MARRIAGEDEBATE.COM--MAIN BLOG

ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES, A SHORTAGE OF MEN: NY Times

2010-02-08T11:22:00.002-05:00

feature:

...North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges. Women have represented about 57 percent of enrollments at American colleges since at least 2000, according to a recent report by the American Council on Education. Researchers there cite several reasons: women tend to have higher grades; men tend to drop out in disproportionate numbers; and female enrollment skews higher among older students, low-income students, and black and Hispanic students. ...

Students interviewed here said they believed their mating rituals reflected those of college students anywhere. But many of them — men and women alike — said that the lopsided population tends to skew behavior.

“A lot of my friends will meet someone and go home for the night and just hope for the best the next morning,” Ms. Lynch said. “They’ll text them and say: ‘I had a great time. Want to hang out next week?’ And they don’t respond.”

Even worse, “Girls feel pressured to do more than they’re comfortable with, to lock it down,” Ms. Lynch said.

As for a man’s cheating, “that’s a thing that girls let slide, because you have to,” said Emily Kennard, a junior at North Carolina. “If you don’t let it slide, you don’t have a boyfriend.”

SING IT SISTER

2010-02-05T20:57:00.002-05:00

A customer reviewer of Constance Ahrons' The Good Divorce writes:

My parents read this book as they were considering separating. It convinced them that there was no reason to resolve their differences, and that our family would be somehow stronger. It absolutely gives unhappy people the unfounded expectation that if they can just be friendly with each other, negative effects
can be completely avoided. In the end it made my parents separation all the more painful for me and my adult siblings, because it built an expectation that divorce would be easy on everyone. When it wasn’t, the only response was to blame us kids, because they were working really hard at their “good” divorce.

QUICK RESPONSE TO STUDY OF ABSTINENCE EDUCATION: NY Times

2010-02-05T09:01:00.001-05:00

reports:

...In Dr. Jemmott’s research, only about a third of the students who participated in a weekend abstinence-only class started having sex within the next 24 months, compared with about half who were randomly assigned instead to general health information classes, or classes teaching only safer sex. Among those assigned to comprehensive sex-education classes, covering both abstinence and safer sex, about 42 percent began having sex.

Dr. Jemmott’s research followed 662 African-American students at urban middle schools, who were paid $20 a session to attend the classes, plus follow-up and evaluation sessions. The abstinence-only classes covered HIV, abstinence and ways to resist the pressure to have sex.

“Because African-Americans tend to have a higher rate of early sexual initiation than others, we thought that within two years, a reasonable number would start having sex,” Dr. Jemmott said. “If we went younger, we couldn’t show that intervention works.”

The research, published in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, appears just as the Obama administration is eliminating federal financing for abstinence-only programs, and starting a pregnancy-prevention initiative that will finance programs that have been shown in scientific studies to be effective. ...

Ms. Brown noted that the abstinence-only classes in the Jemmott study centered on people with an average age of 12 and that unlike the federally supported abstinence programs now in use, did not advocate abstinence until marriage.

The classes also did not portray sex negatively or suggest that condoms are ineffective, and contained only medically accurate information. Dr. Jemmott’s abstinence-only course was designed for the research, and is not in current use in schools.

HARMAN VICTORY SEES FATHERS GET PATERNITY LEAVE SO MOTHERS CAN RETURN TO WORK: Telegraph (UK)

2010-02-04T22:10:00.001-05:00

reports:

The father will be allowed to take time off work to replace the last three months of his partner's nine-month maternity leave.

He would be eligible during the three month period to statutory Government pay of £123 a week.

After nine months, fathers will even have the right the stay off work unpaid for another three months.

Ministers believe it will allow mothers who earn more than their partners to return earlier to work than has otherwise been possible.

Government data has shown that around 350,000 expectant mothers a year are at work. Around two thirds return to work.

It represents a victory for Harriet Harman, the Equalities Minister, who has championed the cause in a bitter Cabinet battle with Lord Mandelson who has fought for business to be spared the extra administrative and financial burden.

Under the current laws, fathers are allowed two weeks paternity leave when their child is born. That will continue, but after the mother has spent six months of leave she can then return to work and allow the father to take the remaining three month’s statutory paid leave and up to six months in total off work.

The new paternity changes will come into force in April next year and parents will be able to use the new transferable right to leave for children born after that date.

