Evolution on Gay Marriage

President Obama completed what he described as the evolution of his position on same-sex marriage.  He has long supported civil rights for homosexuals.  In the 2008 election he supported civil unions as the state equivalent of marriage, reserving the term "marriage" for religious unions.

This has been my position, too.

However, I also see that it is hard for most people to hold on to a living sense of the difference between the law of the state and the order of the church.  Ironically, it is Southern Baptists who seem to have the hardest time with this distinction - even though when they were a sect being persecuted by the state church, Baptists pioneered the church/state wall.  In the recent North Carolina vote outlawing all non-marital sexual unions, the victors said that the Bible recognizes only a marriage of a man and a woman, and therefore the state of North Carolina should do the same.  They didn't even know they were overthrowing the church/state wall that they themselves had promoted to protect the church.

I think President Obama had a genuine change of heart sometime in the past few months, as he said.  But I also think the timing of President Obama's announcement of his support for same-sex marriage was affected by the North Carolina vote.  It has been clear for some time that the constitutional amendment was going to pass. This outcome would not have changed if he had announced his support of same-sex marriage before the vote.   But I also think the recent series of the statements supporting same-sex marriage by Vice President Biden and other cabinet officers was part of a planned roll-out of the president's new position. 

I think the success of legal gay marriage all over the United States is now inevitable.  I think the pace will be quick in half the country, slow in the other half - that is, in my half. But the demographic writing is on the wall - the younger generation not only supports same-sex marriage, they don't understand why the old people are against it.  And this is true of young Republicans, even young religious Republicans, just as it is of most young people.

The Tea Party Kills the American Community Survey

This is a sad day for sociology. 

The American Community Survey, the essential survey conducted by the Census Bureau between decennial censuses, has been killed in the House of Representatives. The bill's sponsor, Tea Party congressman Daniel Webster, believes that making an economic and demographic portrait of the country is an invasion of privacy.

The ACS collects data required by several federal statutes, and is hugely valuable to American businesses.  The Census Bureau has also said that eliminating the ACS will make the next census more expensive.

I have often noted the parallels between the current Tea Party movement and the Know-Nothing Party of the pre-Civil War days.  This time the "know nothing" label is more literally true.

The Loss of Lugar is a Sad Day for Centrism

Richard Lugar was one of the real statesmen of the U.S. Senate.  One of the measures of his statesmanship was his ability to compromise and work with Democrats.

The Tea Party candidate, Richard Mourdock, who beat Sen. Lugar in the Republican primary yesterday is against compromise.

I think if you are against compromise in principle, you have no business serving in a legislature.

I am glad that the country got the Lugar-Obama Non-Proliferation Initiative to reduce stockpiles of nuclear weapons and put the former U.S.S.R.'s nuclear weapons under greater security.  You can bet that if Mr. Mourdock had been in that seat in 2007, there would have been no Mourdock-Obama Non-Proliferation Initiative.

Small Businesses Need Help With Regulations More Than With Taxes

Sanders Daniel, a reader of the blog, sent me the results of a survey of small-business owners that his company, Thumbtack.com, did across the country.

The most interesting main finding, I thought, is this:

Small businesses care almost twice as much about licensing regulations as they do about tax rates when rating the business-friendliness of their state or local government.

This confirms something that my small business friends say - tax cuts will make no difference in whether they create jobs.  Tax cuts are really the hobby horse of rich individuals, not of actual job creators.

The Thumbtack.com survey also found that what helped businesses think that a state was friendly to them, and made them feel optimistic about the future, was if the state provided training in how to meet its regulations.  The government service of regulations - which benefits consumers, but is a pain to business owners - can be aided by the further government service of training owners in how to meet and manage the regulations.

And on training, alas, Kentucky rates a grade of F. 

The Little Words Show a Couple's Mutual Interest

James Pennebaker, a U. of Texas psychologist, studies what happens to our use of function words - the, this, though, I, and, an, there, that - when we converse with other people.  He studied speed-dating couples. He found that when both used these words the same way and at the same rate, they were more likely to go on a real date.

This was not because, as I would have thought, these speech patterns showed an underlying similarity. Other studies have shown that couples with similarly complex vocabularies are more attracted to one another and make more stable marriages.  But that is not what is going on here.  Everyone uses function words.

Pennebaker concludes:
"When two people are paying close attention, they use language in the same way," he says. "And it's one of these things that humans do automatically."

Chinese Civil Rights Lawyer Chen Guangcheng is Halfway to Freedom

Chen Guangcheng brought a lawsuit against Chinese provincial officials for forced sterilizations and forced abortions as part of the one-child policy.  The Chinese government did what it usually does: it cracked down on both the bad officials, and the good citizen who exposed them.  Chen was sentenced to prison on trumped-up charges.  When his four-year term was over, he was (illegally) put under house arrest. 

This week, despite being under intense guard and being blind, Chen escaped from his village, was spirited away by the human rights underground to Beijing, and has taken refuge in the U.S. embassy.

