Same Sex Marriage - 10 Years Later

Remember the shrieks and flying spittle from the Christofascists when Massachusetts became the first state to allow same sex marriage?  These foul, hate and animus motivated people predicted that the sky would fall and that western civilization would end as a result.  A decade later, none of the predictions have come true and Massachusetts continues to have the lowest divorce rate in the nation while serial marriage remains the most prevalent in the hypocrisy filled Bible Belt.  Meanwhile, same sex marriage is legal in 19 states and gays even in gay-hating states like Virginia are marrying in high numbers in states where such marriages are legal.  The husband and I went to a wonderful wedding celebration of friends last night in Norfolk.  One of the things that was noteworthy was the mix of people in attendance - young, older, black, white, gay and straight.   It was a glimpse of what all of Virginia could be like but for the political whores in the GOP who continue to prostitute themselves to the Christofascists at The Family Foundation and other "family values" hate groups.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the transformation over the last 10 years.  Here are excerpts:

So, what happens to a marriage over the course of 10 years? Make that a gay marriage.

On May 23, 2004, The New York Times printed 41 wedding announcements that included 5 same-sex couples, the first legal gay marriages to appear in these pages. (It began publishing same-sex “celebrations” two years earlier.)

Earlier that week, Massachusetts had become the first state to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia do so now and on Wednesday, a federal appeals court struck down Utah’s same-sex marriage ban.

So, where are those first five couples now? Three live in Massachusetts, one moved from Boston to Washington, D.C., and one is in Brooklyn. They have a total of five children, with three born in wedlock. The men and women involved are now 41 to 58 years old. Four couples are still together, one isn’t.

And how did a marriage license change their lives? Some couples talked about how it made everyday headaches like tax and insurance forms go away. One said their lives didn’t change at all. And two couples said they ended up being transformed in ways they had not expected.

“I wasn’t necessarily, like, the bride type of lesbian,” said Mary Beth Caschetta, 47, who married Meryl Cohn, 52, at their home in Provincetown, Mass. “But our marriage has been such a stabilizing force in my life — in both of our lives, really — in a way I could never have imagined.”

“I don’t have some overly romantic notion of it,” Ms. Cohn said. “We were already committed to each other, so I was surprised marriage felt so meaningful in some serious way that feels anchoring. Maybe those feelings would have happened over time anyway, but it does feel like a deeper commitment to say: ‘You. You’re the one I married.’ ”

They were married at their Cape Cod home and had legal benefits until they moved to Washington in 2006, when Mr. Shannon took a new job.

“All of a sudden, poof, the marriage doesn’t exist,” Mr. Shannon said. “We were just two people again.”

With that came complications involving insurance forms and filling out apartment applications. (Washington did not allow gay marriage until 2010.)

Thanks to the Supreme Court ruling a year ago that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, this was the first year they did not have to file separate tax returns. “The accountants are a lot less happy now,” Ms. Leuchs said.

Conservatives claim to want societal stability and the Christofascists always depict gays as promiscuous sluts, yet the oppose same sex marriage that not only encourages stability but also monogamy.  If they truly cared about what they claim to support, they would support same sex marriage.  The fact that they don't underscores their hypocrisy.  Thankfully, the world and the courts and most of society are moving on and leaving these hypocrites as increasingly irrelevant.  They are indeed the modern day equivalents to the segregationists of the 1950's and 1960's.

Quote of the Day: British Prime Minister David Cameron on the Commencement of Same Sex Marriages

Prime Minister David Cameron

Tonight same sex marriage became legal in England and Wales and couples flocked to tie the knot.  Not surprisingly Catholic prelates and far right elements in the Church of England are whining and carrying on as if the world is ending.  Perhaps it is - or at least their world of hate and discrimination that for far too long they were able to inflict on others.  Prime Minister David Cameron had forward looking words for the arrival of equality and a legal structure where individuals will no longer be inferior because of their sexuality.  Cameron's words are the antithesis of what the Christofascists preach, although I would argue that they are very much in keeping with the teachings of Christ.  Teachings more or less totally ignored by today's "godly folk" who reject the Gospel message in favor of the worst aspects of the Old Testament.  Pink News has details on Cameron's remarks. Here are highlights

Writing exclusively for PinkNews, Prime Minister David Cameron celebrates the introduction of same-sex marriage today, comparing same-sex marriages to his own, and noting the work still to be done for equality.

This weekend is an important moment for our country. For the first time, the couples getting married won’t just include men and women – but men and men; and women and women. After all the campaigning – not least by readers of PinkNews – we will at last have equal marriage in our country. Put simply, in Britain it will no longer matter whether you are straight or gay – the State will recognise your relationship as equal.

This is something that has been very important to me. I have been so lucky to find the most incredible lifelong partner in Sam and our marriage has been a very special part of the commitment we have made to each other. Of course any marriage takes work, requires patience and understanding, give and take – but what it gives back in terms of love, support, stability and happiness is immeasurable. That is not something that the State should ever deny someone on the basis of their sexuality. When people’s love is divided by law, it is the law that needs to change.