MOURNING THE LOSS OF EXPECTATIONS: Allison Amend

2010-02-04T22:06:00.002-05:00

in the NY Times:

...When my cellphone rang a week later I was already crying, driving to the airport to attend my aunt’s funeral. My boyfriend had dumped me suddenly that morning via e-mail after I’d just flown 3,000 miles to visit him and his family. When my doctor said, “I have bad news,” I pulled over.

“You’re in premature ovarian failure,” she said. “It’s causing early onset menopause. I don’t know how to tell you this: You won’t be able to have children.”

“O.K.,” I said. I was waiting for the next part of the sentence, the medical way around the problem. I had low thyroid function; I took a pill. I suffered from depression; a few drugs made it bearable. In my experience, medical lemons were almost always followed by a prescription for lemonade. I felt strangely calm, detached, as though we were talking about characters on television.

She said, with believable regret, “I’m very sorry to have to tell you this.” ...

They pitied me, blamed themselves. They had always assumed there would be grandchildren, just as I had always assumed there would be children. They were suffering a loss as well. They were disappointed, however much they tried to disguise it. It felt like they were disappointed in me.

KY COURT OK'S JOINT CUSTODY FOR LESBIAN EX-COUPLE: Associated Press

2010-02-04T22:00:00.003-05:00

reports:

A one-time lesbian couple will have shared custody of the child they had together and raised before splitting up, the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled Jan. 21.

The high court in Frankfort approved the couple's joint custody agreement and ruled that one of the women, Arminta Jane Mullins, acted as a "de facto parent" with her partner, Phyllis Dianne Picklesimer. ...

Picklesimer gave birth to the boy in 2005. The couple filed a joint custody agreement in February 2006 in Garrard County and split up two months later. Picklesimer denied Mullins contact with the boy that September, prompting Mullins to go to court to see the child.

Justice Wil Schroeder wrote for the court's majority that the women made multiple decisions about the child before and after he was born, with Mullins caring for the boy while the couple was together and for five months after they split.

"This would distinguish the nonparent acting as a parent to the child from a grandparent, a baby sitter, or a boyfriend or girlfriend of the parent, who watched the child for the parent, but who was never intended by the parent to be doing so in the same capacity of another parent," Schroeder wrote. ...

Eighteen states recognize "de facto parents" over the objections of fit biological parents: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah, West Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.

Defending David Blankenhorn - Maggie Gallagher - The Corner on National Review Online

2010-02-03T19:21:00.000-05:00

Defending David Blankenhorn - Maggie Gallagher - The Corner on National Review Online

BLANKENHORN TESTIMONY IN PROP 8 TRIAL -- THE MEDIA STORY VS. THE STORY

2010-02-03T15:40:00.003-05:00

Last week my colleague David Blankenhorn was an expert witness for the defense in the Perry vs. Schwarzenegger trial, in which the plaintiffs seek to overturn Proposition 8. It is widely expected that, whatever the outcome, the case will be appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and then the U.S. Supreme Court. Not surprisingly, there was widespread media coverage of his testimony.

One theme that emerged from those critical of Blankenhorn’s testimony was that plaintiff attorneys under cross-examination had maneuvered him into “admitting” or “conceding” that gay marriage could be good for children, or that he was “forced to” admit that he had made positive statements about gay marriage in the past.

Examples include the Los Angeles Times, the Keen News Service, and notably Howard Mintz of the San Jose Mercury News, whose running blog commentary was widely cited and who posted approximately every 45 minutes during Blankenhorn’s two days of testimony (on the 11th and 12th days of the trial).

In fact, Blankenhorn has been making the argument that there are “goods in conflict” in the same sex marriage debate – and that there might be some good reasons for gay marriage – since at least 2004, and developed the argument at length in his 2007 book, The Future of Marriage.

On a more reflective note, Margaret Talbot, who authored a New Yorker piece on the trial before it began, posted twice on the New Yorker blog about Blankenhorn’s testimony and was one of the few mainstream journalists to note his longstanding concerns out of which his position on same sex marriage grows. She writes that he has a “record of genuine concern for the well-being of children, and he has been eloquent for a long time about a very real social problem—the decline of marriage, especially among poor and less-educated Americans, and the harms, economic and emotional, this entails for children.”

She wrote again about his testimony, here.

As coverage continues, this week dawned with the news that a group of Hollywood actors have come together to reenact the trial in a video series posted at www.marriagetrial.com. The Wall Street Journal Law Blog announced that “star defense witness David Blankenhorn” will be played by Gregory Itzin, an actor who plays the president in the hit television series “24.”

