Alas, a Blog

A ton of right-wing sites have been linking to this Washington Times article since it was printed last month.

Right away, notice the Times‘ baseless comparison: All gay relationships versus “first marriages in the United States.” That’s apples and oranges – the legitimate comparison would be first gay marriages vs. first straight marriages, or all gay relationships versus all hetero relationships.

But that’s not all that’s wrong with how right-wingers are using this study.

Maggie Gallagher – the anti-gay-marriage-maven of the Marriage Debate blog – has relied a fair amount on this study this week. First, she used it to argue that marriage won’t change gay men:

Then – after Dale Carpenter argued persuasively – with studies – that gay men aren’t all that promiscuous after all, Maggie responded:

So Maggie is relying on the Dutch study a lot – and she’s right, it’s not a junk study. But Dr. Xiridou’s study was intended to track means of AIDS transmission – not to be a representative study of promiscuity among gay men. I’m not certain – I haven’t been able to find a copy of the study thus far (there are many scientific journals named AIDS this or that) – but I suspect Maggie’s and other conservatives’ use of Dr. Xiridou’s study is illegitimate, because they don’t understand how the data was gathered.

First of all, Dr. Xiridou didn’t gather her data herself – according to her abstract, “estimates of parameters relating to sexual behavior were obtained from the Amsterdam Cohort Study.” Now here’s where it gets interesting – reading the background of the Amsterdam Cohort Study, we can get some clues of how their data was gathered.

It’s hard to say from this exactly what is happening – but it sure seems doubtful that this data can be used to prove any of the points Maggie wants it to prove. Why not? Let’s count the ways. (If you don’t want to read the whole list, just read point five – it’s a doozy).

1. Maggie wants to use this data to prove that the Dutch marriage law, instituted in 2001, hasn’t had any effect on behavior. But it’s not clear if any of the data used in Dr. Xiridou’s study was gathered after 2001.
2. It’s very clear that the Amsterdam Cohort Study does not contain a representative sample of Dutch gay men – so, regardless of when the data was gathered, it’s dubious whether any of Maggie’s broad conclusions are supported by this data.
3. Nor, as far as I’ve been able to find out, does Dr. Xiridou’s study provide the data in a way that makes it possible to compare married gay men’s behavior with nonmarried gay men’s behavior. But without this information, it’s irresponsible for Maggie to imply that gay married men are promiscuous.
4. Dr. Xiridou’s study – at least as I’ve seen it described – reports average behavior. But averages can easily be distorted by a small number of extreme cases. A small number of very promiscuous gay men might raise the “average number of partners” figure very high – but that doesn’t tell us anything about how many partners the typical gay man has.
5. At least some of the men in the sample were specifically recruited based on being promiscuous. The first wave of data included only men who had “at least two sexual partners in the six months prior to intake.” In other words, Maggie may be examining data that excluded non-promiscuous men, and using the results to claim that gay men on average are promiscuous. That’s ridiculous.
6. Another wave of the study was specifically aimed at young gay men. Might young men be (on average) more promiscuous – and less interested in marriage – than gay men in general? It’s certainly a possibility.

Now, it’s possible that there’s more information, unknown to me, that makes this data applicable the way Maggie (and other conservatives) have been using it. As I said, I’ve been unable to read the study itself thus far.

But if my understanding of this study is accurate, then it’s irresponsible of conservatives to use this study the way they’ve been using it. If so, Maggie Gallagher (who seems to be honest) will no doubt admit her error and stop citing this study. But there’ll be snowball fights at the Alamo before the Washington Times prints a retraction..

Ironically, gay marriage opponents are a bigger threat to marriage’s continuing legitimacy than gay marriage itself.

With each passing generation, anti-gay bigotry is seen as less acceptable. Fifty years ago, no politician would have dared to express support for gays in public; today, even conservative politicians feel obligated to stress that they’re not being judgmental of gays even as they support anti-gay laws. (Hence, asked about gay marriage, George Bush’s first response was “I am mindful that we’re all sinners. And I caution those who may try to take the speck out of the neighbor’s eye when they’ve got a log in their own.”)