The introduction of same-sex civil marriage says something about the sort of country we are. It says we are a country that will continue to honour its proud traditions of respect, tolerance and equal worth. It also sends a powerful message to young people growing up who are uncertain about their sexuality. It clearly says ‘you are equal’ whether straight or gay. That is so important in trying to create an environment where people are no longer bullied because of their sexuality – and where they can realise their potential, whether as a great mathematician like Alan Turing, a star of stage and screen like Sir Ian McKellen or a wonderful journalist and presenter like Clare Balding.

[W]e should be proud to live in a country judged to be the best place to live in Europe if you are lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans. But we should equally be far from complacent about the challenges that remain – and I am just as committed as ever to working with you to challenge attitudes and stamp-out homophobic bullying and hate crimes.

We are a nation that is growing stronger economically because of our long term economic plan. But I hope we can also be a country that is growing stronger socially because we value love and commitment equally. Let us raise a toast to that – and all those getting married this weekend.

 It is worth remembering that David Cameron is the leader of the Tory Party - the UK's conservative party and that it was the Tories who pushed through marriage equality.  Given that marriage and supporting stable relationships are indeed a conservative value, it was appropriate that Cameron and the Tories championed same sex marriage - as any true conservatives should.  The reality is that here in America the Republican Party is no longer a conservative party.  Instead it is a sectarian party push to impose Christofascist beliefs on all citizens. 

House DOMA Legal Team Deliberately Wrongly Cites Parenting Study

I'm beginning to believe that in addition to being devoid of compassion towards others, consumed by greed and filled with hatred towards those deemed "other," in order to be a Republican nowadays, one must also be a pathological liar.  A case in point is the seemingly deliberate misuse of gay parenting studies by the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group of the U.S. House of Representatives, also known as BLAG for short.  BLAG's legal team apparently takes a view that if research doesn't support one's anti-gay agenda, then just lie about it and twist its findings.  It's a trait apparently learned from the Christianist hate groups who can safely be assumed to be lying if their mouth pieces' lips are moving (think Tony Perkins, Maggie Gallagher and Bryan Fischer for starters).  A component in childerns' success is stability - something same sex marriage would bring to families.  As would ending the "change myth" and "ex-gay" ministries that only lead to opposite sex marriages that are doomed to fail and cause upheaval for the children of such marriages.  The hypocrisy is that the opponents of gay marriage do all in their power to destabilize same sex unions, and then use the fruits of their handiwork to condemn gay couples and their families.  A piece in The Advocate looks at BLAG's attempts to defraud the Courts with false citations of Daniel Potter's study.  Here are some article highlights:

BLAG’s brief marks the second time the study — which was conducted by University of Texas professor Mark Regnerus with the financial backing of socially conservative groups — has been used to defend DOMA in the case. The day after Regnerus’ study was released to the public last month, a conservative medical group highlighted it in a “friend of the court” brief. The American College of Pediatricians filed that brief at the request of the Alliance Defending Freedom, an influential religious right legal organization.

In fact, Regnerus’ study has been widely criticized for comparing children raised by intact biological families to children raised by parents who had a same-sex relationship at some point, regardless of whether the child was actually raised by a stable, same-sex couple.

The other recent study BLAG cites in support of the premise that children are better off when raised by two heterosexual parents was published in the Journal of Marriage and Family in May. That study, authored by Daniel Potter of the American Institutes for Research, found that children raised in same-sex-parent families scored lower on academic tests than children raised in two-parent households by a straight couple.

Potter, who conducted his research using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, says in a discussion of the results that the “transitions and changes that accompany the formation of such households” factored heavily into the lower test scores. He stresses that instability within the family, rather than the family structure itself, seemed to have had more of an effect on the children’s test scores.

In an email exchange, Potter said he had not previously been aware that BLAG had used his study in its defense of DOMA.  .   .   .  .  “But … the negative association is accounted for by including information on the number of transitions that children experience. … I interpret these findings to suggest that it is not the family structure per se that is associated with children’s lower performance, but that it is the instability and transitions leading up to the formation of these families that matters.”

Potter added: “I do not view my study as rejecting prior research on same-sex parent families, nor do I believe it offers the quintessential investigation from which future research should advance.  .  .  .  .  “I think the results do push forward the idea that stability is a central element for understanding the role of family structure in children’s lives,” he said, “but the research cannot speak to the issue of same-sex marriage.”

Potter explains that “same-sex parent families are often created through a series of changes to and transitions in children’s family structure” but notes that “not all same-sex parent families are created from dissolved opposite-sex relationships.”

John Boehner congratulates himself on being a "godly Christian" yet he and his compatriots are in my view lying sacks of shit.

Did Right Wing Funded Gay Parenting Study Unwittingly Support Gay Marriage?