Stay tuned.

WILL GAY MARRIAGE BENEFIT CHILDREN OF SAME-SEX COUPLES?: Maggie Gallagher

2010-02-03T00:11:00.002-05:00

blogs:

...How does marriage benefit children? The answer is not that marriage confers general respectability or practical benefits. If that were true, then children in remarried families would do better than children with unmarried parents. And they don't, on average.

Marriage benefits children to the extent that it keeps the child's own mother and father in a permanent, not-too-high-conflict union. ...

I do not think same-sex marriage will serve child well-being in any appreciable way, and I don't think there is much sign that that is the goal. The gay community is by and large supporting same-sex marriage as a right, not as a norm at all. Relatively few same-sex couples enter same-sex marriages [PDF] and the dissolution rates (at least in Sweden, where we have hard data) are extraordinarily high (roughly 50 percent higher for gay men, 100 percent higher for lesbian couples [PDF]).

SEX ED IN WASHINGTON: Ross Douthat

2010-02-03T00:07:00.002-05:00

in the NY Times:

Liberals hated almost everything about George W. Bush’s presidency, but they harbored a particular animus toward a minor domestic policy priority: abstinence-based sex education. The abstinence effort accounted for about a hundred million dollars in a trillion-dollar budget, but in the eyes of many critics it was Bushism at its worst — contemptuous of experts, careless about public health and captive to religious conservatism.

So last week’s news that teenage birthrates inched upward late in the Bush era, after 15 years of steady decline, was greeted with a grim sort of satisfaction. Bloggers pounced; activists claimed vindication. On CBS News, Katie Couric used the occasion to lecture viewers about the perils of telling kids only about abstinence, and ignoring contraception. The new numbers, declared the president of Planned Parenthood, make it “crystal clear that abstinence-only sex education for teenagers does not work.”

In reality, the numbers show no such thing. Abstinence financing increased under Bush, but the federal government has been funneling money to pro-chastity initiatives since early in Bill Clinton’s presidency. If you blame abstinence programs for a year’s worth of bad news, you’d also have to give them credit for more than a decade’s worth of progress.

More likely, neither blame nor credit is appropriate. The evidence suggests that many abstinence-only programs have little impact on teenage sexual behavior, just as their critics long insisted. But most sex education programs of any kind have an ambiguous effect, at best, on whether and how teens have sex. The abstinence-based courses that social conservatives champion produce unimpressive results — but so do the contraceptive-oriented programs that liberals tend to favor. ...

None of this renders the abstinence-versus-contraception debate pointless. But we should understand it more as a battle over community values than as an argument about public policy. Luker describes it, aptly, as a conflict between the “naturalist” and “sacralist” approaches to sex — between parents in Berkeley, say, who don’t want their kids being taught that premarital intercourse is something to feel ashamed about and parents in Alabama who don’t want their kids being lectured about the health benefits of masturbation.

ABSTINENCE-ONLY PROGRAMS MIGHT WORK, STUDY SAYS: Washington Post

2010-02-03T00:03:00.000-05:00

reports:

Sex education classes that focus on encouraging children to remain abstinent can persuade a significant proportion to delay sexual activity, researchers reported Monday in a landmark study that could have major implications for U.S. efforts to protect young people against unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

Only about a third of sixth- and seventh-graders who completed an abstinence-focused program started having sex within the next two years, researchers found. Nearly half of the students who attended other classes, including ones that combined information about abstinence and contraception, became sexually active.

The findings are the first clear evidence that an abstinence program could work.

"I think we've written off abstinence-only education without looking closely at the nature of the evidence," said John B. Jemmott III, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who led the federally funded study. "Our study shows this could be one approach that could be used."

The research, published in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, comes amid intense debate over how to reduce sexual activity, pregnancies, births and sexually transmitted diseases among children and teenagers. After falling for more than a decade, the numbers of births, pregnancies and STDs among U.S. teens have begun increasing.

The Obama administration eliminated more than $170 million in annual federal funding targeted at abstinence programs after a series of reports concluded that the approach was ineffective. Instead, the White House is launching a $114 million pregnancy prevention initiative that will fund only programs that have been shown scientifically to work -- a program the administration on Monday proposed expanding to $183 million.

more--and there's quite a bit of interest in the rest of the piece

MANY SUCCESSFUL GAY MARRIAGES SHARE AN OPEN SECRET: New York Times

2010-02-02T00:38:00.001-05:00

reports:

When Rio and Ray married in 2008, the Bay Area women omitted two words from their wedding vows: fidelity and monogamy.

