafers might be banging dudes (or want to).
But the metaphor of 'the closet' doesn't really work anymore. These days, most youth don't 'come out', they grow up in a world where any sexual orientation is always a possibility: that they may develop with various shades of queerness. Whether an adult has a problem with that or not, we are no longer in a world where everyone is assumed to be straight. We also are no longer in a world where Marcus Bachmann and Paul Cameron can have their claims of being straight taken with a straight face.
So in a way, the death of the closet had pulled the rug from under the Religious Right, and I think that's why they began making a big deal out of this gay marriage thing. Back when I was in college, Caroline & Angela's wedding wasn't a threat to the Religious Right, they could afford to ignore it completely, because in their minds, it was obvious it wasn't legitimate when two people of similar genders tied the knot. The fact that this is now the main issue shows just how far the culture has in fact changed.
Where have I evolved to now? I'm not exactly sure how to describe it. The simple soundbite is that of course people should be able to marry without regard to gender. We should have genderless marriage laws. But at the same time it feels very strange to push this agenda when it is still legal to fire people for being gay; where there is still tacit approval for beating up gay people in many parts of the country, especially if a gay eye lingers "too long"; where the claim "we're just like you" is fast outpacing our efforts not to be just like you: to be more playful, more imaginative, more fabulous.
Back in college, I went to Caroline & Angela's wedding, with all our friends. I'd never been to a wedding before, and I didn't really know what to do. So I pulled out my camera and snapped pictures of everyone as they left the church. Lots of smiles and hugs. Thankfully I brought along a few extra rolls of film.
In the late 80's, there was no gay marriage issue. If two people of the same sex wanted to get married there were a thousand imaginative and creative ways to do it. It didn't occur to me that Angela and Caroline's wedding was representative of anything other than a 'wedding'. By that, I mean it wasn't a 'gay wedding', and I didn't think of it as something revolutionary or controversial. It was, if anything, a fairly conservative thing to do in those days (no offense intended!) And it would be hard to imagine homophobes having any more concern over gay people getting married that gay people buying milk. They would get exorcised about anything gay people might do, but not especially about gay people getting married.
It's hard to know when that changed. I guess it would have been in 1997 or so, when the Hawai'ian Supreme Court determined that the State either had to allow two people of similar genders to marry, or come up with some equivalent.
Still, it wasn't a mainstream issue in the gay community at all. We were focused on employment discrimination protections, hate crimes, and of course AIDS.
I don't remember talking with my friends about the issue at all then. Maybe it came up, maybe not. But if it did, I'm sure we would have talked about it as being an issue that was relevant chiefly to the couples bringing the suit, not something generally applicable to same-sex couples on a national level.
Then, there were referenda on restricting marriage in Hawai'i and Alaska in 1998, and Nevada in 2000. And it became clear that some Evangelicals were getting excited about 'gay marriage' in a way that they hadn't ever been before.
At that point, I was starting to 'feel the burn' as the rhetoric ramped up, but still it wasn't something I devoted much time to. Marriage was a right that I didn't want, and I think most political gays saw the emerging marriage debate as a distraction - it was a franchise very few of us wanted to exercise.
Let me take a step back on that for a minute. Why didn't many of us want to get married?
Because growing up in the 70s and 80s, "being gay" was a bit different than it is now. In order to become gay, to come out as gay, you had to consider the very strong likelihood that it would mean the end of all family ties. You had to essentially give up on the American Dream and start pursuing your own dreams instead. It meant giving up on giving your parents grandchildren. If the popular media was any guide, a sad, lonely life lay ahead.
After coming out, a very different picture was revealed, but before coming out, the whole gay thing looked pretty grim. And that before coming out period, that's when I and many others did a lot of hard work shifting assumptions about what life might lay ahead of us.
Then, once I did come out, I was skeptical when someone talked about getting married or having kids. I thought that was a sign that they hadn't become gay enough - they were still holding on to an impossible future, they needed a bit more time to fully blossom into imagining themselves in one of the many delicious alternative lifestyles we had cooked up.
So, coming back to 2000 or so, from my vantage point, marriage was a very curious right to seek. Marriage, after all, was the most visible symbol of heterosexism, something we felt oppressed by, and rebelled against. If anything, we hoped that heterosexuals would abandon this institution based on a transfer of property (a woman) from one man (her father) to another (her husband). This transfer is still the symbolic center of most heterosexual weddings - the father walks the bride up to the altar, the husband takes her away.
