A majority of births among under-30 US women are now out of wedlock, but you can't blame marriage equality for it, just people who who don't want to be confused by the facts:
But according to the Child Trends research, the only demographic of young mothers who resisted the out-of-wedlock birth trend are college graduates, and this educated demographic is the one most likely to support same-sex marriage. If [marriage equality opponent Maggie] Gallagher’s assumptions were right—that acceptance of same-sex marriage leads to less marrying—then these supporters of same-sex marriage would be the least likely to marry, not the most.
There has never been any evidence that same-sex marriage, or parenting by lesbians and gays, hurts children—and mountains of data say they don’t. Nor has there ever been any evidence that acceptance of same-sex marriage causes a decline in willingness to marry. The historical timeline works against this argument anyway: marital rates declined, and divorce rates increased, beginning in the 1960s, over three decades before any jurisdiction in the modern world held a legal gay wedding...
New research from Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project offers some promising, if unsurprising, suggestions for gay rights advocates. Using focus groups and national surveys, researchers were able to correlate negative views about gay people with an exaggerated perception of the risks involved in granting them equality. It turned out that people will disbelieve new information—such as the fact that having gay or lesbian parents does not harm kids—unless they’re confident that absorbing it will not threaten their values. (The same goes for cultural liberals, of course, who are also prone to such cognitive bias. The Yale researchers cited a similar unwillingness to absorb factual information among opponents of nuclear energy, for example.) Yale’s team suggests increasing open-mindedness by presenting people with new information in ways that conform with values they already hold dear.
Research commissioned by the Third Way, a moderate think tank in Washington, illustrates how this might look. A team of research psychologists conducted in-depth interviews with members of the “moveable middle,” or those considered open to supporting gay equality but not yet fully there. They used psychological tools to identify their subjects’ emotional states and concerns around issues of gay equality. What their research revealed were subconscious anxieties around what they perceive to be a world spinning out of control, a feeling exacerbated by a sense that new understandings of old institutions are being forced upon them. Some may oppose same-sex marriage in an effort to seize control and bolster values they see as besieged.
Third Way recommends reassuring opponents of same-sex marriage that gay people wish to reinforce, not undercut, the responsibilities of marriage. Responsibility is a value conservatives hold dear... The value of responsibility is clearly important to opponents of the freedom to marry. The Defense of Marriage Act, the 1996 law that bans federal recognition of same-sex marriages, states as its rationale for restricting marriage to heterosexuals that society has an “abiding interest in encouraging responsible procreation and child-rearing.”
Liberals also value responsibility, in their belief that society is obligated to care for the poor, the old and the sick, and protect the Earth's natural resources. Suppose we grant that teaching responsibility, as such, is important to society. There’s no reason we can’t teach “procreative responsibility” and the importance of marital norms, while also supporting equality for gay people, including their freedom to marry. In other words, there's no reason we can't make a change to marriage laws that’s congruent with the stated values of conservatives and moderates.
In fact it's already happening. Equality Maryland, the state’s major LGBT equality group, recently helped secure the freedom to marry with a message that gay people, like straight people, seek to “make a public promise of love and responsibility for each other and ask our friends and family to hold us accountable.” The values that would be more likely to appeal to liberals who already endorse same-sex marriage—those of individual rights and entitlements—were not the message. In her forthcoming book, Supreme Court lawyer Linda Hirshman argues that a rhetoric of moral values, which itself strikes many as conservative, was the gay movement’s “surprise weapon” in beginning to win the freedom to marry. Telling the stories of heroic caretaking throughout the AIDS crisis and of committed relationships through thick and thin, advocates stopped relying on feeble appeals to tolerance, and showed naysayers that gay people shared their moral values and deserved equal treatment.
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