“I take it as a gift that someone will be that open and honest and sharing with me,” said Rio, using the word “open” to describe their marriage.

Love brought the middle-age couple together — they wed during California’s brief legal window for same-sex marriage. But they knew from the beginning that their bond would be forged on their own terms, including what they call “play” with other women.

As the trial phase of the constitutional battle to overturn the Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage concludes in federal court, gay nuptials are portrayed by opponents as an effort to rewrite the traditional rules of matrimony. Quietly, outside of the news media and courtroom spotlight, many gay couples are doing just that, according to groundbreaking new research.

A study to be released next month is offering a rare glimpse inside gay relationships and reveals that monogamy is not a central feature for many. Some gay men and lesbians argue that, as a result, they have stronger, longer-lasting and more honest relationships. And while that may sound counterintuitive, some experts say boundary-challenging gay relationships represent an evolution in marriage — one that might point the way for the survival of the institution.

New research at San Francisco State University reveals just how common open relationships are among gay men and lesbians in the Bay Area. The Gay Couples Study has followed 556 male couples for three years — about 50 percent of those surveyed have sex outside their relationships, with the knowledge and approval of their partners.

That consent is key. “With straight people, it’s called affairs or cheating,” said Colleen Hoff, the study’s principal investigator, “but with gay people it does not have such negative connotations.”

The study also found open gay couples just as happy in their relationships as pairs in sexually exclusive unions, Dr. Hoff said. A different study, published in 1985, concluded that open gay relationships actually lasted longer.

None of this is news in the gay community, but few will speak publicly about it. Of the dozen people in open relationships contacted for this column, no one would agree to use his or her full name, citing privacy concerns. They also worried that discussing the subject could undermine the legal fight for same-sex marriage.

A LEGAL PUZZLE: CAN A BABY HAVE THREE BIOLOGICAL PARENTS?: Adam Cohen

2010-02-02T00:34:00.003-05:00

in the New York Times:

...Researchers at the Oregon National Primate Research Center were looking for ways to eliminate diseases that can be inherited through maternal DNA. They developed, as the magazine Nature reported last summer, a kind of swap in which defective DNA from the egg is removed and replaced with genetic material from another female’s egg. The researchers say the procedure is also likely to work on humans.

The result would be a baby with three biological parents — or “fractional parents,” as Adam Kolber, a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, calls them.

He mentioned the idea over lunch at The Times, and it provided plenty of grist for debate among law junkies: Could a baby one day have 100 parents? Could anyone who contributes DNA claim visitation rights? How much DNA is enough? Can a child born outside the United States to foreigners who have DNA from an American citizen claim U.S. citizenship? ...

Since the 1960s, there has been a shift toward recognizing people’s intent in creating familial relationships, as reflected in the rise of no-fault divorce, prenuptial agreements and civil unions. But when it comes to deciding parenthood, courts remain deeply influenced by biology, even when it clashes with intent.

This concern is playing out now in A.G.R. v. D.R.H. & S.H., the biggest surrogacy case in New Jersey since Baby M’s. A woman served as a surrogate for her brother and his male spouse, giving birth to twins conceived with the spouse’s sperm and donor eggs. She signed a contract agreeing that her brother would adopt the children, but the trial court, saying it was following the Baby M decision, ruled that the spouse and the surrogate mother are the legal parents. The surrogate’s brother was given no parental rights.

REENGINEERING THE FAMILY: Heather Mac Donald

2010-02-02T00:27:00.004-05:00

in National Review Online:

An image from a TV ad for gay marriage, reproduced in the January 18 New Yorker, provides a Rorschach test for reactions to America’s ongoing revolution in family structure. Two men in black suits stand shoulder-to-shoulder in a group of people, looking into each other’s eyes. In their arms are two newborns in white baby clothes and blankets. Though it’s not immediately apparent from the photo, the men are at a baptism for their infants. The ad, still being test-marketed, is called “Family Values,” and is intended to emphasize the “conventionality of gay couples,” explains The New Yorker.

If your reaction to the image is: “Where’s the mother(s)?” you may not yet be fully on board the “conventionality” bandwagon. If your reaction to the foregoing question, however, is: “Why does it matter?” then you are keeping pace with the revolution. “Why does it matter?” may ultimately prove the more appropriate response, but no one should pretend that it represents anything other than a radical revision of the traditional relationship between parents and children — one whose consequences no one can predict.