We felt like we were leading the way, creating many alternative models that radically reconceptualized kin relationships. When the subject of gay marriage came up during this time period (from about 2000 to 2004) I would mainly try to dismiss it with a joke like 'how did 3,000 years of enforced gender hierarchy become equality?' I didn't see being able to marry as a form of equality, I saw it as turning our backs on the progress we were making.
So when the radical right accused the gay community of 'wanting to destroy marriage' they were right, in a way. (notice how the language has changed- first we wanted to destroy marriage, then redefine it, now the latest meme they are trying out is that we want genderless marriage). The me in 2004 before the election would have been in complete agreement - genderless marriage would seem to be a great step forward, if the abolition of marriage was out of reach.
But then the 2004 election hit. In advance of the election, I ignored the various anti-gay referenda, still thinking it was a ridiculous sideshow, like banning flag-burning. The way I figured it, there wasn't any great harm in people voting on defining marriage - while we're at it, let's put in a definition saying that my mom bakes the best apple pies in the world.
But in the wake of that election, when it became clear that these referenda were only partly an expression of popular will, but also partly an attempt by Turdblossom and his henchmen to manipulate the election, my views began to shift again.
I still wasn't won over to the fight for gay marriage (or the right to wage war as an openly gay person, for that matter). I still thought (and still think) that the bread-and-butter issues of employment protections and hate crimes are more fundamental. Gay marriage wasn't my first choice, but if that's the battering ram the religious right was using to knock us around with, then we did need to fight back. The religious right had succeeded in putting our movement on the defensive.
And it showed - we had been making tremendously rapid progress, especially in the late 1990's and early 2000's in extending employment protections across the nation. That progress came to a screeching halt as nearly all of our political resources got re-oriented towards the marriage battles. There was still progress being made in adding gender identity protections, but this happened more in jurisdictions that already had gay rights laws than in extending protections in new states and cities.
Another important thing was going on in my life in 2004: I was working on my doctoral thesis. I had written a paper on the fact that teen suicides fell in every state that passed a gay rights law, and since employment protections would presumably have little impact on teens, that this was evidence that changing mores on heterosexism had a demonstrable health benefit.
I was looking for other ways to measure societal homophobia, ideally a continuous measure which could be measured in fine geographic detail, preferably with variation over time.
So from an opportunistic perspective, these votes were a terrific help to me in characterizing local-area sentiments - in the states where these referenda were held, there was a very strong correlation at the county level between higher proportions of people voting to restrict marriage to 'one man and one woman' and teen suicide rates.
Thus, I found myself in a conflicted position. Of course I would prefer it if there was never another referendum on marriage, but the lemonade to make out of those lemons was that how people vote on marriage seems to be an excellent measure of societal heteronormativity, probably down to the neighborhood level.
I must admit, I felt a tinge of glee poring over the 2006 election results, because they enabled me to measure homophobia in a bunch of additional states.
When I presented my thesis in 2006, I was still very much opposed to pursuing gay marriage, and felt that the efforts to engage the religious right over this issue were a huge distraction from a more pro-active agenda that would affect a lot more people on a more fundamental level: keeping a job, being hired, losing housing, etc.
But I also solidified my understanding that the true issue here wasn't marriage - but heteronormativity. And that what was happening was that the debate was becoming less about whether we should exist at all, less about whether hitting on someone was a justification for homicide, and that the fact that the religious right kept making a mountain out of the marriage molehill was because they realized they had lost the ability to keep us silenced, closeted , marginalized. The metaphor of 'the closet' only makes sense when you have to 'come out' of it to change the status of how you are perceived. It works as a metaphor when the assumption of straight until proven otherwise was so ingrained that it wouldn't even occur to heterosexual society to ask whether a fellow who was a bit light in the loafers might be banging dudes (or want to).
But the metaphor of 'the closet' doesn't really work anymore. These days, most youth don't 'come out', they grow up in a world where any sexual orientation is always a possibility: that they may develop with various shades of queerness. Whether an adult has a problem with that or not, we are no longer in a world where everyone is assumed to be straight. We also are no longer in a world where Marcus Bachmann and Paul Cameron can have their claims of being straight taken with a straight face.
So in a way, the death of the closet had pulled the rug from under the Religious Right, and I think that's why they began making a big deal out of this gay marriage thing. Back when I was in college, Caroline & Angela's wedding wasn't a threat to the Religious Right, they could afford to ignore it completely, because in their minds, it was obvious it wasn't legitimate when two people of similar genders tied the knot. The fact that this is now the main issue shows just how far the culture has in fact changed.
