Gay Marriage Rates From A Different Perspective

About two month ago, I mused that with available statistics, it appeared that gay couples were twenty times less likely to marry, now that they have been given the opportunity to do so. I pointed out that this did not pass the smell test and that I was suspicious of having made some kind of a logical mistake or perhaps missed an important factor along the way.

Today, Dale Carpenter at Volokh Conspiracy points to a study from a UCLA-based think tank that reaches the exact opposite conclusion, based on original demographic research. Conclusions:

1. About 40% of same-sex couples have already sought some level of legal recognition for their relationships (whether that be marriage, civil union, or domestic partnership, depending on what the state’s law allows);
2. Existing trends suggest that by 2028, legal recognition of same-sex and opposite-sex relationships will reach parity;
3. Gay couples prefer marriage to civil unions or domestic partnerships — they marry in higher rates than they register for the allegedly equivalent but differently-named institutions, and generally, they register for those institutions in higher percentages as those institutions provide more comprehensive sets of rights.

None of this is surprising, but it does suggest that for a generation, gays may indeed be more reluctant than their straight counterparts to seek legal recognition for their relationships. There is no hint, at least from Prof. Carpenter’s link, as to why that should be the case. My armchair hypothesis is that there is less expectation among gays than straights that even a “long term” relationship will be “permanent.”

As for the study’s first point, twenty years is a long time for a social trend to work out. At that point, we’re talking about society-wide change in social norms, not just gays figuring out that yes, they can get married. I figure they read newspapers and websites the same as us straight folks so they knew that already. If you haven’t learned that same-sex marriage is now recognized in California, I have some other political news for you, like we went to war with Iraq in 2003, and Dick Cheney is the Vice-President.

I’d also point out in reading the above that official or legal registration may not be the same thing as “marriage,” and indeed the study points out that homosexual couples react measurably to both nomenclature and the substantive rights offered. So saying that gays will seek legal recognition of their relationships at the same rate as straights in twenty years is not the same thing as saying that they will marry in proportionate numbers. Indeed, unless you equate domestic partnership with marriage — a conclusion the study explicitly rejects — it seems to shy away from the conclusion of converging parity in marriage rates.

The study itself does not appear to be available online. You can read its official synopsis here.