Every time a homosexual couple conceives a child, there is another parent offstage somewhere whose sperm or egg has allowed conception to occur (and, in the case of male homosexuals, whose womb has allowed gestation to occur). In some homosexual families, that parent will be involved in his child’s life; in others, he will remain completely anonymous and unknown. Parental identity and responsibility for children in a homosexual family do not flow from biology; they result from choice and intent. To the extent that a gay couple wants to retain the traditional number of parents in the home, it must exclude one biological parent from inclusion in the family unit. To the extent that a gay couple wants to preserve the traditional connection between that biological parent and his offspring, however, the adult side of the family becomes more of a non-traditional threesome. ...

These are not easy questions. The deprivation to gays from not being able to put the official, public stamp of legitimacy on their love is large. If one were confident that gay marriage would have at most a negligible effect on the ongoing dissolution of the traditional family, I would see no reason to oppose it. And fertility technology is hardly the only source of stress on families; heterosexual adults have been wreaking havoc on the two-parent family for the last five decades in their quest for maximal freedom and choice. The self-interested assumption behind that havoc has been that what’s good for adults must be good for children: If adults want flexibility in their living arrangements, then children will benefit from it, as well. Perhaps children are as infinitely malleable as it would be convenient for them to be. But if it turns out that they thrive best with stability in their lives and that the traditional family evolved to provide that stability, then our breezy jettisoning of child-rearing traditions may not be such a boon for children.

The facile libertarian argument that gay marriage is a trivial matter that affects only the parties involved is astoundingly blind to the complexity of human institutions and to the web of sometimes imperceptible meanings and practices that compose them. Equally specious is the central theme in attorney Theodore Olson’s legal challenge to California’s Proposition 8: that only religious belief or animus towards gays could explain someone’s hesitation regarding gay marriage. Anyone with the slightest appreciation for the Burkean understanding of tradition will feel the disquieting burden of his ignorance in this massive act of social reengineering, even if he ultimately decides that the benefits to gays from gay marriage outweigh the risks of the unknown.

ENGLAND AND WALES DIVORCE RATE AT 29-YEAR LOW: National Statistics Online

2010-02-02T00:24:00.001-05:00

(though no indication of marriage-rate changes, nor who is raising the children):

In 2008, the divorce rate in England and Wales fell to 11.5 divorcing people per 1,000 married population compared with the 2007 figure of 11.8, a fall of 2.5 per cent. The divorce rate is at its lowest level since 1979 when it was 11.2.

For the fourth consecutive year, both men and women in their late twenties had the highest divorce rates of all five-year age groups. In 2008 there were 26.3 divorces per 1,000 married men aged 25 to 29 and 27.8 divorces per 1,000 married women aged 25 to 29. This compared with 16.8 divorces per 1,000 married men aged 45 to 49 and 14.6 divorces per 1,000 married women aged 45 to 49 in 2008.

GOVERNMENT AND MARRIAGE: TIME FOR A SEPARATION: David Casavant and J. Douglas Wellington

2010-02-02T00:21:00.003-05:00

in the Bangor Daily News:

It is evident that neither side of the fight over same-sex marriage is prepared to yield. This is unfortunate. Far too many individuals who strive for recognition of their committed relationship are being accused of undermining society; far too many individuals who genuinely care about marriage are being accused of bigotry. ...

At one time, determining the role of government in marriage might have been easy. In years gone by and based on the mores of the time, people could envision government fostering long-term, heterosexual marriages for the purposes of promoting a stable environment for offspring. The Maine statute on marriage states that Maine “has a compelling interest to nurture and promote the unique institution of traditional monogamous marriage in the support of harmonious families and the physical and mental health of children.”

However noble and worthy the sentiment, numerous heterosexual marriages end in divorce. Quite appropriately, there are no punitive measures for unwed mothers. Even government social assistance is not geared toward ensuring the stated interest of promoting heterosexual marriage and may actually encourage single parentage. In many respects, heterosexual couples have done a great deal to weaken the justification for government’s role in marriage. And yet, the current debate is whether to extend that role to same-sex couples. Citizens are caught in battle over a governmental status designation that may no longer have a meaningful function.