Where have I evolved to now? I'm not exactly sure how to describe it. The simple soundbite is that of course people should be able to marry without regard to gender. We should have genderless marriage laws. But at the same time it feels very strange to push this agenda when it is still legal to fire people for being gay; where there is still tacit approval for beating up gay people in many parts of the country, especially if a gay eye lingers "too long"; where the claim "we're just like you" is fast outpacing our efforts not to be just like you: to be more playful, more imaginative, more fabulous.
Saturday, May 12, 2012
NC Amendment One
In the map above, yellow is 50/50, red is more in favor of restricting marriage, green less in favor of restricting marriage.
The green areas you see are mostly urban areas, and most of the rural areas are in the red range.
But there's also a smaller green core to Charlotte than there is to Raleigh/Durham, and the rural areas of the Atlantic Coast and the Appalachian West are more friendly than in the middle of the state.
One conclusion I draw from this is that the generational gap in views on homosexuality may not be nearly as wide as the geographic gaps. What do you see in it?
Friday, March 9, 2012
Could Gay Marriage be Good for Straight Couples?
I'm sure you're familiar with the stock arguments about how similar-gender marriage will hurt heterosexuals: allowing gays to marry will weaken the institution of marriage, make kids confused about their parents, make parents confused about their sex-specific roles, and result in more kids figuring out that they're queer.
You've probably even heard that similar gender marriage will lead to the downfall of Western Civilization.
Never mind that most of that is pure conjecture, and what little evidence there is for the rest of it is pretty unconvincing.
Then, there are the familiar arguments about how similar gender marriage helps queer people: we'll be happier, more likely to get health insurance, custody of children, hospital visitation, inheritance rights, and so on. And, it normalizes queerdom, making it palatable to relatives, co-workers, and friends who have struggled with understanding us. Hey, it might even result in more kids figuring out that they're queer.
Alas, there's not much evidence for these claims either, and what there is is pretty unconvincing.
So maybe it's not so far-fetched to think heterosexuals have as much to gain from similar-gender marriage as we do. What do you think?
You've probably even heard that similar gender marriage will lead to the downfall of Western Civilization.Never mind that most of that is pure conjecture, and what little evidence there is for the rest of it is pretty unconvincing.
Then, there are the familiar arguments about how similar gender marriage helps queer people: we'll be happier, more likely to get health insurance, custody of children, hospital visitation, inheritance rights, and so on. And, it normalizes queerdom, making it palatable to relatives, co-workers, and friends who have struggled with understanding us. Hey, it might even result in more kids figuring out that they're queer.
Alas, there's not much evidence for these claims either, and what there is is pretty unconvincing.
And then there are arguments about how societal recognition of similar gender marriage might be harmful to queers, especially the queerest among us. One of those arguments is that by normalizing queerdom, there will be less space for the funkiest, freakiest, most inventive and transgressive people and ideas in our communities. 
That the open space we create in society for the misfits and wierdos, the queerest of the queer will close up a bit, that the forces of conformity will win out, thus threatening the very best of Western Civilization. Indeed, many have claimed that this process is well underway.
At the risk of repeating myself, the empirical evidence is underwhelming.
But there's a fourth box in this 2x2 table that has been pretty much overlooked: how might societal recognition of similar gender marriage benefit heterosexuals?
I don't know, but I'd like to posit some ideas, and hear yours.
In my last post, I talked about how homophobia is only one of the motivations for the social conservatives' anxieties, there's also a good deal of anxiety about upsetting gender roles in marriage, that marriage might some day be redefined as the union of one woman and one man.
I think it's pretty likely that societal recognition of similar-gender marriage does encourage people to question their gendered assumptions, but I think that's a good thing. What benefits might one expect to flow from that?
That the open space we create in society for the misfits and wierdos, the queerest of the queer will close up a bit, that the forces of conformity will win out, thus threatening the very best of Western Civilization. Indeed, many have claimed that this process is well underway.At the risk of repeating myself, the empirical evidence is underwhelming.
I don't know, but I'd like to posit some ideas, and hear yours.
In my last post, I talked about how homophobia is only one of the motivations for the social conservatives' anxieties, there's also a good deal of anxiety about upsetting gender roles in marriage, that marriage might some day be redefined as the union of one woman and one man.