Moreover, poll after poll after poll shows that the younger generation is far more supportive of gay rights – including gay marriage – than previous generations. This matches my experience; many of my heterosexual friends have questioned if they’ll get married or not because they’re not sure they want to be part of an exclusionary and homophobic institution.

If lesbians and gays continue to be locked out of marriage, marriage itself will lose legitimacy. It will be seen as something done by the homophobic and backward, rather than something decent, non-bigoted people do. If folks like Eve and Maggie Gallagher really want to preserve marriage as an institution, they better hope that they continue losing the same-sex marriage debate.

UPDATE: Will Baude of Crescat Sententia disagrees (politely, of course). The permalink doesn’t seem to be working, but you can go to August 7 2003 and then scroll down to “gay marriage.”.

I read in Newsday that Jordon’s new parliment has rejected a couple of women’s rights laws – they turned down women’s right to get a divorce, and also came out against harsh penalties for “honor killings” of women. Why? Because the laws would “encouraged family disintegration.”

Oddly enough, that’s pretty much the exact same reason Maggie Gallagher and her fellow-travelers oppose gay marriage. And by Maggie’s logic, the anti-woman Jordanians are correct (I’m not even certain that Maggie disagrees with Islamic fundamentalists who oppose what Maggie calls “unilateral divorce”). Maggie’s argument comes down to a kind of social “precautionary principle” – unless we can say for certain that the overall effects of a change to any important social institution will not be negative, we should not change that institution. It is not that Maggie has anything against gay people; rather, she thinks the risk to society if gays have equal rights is too great:

But if we accept Maggie’s logic, we must conclude that no change to marriage, historically, has ever been justified. Giving women the right to divorce could, in theory, lead to higher divorce rates (and probably will in practice, if Jordon’s women ever get equal rights). Discouraging honor killings of women could, in theory, lead to greater promiscuity and adultery. Allowing blacks and whites to marry could, in theory, have discouraged racists from marrying and thus degraded marriage – just as Maggie argues allowing gay marriage will discourage homophobes from marrying today. Outlawing rape within marriage could have degraded marriage by giving women new grounds for divorce. Etc, etc.

In each of these cases – in the United States, at least – it was eventually decided that social justice is too important to put off indefinitely because of purely theoretical future harms to marriage. And, in retrospect, most of us feel that’s a good thing; we prefer non-racist marriage laws, we prefer women to have equal rights, and – in the near future, I believe – we will prefer gays to have equal rights, too..

Eve Tushnet yesterday blogged her brief against gay marraige. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me – and, despite Eve’s effort to put her argument in entirely secular terms, I suspect it wouldn’t make sense to most atheists.

Eve’s first step is a “just-so” story – she asks what the purpose of marriage in our society. By an amazing coincidence, most of the answers Eve came up with imply heterosexuality:

(Maggie Gallagher, answering a similar question, said “The three classic goods of marriage in our common tradition are children, mutual caretaking, and sexual regulation, not necessarily in that order,” which I think I find a little more convincing).

Quibbles aside, I agree that marriage historically developed to meet the needs of opposite-sex couples; for most of the history of marriage’s development, after all, there were virtually no publicly acknowledged same-sex romantic couples. However, it’s also true that in the United States marriage historically developed to meet the needs of same-race couples. Eve could argue, I suppose, that miscegenation laws weren’t an important element of marriage considered over thousands of years. But in that case, we must acknowledge that in most of the world, marriage historically developed to merge a family between a subservient class with few legal rights (women) and the master class (men).

The fact is, the original conditions that marriage was designed for no longer apply. The races now intermarry with no harm to marriage. Women and men are – if not entirely equal classes – certainly much closer to equal than when marriage first evolved (at some cost to marriage, in that fewer women nowadays stay in marriage out of fear of starvation). Despite these changes, however, marriage still serves to provide children with stable families; to be a ceremony of transition to adulthood; and to channel sexual desire.

Is there any reason to think this will cease to be the case if same-sex marriage is acknowledged?

None that I’ve seen. Eve has promised to write a post describing “the “mechanism” by which same-sex marriage will weaken reg’lar old marriage”; I’ll be looking forward to it, since it seems to me this is the big “missing link” in the anti-gay-marriage argument..