Is there a way to resolve the dispute? While at first blush the solution may appear radical, the answer seems quite clear — marriage should no longer be a governmental function. All couples, heterosexual and homosexual, should register as under the current Maine statute for domestic partners. This would allow couples, whether heterosexual or of the same sex, to obtain the benefits of health insurance, inheritance, hospital visitation, etc.

OPEN THE MARRIAGE, CLOSE THE DOOR: Randy Cohen

2010-02-02T00:19:00.000-05:00

aka "The Ethicist," at the NY Times Magazine:

My husband and I practice polyamory, a k a ethical nonmonogamy. We are open about this to friends but are unsure what to disclose to others. Our housekeeper might have seen me in bed with my boyfriend. Must I explain? When I travel for business, I sometimes take my boyfriend. Must I fill in a co-worker I see only occasionally? I don’t want to hide my affection for my boyfriend or make anyone uncomfortable. NAME WITHHELD, SAN FRANCISCO

You have no duty to decode your connubial arrangements for mere acquaintances. Nor need you make them feel comfortable or reassure them that their views on marriage and monogamy are universally held.

Reject Easy Annulments, Pope Tells Vatican Tribunal: Catholic World News

2010-02-01T01:59:00.003-05:00

reports:

Granting easy access to marriage annulments is an offense against both justice and charity, said Pope Benedict XVI on January 29.

The Pope’s message has a particular resonance in the US, whose Catholic Church tribunals account for more than half of the world’s annulment decrees. Pope Benedict, like Pope John Paul II before him, has repeatedly argued for a more vigorous defense of the marital bond.

In an address to the Church’s highest tribunal for marriage cases, the Holy Father warned against “the tendency--widespread and well-rooted though not always obvious--to contrast justice with charity, almost as if the one excluded the other.” He reminded the tribunal’s judges and advocated that the marriage laws of the Church are oriented toward the spiritual welfare of the individuals, and applying those laws properly is itself a work of charity. Ultimately, he reminded them, “the Church's juridical activity has as its goal the salvation of souls.”

“Without truth charity slides into sentimentalism,” the Pope told officials of the Roman Rota, at the opening of its judicial term. “Love becomes an empty shell to be filled arbitrarily. This is the fatal risk of love in a culture without truth.” ...

The Pope went so far as to suggest that tribunals should do their best to save marriages intact whenever that is possible. In most American dioceses, couples are required to file for a civil divorce before submitting an annulment application. But the Pontiff suggest that “effective efforts be made, whenever there seems to be hope of a successful outcome, to encourage the spouses to convalidate their marriage and restore conjugal cohabitation.”

The Right Is Wrong About Gay Marriage: John Corvino

2010-02-01T01:53:00.004-05:00

at 365Gay.com:

...What Gallagher and her cohorts are contending is that EVEN IF we were to take the consequentialist arguments off the table, there will still be the problem that same-sex marriage promotes a lie, much like calling a chicken a duck.

Let’s pause to consider a seemingly silly question: apart from consequences, what’s the problem with calling a chicken a duck—or more precisely, with using the word “chicken” to refer to both chickens and ducks?

If I go to the grocer and ask for a chicken and unwittingly come home with a (fattier and less healthful) duck, that’s a problem. But (1) same-sex marriage poses no similar problem: no one worries about walking his bride down the aisle, lifting her veil, and discovering “Damn! You’re a dude!” And (2) such problems are still in the realm of consequences.

If there’s an inherent problem with using the word “chicken” to refer to both chickens and ducks, it’s that doing so would obscure a real difference in nature. Whatever we call them--indeed, whether we name them at all--chickens and ducks are distinct creatures. ...

That might begin to get at what marriage-equality opponents mean when they claim that same sex marriage involves “a lie about human nature” (Gallagher’s words). But if it does, then their argument is weak on at least two counts.

First, one can acknowledge a difference between two things while still adopting a blanket term that covers them both. Both chickens and ducks are fowl; both silver and platinum are precious metals.

So even if same-sex and opposite-sex relationships differ in some fundamental way, there’s nothing to prevent us from using the term “marriage” to cover relationships of both sorts--especially if we have compelling reasons for doing so (for example, that marriage equality would make life better for millions of gay people and wouldn’t take anything away from straight people).

The second and deeper problem is that both the chicken/duck example and the silver/platinum example involve what philosophers call “natural kinds”--categories that “carve nature at the joints,” as it were. By contrast, marriage is quintessentially a social, or artifactual, kind: it’s something that humans create.