I think it's pretty likely that societal recognition of similar-gender marriage does encourage people to question their gendered assumptions, but I think that's a good thing. What benefits might one expect to flow from that?
For openers, women in relationships with men might well be on a more egalitarian footing. Might that reduce the incidence of domestic violence? Encourage more women to seek and achieve fulfilling careers outside the home? Bring men's anxieties about being in charge down a notch?
There's some pretty compelling evidence that greater equality between the sexes results in better health for women, and often men do even better in a context of gender equity.So maybe it's not so far-fetched to think heterosexuals have as much to gain from similar-gender marriage as we do. What do you think?
Friday, February 24, 2012
"Traditional" Marriage Definition is Patriarchal, p=0.00000000046
It is a curious thing that voter referenda to restrict the definition of marriage always define it in terms of "one man and one woman", and never as "one woman and one man".
The only explanation I can think of is that marriage, in the eyes of the proponents of these referenda, is not only between people of differing genders, but also hierarchically places one of those genders as dominant over the other. Otherwise, you'd expect the wording to be about half one way, and half the other.
Not saying these are my assumptions, but if one starts from these three premises: 1) marriage is between dissimilar genders, 2) there are but two genders, and 3) these genders are equal; then the probability that each and every one of these 31 referenda happened to list "man" first would be 1/2 to the 31st power, or 0.00000000046, or put another way, 1 chance in 2,147,483,648.
The only explanation I can think of is that marriage, in the eyes of the proponents of these referenda, is not only between people of differing genders, but also hierarchically places one of those genders as dominant over the other. Otherwise, you'd expect the wording to be about half one way, and half the other.
Not saying these are my assumptions, but if one starts from these three premises: 1) marriage is between dissimilar genders, 2) there are but two genders, and 3) these genders are equal; then the probability that each and every one of these 31 referenda happened to list "man" first would be 1/2 to the 31st power, or 0.00000000046, or put another way, 1 chance in 2,147,483,648.
Sounds a lot like a coin with "heads" on both sides.
I think it's safe to conclude that the drafters of these referenda don't abide the second or third premises.
If you pay much attention to the persecution fantasies of the religious right, you'll soon see that a great deal of their anxiety about similar gender marriage isn't about gay or lesbian couples at all - it's never long before they claim that mothers and fathers have distinct and separate roles to play in raising children. And questioning that really threatens their view of the world.
Of course, another way to look at it is that is you want your heterosexual marriage to be on a stronger and more egalitarian basis, you'd be voting against your own interests to exclude similar gender couples from the institution.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
invalid votes
I've been thinking a lot about similar gender marriage lately. And its proponents.
I followed the prop8 trial very closely, even going to observe it two days. I watched every second of the proposition 8 trial re-enactment on YouTube. I've even listened to Family News in Focus to try to understand where the other side is coming from, and how they've interpreted the trial.
I've been absolutely mystified by the approach that the prop8 defendants (protectmarriage.com) took during the trial. It seemed like they opened up a shotgun on one foot, then the other, then still not satisfied, started gnawing off their hands. Their defense was really that incompetent. It can't be unintentional. They must have wanted to lose the case. But why?
I still don't have a good theory on that.
Were they just so cocky that they are going to win in the Supreme Court that they decided not to invest any resources in the trial? That doesn't make sense to me. Why sabotage their own trial if they thought they might have to defend it in the Supreme Court?
Were they hoping to portray the trial as a miscarriage of justice - in essence setting up Judge Walker to take on the unwitting role of an "activist judge"? That makes some sense to me, because they certainly have been making hay in their news broadcasts about how San Francisco justice is about to be foisted on the whole country. But how often (if ever) would they get the opportunity to get a new trial rather than have it appealed up to the 9th district? And is it worth losing the war in order to get a few bucks out of scaring people with the threat of having an activist judge force everyone in the country into a similar gender marriage?
In a related vein, maybe they really need a new front in this battle in order to keep donations up. Now that every state with a voter initiative process has had a marriage restriction amendment of some sort on the ballot, they need a new bogey man, and have found it in this trial. But that is just too conspiratorial for my taste. I believe that these people are earnest in their beliefs. I think that there are some people like Karl Rove who have done some truly cynical manipulation of them, but I think that the vast majority of them, the people giving money, even those running television ministries and organizations to "protect" marriage, are honest and heartfelt, if (from my perspective at any rate) misguided.
And that brings me around to the thought that I started out with when sitting down to write tonight. In the circles I travel, it is easy to be flip and dismissive about the millions of people who voted for proposition 8. I mean, what were they thinking, right?