Over the weekend I blogged about the right wing funded study on gay parenting and the flawed group same sex parents with other groups so that the results deliberately came out skewed against gay parenting.  Not surprisingly, NOM and Family Research Council and similar anti-gay groups have joyously jumped on to the report as supportive of the anti-gay jihad.  But as a piece in Slate column suggests - and echo's what I said about the negative impact that DOMA and bans on same sex marriage have on the children of LGBT citizens - the anti-gay study unwittingly makes the case as to why same sex marriage is a necessity if one truly is concerned about children as the Christianists pretend to be concerned  The bottom line is that by banning same sex marriage children are deliberately deprived of financial and family stability that the children of heterosexual couples take for granted.  It's yet another of the rank dishonesty and hypocrisy of the far right that claim to care about children but then do all they can to harm countless children.  As I've noted many times, tawdry whores are more virtuous than most of the "godly Christian" crowd.  Here are highlights from the Slate article:

Is same-sex marriage a good idea? Or is an intact biological family the best environment for raising a child? The answer may turn out to be yes and yes.

That’s the curious implication of a study reported yesterday in Social Science Research and outlined in Slate today by its principal investigator, sociologist Mark Regnerus. The study, which found inferior economic, educational, social, and psychological outcomes among children of gay parents, comes across as evidence that homosexuals are unfit to raise kids. But the study doesn’t document the failure of same-sex marriage. It documents the failure of the closeted, broken, and unstable households that preceded same-sex marriage.

In his journal article, Regnerus says it “clearly reveals that children appear most apt to succeed well as adults—on multiple counts and across a variety of domains—when they spend their entire childhood with their married mother and father.”

These findings shouldn’t surprise us, because this isn’t a study of gay couples who decided to have kids. It’s a study of people who engaged in same-sex relationships—and often broke up their households—decades ago.

To understand the study, you have to read the questionnaire that defined the sample. It began by asking each respondent, as the child of this or that kind of family arrangement, his age. If the respondent was younger than 18 or older than 39, the survey was terminated. This means the entire sample was born between 1971 and 1994, when same-sex marriage was illegal throughout the United States, and millions of homosexuals were trying to pass or function as straight spouses.

[B]roken families were excluded from the IBF [intact biological family] category but included in the GF and LM categories. This loaded classification system produced predictable results. In his journal article, Regnerus says respondents who were labeled GF or LM originated most commonly from a “failed heterosexual union.”

In short, these people aren’t the products of same-sex households. They’re the products of broken homes. And the closer you look, the weirder the sample gets.

What the study shows, then, is that kids from broken homes headed by gay people develop the same problems as kids from broken homes headed by straight people. But that finding isn’t meaningless. It tells us something important: We need fewer broken homes among gays, just as we do among straights. We need to study Regnerus’ sample and fix the mistakes we made 20 or 40 years ago. No more sham heterosexual marriages. No more post-parenthood self-discoveries. No more deceptions. No more affairs. And no more polarization between homosexuality and marriage. Gay parents owe their kids the same stability as straight parents. That means less talk about marriage as a right, and more about marriage as an expectation.

[T]he methodology and findings, coupled with previous research, point to deeper differences that transcend orientation. Kids do better when they have two committed parents, a biological connection, and a stable home. If that’s good advice for straights, it’s good advice for gays, too.

Not surprisingly, the wingnuts do not want same sex couples to have the same legal rights, legal protections, and stability of their heterosexual counterparts be cause, God forbid from the Kool-Aid drinking crowd perspective - the same sex couples might just do a better job parenting children and expose the anti-gay Christianist lies.

Legal Status Helps Gay Relationships Last Longer

One of the smears that the anti-gay Christianist throw at gays is that gay relationships are unstable and/or that gays are unable/unwilling to be faithfully monogamous. Of course meanwhile, they do everything in their power to undermine gay relationships and make sure they have no recognized legal status. If anything, I believe it's amazing how many stable, long last gay relationships manage to endure given all the negatives that are working against them. A new story in The Advocate is reporting what to me ought to be self-evident: Same-sex couples in legally recognized relationships stay in their relationships longer than those who are not legally recognized. Hello, why is this a surprise? Personally, I think the Christianists are afraid that broadly available marriage rights for same-sex couples will demonstrate that gays are as stable in relationships as their heterosexual counterparts. Should this occur, the Christianists lose yet another stone to throw at LGBT citizens. Here are some highlights:

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Same-sex couples in legally bound relationships appear to stay in their relationships longer than those who are not legally recognized, according to a new study published in Developmental Psychology.

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Robert-Jay Green, executive director of LGBT research organization Rockway Institute, said the study shows that civil union status itself may help preserve relationships. "There are many ways that a legal couple status may support a relationship -- more family understanding, acceptance by friends and coworkers, greater commitment that results from a public declaration, and enhanced legal protections in the form of health care benefits and community property," Green said in a statement on Tuesday.

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About 9% of same-sex couples not in civil unions ended their relationship, while only 3.8% of same-sex couples in a civil union ended their relationships. The study was conducted by Kimberly F. Balsam and Theodore P. Beauchaine of the University of Washington, Esther D. Rothblum of San Diego State University, and Sondra E. Solomon of the University of Vermont.