THE CASE FOR SSM? Maggie Gallagher replies to Gregg Easterbrook

Technical question: What does social science tell us about how legal marriage will affect same-sex couples? Will it have the same powerful benefits marriage has for opposite-sex couples? (In this context marriage benefits do not refer to privileges and immunities granted by law but the "natural" good consequences that flow from entering the marriage relationship.)

I'm often asked to speculate. The first answer is: we don't know. There is no good body of social science research (comparable to the marriage research) on how marriage or quasi-marital legal arrangements affect the well-being of same-sex couples (or their children, for that matters).

The second answer is: it depends. It depends on at least two things: a. how (and how much) does gender matter?

b. How much social support (from the general community and from the gay community) for permanence, fidelity, healthy norms of behavior will these couples receive?

Social support in this sense could also be described as "social pressure." Social support for marriage norms, social pressure not to deviate from them.

My own guess, and it is just a guess, is that same-sex couples will receive some portion of the "marriage benefits" described in The Case for Marriage, but will look more like cohabiting same-sex couples than cohabiting opposite-sex couples look like married couples. That is, SS couples will experience a lower return to marriage.

Why? My sense is that SSM is embraced by the gay community as a right, not as a social norm, there is little or no "social support" (and/or social pressure) from within the gay community for getting or for staying married, and that the broader community will not offer the same social support/social pressure to ss couples as to opposite-sex couples (at least in jurisdictions where SSM is court-ordered). I also suspect that gender has something to do with the benefits of marriage i.e. there are specfic benefits to women that come from intimate partnership with a man, and most especially vice versa. Women do things for men that men just do not do for their fellow men, at least to the same extent.

High rates of exit (such as the high divorce rates in Swedish SS couples) would also lead us to predict a lower return to marriage. We know from prior research that when opposite-sex couples see divorce-risk as high, or have a reduced commitment to marital permanence, they do not make the same investments in each other.

But it would be nice to get some actual research on this question.
posted by Eve at 2:39 PM VOTE

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home