In response to claims that one wacko judge in California had just over-ruled the entire voting public, I recently posted on FaceBook:
"Correction: one judge AND THE CONSTITUTION invalidated the votes of millions of Californians".
Hey, it's good for a laugh, but after posting that, I've been thinking, you know, invalidating the votes of millions of Californians is really no laughing matter. It's pretty serious business.
It was the right thing to do, but it's also unreasonable for our side to just think, OK, no biggie, now that's over and we're on the right path again. A lot of people did vote, and a lot did vote against us. And now they've just been told that their votes were wrong, unconstitutional, un-American.
It shouldn't be surprising if a lot of them resent having their votes invalidated, and there will probably be some who might be swayed to the right side of the issue, but will resist it just because they feel like their vote was stolen from them.
And that got me thinking about how should we go about acknowledging the hurt of having their votes taken away from them, and still trying to convince them that their position was wrong in the first place? Its thoughts like that that make me glad I'm not a political consultant. I mean, how can you square that circle?
I followed the prop8 trial very closely, even going to observe it two days. I watched every second of the proposition 8 trial re-enactment on YouTube. I've even listened to Family News in Focus to try to understand where the other side is coming from, and how they've interpreted the trial.
I've been absolutely mystified by the approach that the prop8 defendants (protectmarriage.com) took during the trial. It seemed like they opened up a shotgun on one foot, then the other, then still not satisfied, started gnawing off their hands. Their defense was really that incompetent. It can't be unintentional. They must have wanted to lose the case. But why?
I still don't have a good theory on that.
Were they just so cocky that they are going to win in the Supreme Court that they decided not to invest any resources in the trial? That doesn't make sense to me. Why sabotage their own trial if they thought they might have to defend it in the Supreme Court?
Were they hoping to portray the trial as a miscarriage of justice - in essence setting up Judge Walker to take on the unwitting role of an "activist judge"? That makes some sense to me, because they certainly have been making hay in their news broadcasts about how San Francisco justice is about to be foisted on the whole country. But how often (if ever) would they get the opportunity to get a new trial rather than have it appealed up to the 9th district? And is it worth losing the war in order to get a few bucks out of scaring people with the threat of having an activist judge force everyone in the country into a similar gender marriage?
In a related vein, maybe they really need a new front in this battle in order to keep donations up. Now that every state with a voter initiative process has had a marriage restriction amendment of some sort on the ballot, they need a new bogey man, and have found it in this trial. But that is just too conspiratorial for my taste. I believe that these people are earnest in their beliefs. I think that there are some people like Karl Rove who have done some truly cynical manipulation of them, but I think that the vast majority of them, the people giving money, even those running television ministries and organizations to "protect" marriage, are honest and heartfelt, if (from my perspective at any rate) misguided.
And that brings me around to the thought that I started out with when sitting down to write tonight. In the circles I travel, it is easy to be flip and dismissive about the millions of people who voted for proposition 8. I mean, what were they thinking, right?
In response to claims that one wacko judge in California had just over-ruled the entire voting public, I recently posted on FaceBook:
"Correction: one judge AND THE CONSTITUTION invalidated the votes of millions of Californians".
Hey, it's good for a laugh, but after posting that, I've been thinking, you know, invalidating the votes of millions of Californians is really no laughing matter. It's pretty serious business.
It was the right thing to do, but it's also unreasonable for our side to just think, OK, no biggie, now that's over and we're on the right path again. A lot of people did vote, and a lot did vote against us. And now they've just been told that their votes were wrong, unconstitutional, un-American.
It shouldn't be surprising if a lot of them resent having their votes invalidated, and there will probably be some who might be swayed to the right side of the issue, but will resist it just because they feel like their vote was stolen from them.
And that got me thinking about how should we go about acknowledging the hurt of having their votes taken away from them, and still trying to convince them that their position was wrong in the first place? Its thoughts like that that make me glad I'm not a political consultant. I mean, how can you square that circle?
day of decision
This is moments after Judge Walker's decision was announced, before the "whoop" that you've probably heard on TV.
And this is after the "whoop", as the cameras were swinging around trying to find some "human interest".
Then, of course, there's the inhuman interest...
A procession towards City Hall to try to get a couple married. The judge's stay was ordered while these folks were en route.
I had a chat with this lovely couple, who were thrilled to share their special day.
Seth is beaming.
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