NOM'S FUZZY LOGIC: Jonathan Rauch

2010-02-01T01:47:00.002-05:00

at the Independent Gay Forum:

In a recent newsletter, the National Organization for Marriage cites a new government study as evidence that gay marriage will hurt kids, because the research finds that kids suffer less abuse with married biological parents than with a single parent, a parent living with an unmarried partner, or a parent and step-parent.

They got it half right. Having two married biological parents is good for kids, and better than the alternatives the study examined. We here at IGF are all for it. But that doesn't make having, say, an unmarried mom and mom better than having a married mom and mom. As a correspondent points out:

Does NOM never, ever learn? These same figures indicate that for either two-adult family structure (both biological parents, or one biological and one step-parent) the chance of abuse to the child goes down drastically IF THE COUPLE GETS MARRIED. For the first kind of family, the risk drops 80 percent. For the second kind of family, the risk drops nearly 60 percent. Even for single biological parents, the child's risk drops by about 15 percent if that single parent finds and marries someone.

COLLEGE GENDER GAP REMAINS STABLE: 57% WOMEN: USA Today

2010-01-29T01:40:00.001-05:00

reports:

The gender gap on campus — about 57% female, 43% male — is troubling, but it's not getting any worse, a report says today.

Men have consistently represented about 43% of enrollments and earned 43% of bachelor's degrees since 2000, says the report by the American Council on Education, a higher-education organization.

It doesn't offer solutions on how to narrow that gap, but it suggests policymakers and educators can have the greatest effect by focusing efforts on Hispanics. Just 9% of Hispanic young men have earned a bachelor's degree, the lowest attainment level of any group studied. Among Hispanic young women, 14% have earned a bachelor's.

Given that Hispanics represent the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population, "raising the attainment rate of Hispanic men — and women — looms as one of the most significant challenges facing American education," says report author Jacqueline King, assistant vice president of ACE's Center for Policy Analysis. The group has been slicing and dicing gender data since 2000.

TEENS SUSCEPTIBLE TO REPRODUCTIVE COERCION: Newsweek

2010-01-27T20:10:00.001-05:00

reports:

...This month, Miller published a study in the journal Contraception detailing "reproductive coercion," when the male partner pressures the other, through verbal threats, physical aggression, or birth-control sabotage, to become pregnant. According to Miller's research, about a third of women reporting partner violence experienced reproductive coercion, as did 15 percent of women who had never reported violence.

Overall, rates of reproductive coercion among family-planning-clinic patients are surprisingly high: about one in five women report their partner having attempted to coerce them into pregnancy. "What we're seeing is that, in the larger scheme of violence against women and girls, it is another way to maintain control," says Miller, who studied 1,300 female patients culled from five family-planning clinics in Northern California. "You have guys telling their partners, 'I can do this because I'm in control' or 'I want to know that I can have you forever.' " This may help explain previous findings of higher rates of unintended pregnancies in relationships with partner violence.

The women in Miller's study were between 16 to 29; Miller will publish a study later in 2010 that finds similar numbers in demographics of older women. That said, younger women may have a more difficult time dealing with reproductive coercion: they have less experience in relationships, and, if they are minors, less access to doctors' appointments and emergency contraception. Particularly for teenagers in relationships with older men, the age difference "may have profound implications for perceived and actual reproductive choices for young adult women," Miller wrote in a 2007 paper on the same subject. "Such factors may also lead to fewer adolescents reporting such reproductive control as abusive, forced, or coercive." Put another way, teenage girls are at greater risk of not recognizing reproductive coercion as problematic, and allowing it to continue.

SACRAMENTO PROFESSOR ASKS 30-YEAR COUPLES WHAT KEEPS THEM MARRIED: Sacramento Bee

2010-01-27T20:07:00.003-05:00

reports:

At the statistical intersection where increased life expectancy balances out the divorce rate, there is a surprising new cultural demographic: More Americans are reaching and exceeding the 40th wedding anniversary.

What's keeping more married couples together 'til death do them part? Todd Migliaccio, a Sacramento State associate professor of sociology, is working to figure that out in a series of interviews with area couples married 30 years or longer, or with a surviving spouse.

"We tend to focus on the fact that more people get divorced now," said Migliaccio, 37, who set the demographic bar for his research at 30 years of marriage to include more couples' stories. "But maybe we should focus on the increasing number who stay married longer."

It's a sunnier approach, after all. There's only so much the group most at risk of divorce – newlyweds married five years or less – have to share with the world.

