Demand for Same-Sex Marriages / Jon Rauch

I haven't yet read IMAPP's new paper on utilization of same-sex marriage, but Gary Gates, a demographer at UCLA, drew my attention to this Washington Post article, in which he notes that "that a sharply higher percentage of gays and lesbians were deciding marry than heterosexuals of marrying age." Gary tells me:

The math behind this is that about 2.2 million marriages occur in the US in a given year out of a possible 96 million unmarried people. That’s about 4.4 million married people out of 96 million or 4.5%. Maggie’s study suggests 13.6% of gay people married in Massachusetts.

Speaking generally (not about IMAPP's paper), these marriage prevalence/rate comparisons are a thorny business. On the one hand, you'd expect pent-up demand to produce somewhat higher marriage rates after SSM legalization, which may be what Gates is picking up in Massachusetts. On the other hand, we're dealing with a population that has been socialized outside of marriage for generations. I've always advocated SSM not just because it will meet demand in the gay population for marriage but also because, over time, it will create demand for marriage.

It's also important to compare rates to rates and prevalence to prevalence. Most straight people eventually marry (high prevalence), but in any given year only a small fraction of the straight population marries (that's the annual marriage rate). A fairly common mistake--made, for instance, by David Frum in a National Review article of March 28, 2005--notes that a small percentage of the estimated homosexual population has married in (say) the year or two since gay marriage became available, and then compares the tiny fraction of gays who are married with the large majority of straights who are married, concluding, as Frum did of Canada:

...very few homosexuals wish for marriage for themselves... Within the first year, about 4,000 Canadian couples had been married in Ontario. Since then, the number of same-sex marriages seems to have dropped off. Current statistics are hard to come by, but it's a good guess that nearly two years after same-sex marriage arrived in Canada some 98 percent of adult Canadian gays have chosen not to avail themselves of their new legal right.

Taking a closer look, Samuel Bell, of Raleigh, NC (in a letter to Independent Gay Forum...the letter is no longer online), pointed out that

only about 1.1% of all Canadian gays got married during that year [2003-2004, after gay marriage was legalized in several provinces of Canada]. In that same period, about 300,000 out of 23,250,000 marriageable heterosexual Canadians got married, which amounts to approximately 1.3% of the heterosexual population. Thus, the heterosexual marriage rate was similar to the gay marriage rate.

In other words, some 98 percent of straight Canadians also chose not to avail themselves of their right to marry in the year after gay marriage was legalized.

I'm confident that IMAPP will not have made that mistake, but it's worth noting that, even if gays married at the same rate as straights (or, for that matter, at higher rates), many years would pass before marriage prevalence could match in the gay and straight populations. Maggie G. and I disagree on whether SSM would build or erode the marriage culture, but we probably do agree that, either way, it's not a quick process.

posted by Jon at 2:14 PM | link

At 4/27/2006 3:18 PM,  chairm said...

Jon, I think that the share of the adult homosexual population living in some verson of same-sex household (about 11%) lends credence to the lower estimates of participation in SSM where enacted.

Also, of course, early counts after enactment will reflect initial "pent-up" response to sudden availability.

As for comparisons with the rest of the adult population, I think the participate rate (newlyweds per 1,000 unmarried) has been on a downard trend for long enough that it may eventually meet the low participation rate of homosexual adults in same-sex houseolds (SSM or otherwise). If the trends line cross low on the charts, that would not be a good sign of the times.

I'd be interested to see data on the individuals who participate in SSM where enacted -- whether it be in the form of a merging with marital status or civil union, domestic partnership, or register/formalized cohabitation.

I suspect that an individual's having been previously married (as in with a person of the other sex) would be the most significant predictor of participation in SSM. Second factor: custodial parent of children from man-woman relationship (typically marriage).

SSM is imitative of the marriage both in concept and in practrice. The marrying type among homosexual adults is probably an ex-married who migrated to a same-sex household and would create a "blended", or step, family.

 

At 4/27/2006 3:55 PM,  Anonymous said...

Can you really say that 98% of straight Canadians chose not to avail themselves of marriage when, as you stated earlier, most of them were already married?

 

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