On the other hand, couples who have stuck it out through thick and thin might have a few things to teach us.

So far, Migliaccio has interviewed six couples, some of whom he found after posting a request for volunteers at Sacramento's Hart Senior Center. His plan was to videotape them talking about their long and happy marriages as a way to sweeten the dose of reality he provides students in class. ...

"I loved his family," said Metzinger, a 79-year-old state worker who lives in Carmichael. "When I met his family, I could see this would be a happy marriage and a happy life."

It was, through raising four kids – who have since produced 11 grandchildren and 10 great-grandkids, with one more on the way – and through their share of ups and downs.

"Leaving was never an option," she said. "Even in some of our darkest days, it was never discussed. We loved each other. We were going to go forever."

COLLEGE LINKED TO MARRIAGE: Wall Street Journal

2010-01-27T20:04:00.001-05:00

reports:

Maybe education can lead to marital bliss, too. College-educated women were more likely to be married at age 40 than women without a college education, new research showed.

And college-educated women were more likely to say they were happy in their marriages, said economists Betsey Stevenson and Adam Isen of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. The study, to be released Tuesday, was conducted for the research group Council on Contemporary Families. It was based on several data sets and surveys on men and women. ...

Having a college education also appeared to make women happier in their marriage. That's perhaps because both college-educated men and women were less likely to see marriage as a source of financial stability, Ms. Stevenson said, approaching it instead as "a source of personal fulfillment." That could also be a reason divorce rates among the college-educated were lower than for groups with less education.

PLUMMETING BIRTHRATES THREATEN PROSPERITY WORLDWIDE. CAN AMERICA BUCK THE TREND?: Steven Malanga

2010-01-27T19:54:00.003-05:00

in City Journal:

With more than one in five Japanese 65 or older, the government is encouraging citizens like Tsuneko Hariki of Kamikatsu to work well past traditional retirement age.

In Kamikatsu, on the Japanese island of Shikoku, officials have set up an agricultural cooperative whose members log on to computers daily to check the fluctuating prices of the produce that they grow. Then they go out and pick whatever is fetching the best price that day. Unusual, yes, but what’s truly surprising about this cooperative is the average age of its members: 70. In a country where lots of folks retire at 60, Kamikatsu’s residents are working well into their senior years—and they’re doing so not only to buoy retirement earnings but also to energize the local economy. With nearly half of the town’s residents 65 and older, the government realized that there simply wasn’t enough of a traditional workforce available to build or staff most typical industries.

Kamikatsu shows in microcosm what Japan and several other nations now face--and what others soon will. For decades, demographers and economists have watched the world’s fertility rate plunge as countries grew wealthier and more urban. These days, fertility rates in much of the industrialized world are far below replacement levels--that is, the number of kids that parents must have to replace themselves and adults who remain childless. Though the steepest declines happened first in wealthy countries like Japan, Italy, Germany, and Spain, even many developing countries have seen their fertility rates head downward. ...

Seeking solutions, a few policy experts have begun looking more closely at the United States. After a big drop in the mid-1970s, America’s fertility rate bounced back and has remained relatively stable, near replacement level--a 30-year-plus pattern that astounds European observers. For a time, demographers explained the difference between the U.S. and other industrialized countries by observing that America’s population was more diverse, with more recent immigrants who had more children. But fertility levels among native-born white Americans also remain higher than among native-born Europeans, and the U.S.’s overall fertility outpaces that of other countries with a high percentage of foreign-born residents.

Demographers have also speculated that the higher fertility rate is a function of America’s being a more religious country, reasoning that those who engage in organized religious activity favor larger families. One survey found 46 percent of Americans attending religious services regularly, compared with just 4 percent of Japanese, 7 percent of Swedes, and 16 percent of Germans. Yet fertility rates have remained stable in the U.S. even as they have plummeted in religious fundamentalist countries like Iran and Jordan, as well as in developing countries like Mexico, where rates of religious attendance remain higher than in America.

Faced with these contradictions, some scholars are now positing the distinctive nature of the U.S. economy and its labor market as a principal reason why Americans are having so many kids. “In general, women (and couples) are deterred from having children when the economic cost--in the form of lower lifetime wages--is too high,” wrote economists Francesco Billari, José Antonio Ortega, and Hans-Peter Kohler in a 2006 study. “Compared to other high-income countries, this cost is diminished by an American labor market that allows more flexible work hours and makes it easier to leave and then reenter the labor force.”