I hope a fruit of the upcoming U.S./China economic talks will be that Chen can leave China for freedom, and that his family will not be retaliated against.

What I find particularly hopeful about this story is that Chen's activism took the form of a lawsuit.  The fact that it is even possible now for a citizen to file a lawsuit against the government is a hopeful step toward legitimate government in China.

Wheelan's Good Life Advice for Graduates (and Everyone)

I endorse Charles Wheelan's sentiments in his Wall Street Journal piece, "Ten Things Your Commencement Speaker Won't Tell You."

I particularly embrace #4, "Marry Someone Smarter Than You Are."  This paragraph is pretty much my life story, swapping "software company" for "education non-profit."

I do take issue with one element of #1, "Your Time in Fraternity Basements Was Well Spent." Wheelan is thinking of time spent building lifetime relationships, based on making "meaningful connections with other human beings." Merely drinking together will not do that.  And hookups have a negative effect.

Enjoy Commencement season.

The Tide Has Turned on Gay Marriage

A new Pew poll shows that more people favor gay marriage than oppose it - 47% to 43%. 

That would not persuade me in itself.  But when you parse the data, majorities of women favor gay marriage, majorities of moderates favor gay marriage, and, most importantly, majorities of the two youngest generations favor gay marriage.

The tide has turned in favor of gay marriage.  In a decade, it will not be an issue in most places in America.

Mexican Immigration Turns the Corner

Mexican immigration has peaked and started to recede.

There are about 12 million Mexican immigrants in the United States.  Slightly over half of them are here illegally. 

In the past few recession years the in-migration has slowed to a trickle, and the out-migration has picked up.  Last year there may have been more people returning to Mexico than came here.

Those who were afraid of being overrun by Mexicans can strike another fear from their list.

Consider Three: New Evidence from Young Adult Families.

Mark Regnerus reports some early results of his survey of young adults, 18 - 39.

I was drawn to this portrait of the number of children in each family.  These data are on full brothers and sisters.

Only children: 21%
Two-child family: 34%
Three-child family: 24%
Four-child family: < 10%
Five-child family: < 5%

Thus, most families don't have enough children to replace the population (replacement level is, on average, 2.1 children per woman).  When you consider the people in the parental generation (older than these respondents) who had no children, they balance out those who had four or more kids.  The average educated mother has two children, which is a widely known norm.  What is less well known is that poor, unschooled, teen mothers also have, on average, two children.

Sociologists have known for some time that the population of this country is in danger of declining, as it is likely to do in all other industrialized countries. Many of my students feel freed by this news, as they want to have more than two children but were afraid that was irresponsible.  They had been taught the old story of a "population explosion" that their parents were taught.  The idea that they can have more is liberating.

The threshold for a stable population, I believe, is between two children as a norm, and three.  People like my students are the very kind most likely to be able to create stable families - educated, persistent young people who are no longer teenagers.

America would be better off if the norm for stable families was three children, rather than two.

As I have long urged my students, when thinking about family size, consider three.

Sliding Into Cohabitation is Not Worth It

Meg Jay, a clinical psychologist, has a fine piece in the New York Times on how sliding into cohabitation can make it less likely that you will make a successful marriage.

This line is worth the price of admission:
"I’ve had other clients who also wish they hadn’t sunk years of their 20s into relationships that would have lasted only months had they not been living together."

My advice to students: don't live together without a ring and a date.

"Equal Pay Day" is Mostly Wrong

Today is "Equal Pay Day," an annual symbolic protest of the supposed gender gap in wages.  It is based on the number of additional days that women have to work into the new year to equal the median wage of men in the prior year.  Last year the median annual income of women working full time and year round was 77% of men's median income. Thus, women need to work an extra quarter of a year - that is, until today - to catch up.

The implication of this argument is that women make 77% of what men make due to discrimination.  A moment's thought, though, should dispose of this argument.  If women really did exactly the same work as men for only three quarters of the cost, no rational employer would hire men at all.

The American Association of University Women, who calculated this ratio, admit that when you control for several things that should be controlled for - college major, occupation, industry, sector, hours worked, workplace flexibility, experience, educational attainment, enrollment status, GPA, institution selectivity, age, race/ethnicity, region, marital status, and number of children - the gap drops to 5% one year after college graduation.

The biggest difference is not simply between men and women, but between fathers and mothers. Married fathers are likely to work more, more steadily, and seek every opportunity to make more money for their families. Married mothers are more likely to scale back their work to have a better balance with their family life.  Married couples usually divide labor and specialize for the good of the family as a whole.

Of course there is some sex discrimination in employment. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, signed into law by President Obama a few years ago, did address a real problem.

But most of the gender gap in wages is due to different choices of how to live that men and women, and especially fathers and mothers, make about work and family life.

Americans Couple Up When They Always Have

The age of marriage is going up, so the proportion of people who are married in their early 20s - the traditional age of marriage - is going down.

However, the cohabitation rate is going up, and it starts earlier than the marriage age.  Indeed, most couples cohabit before marriage.  Some do so as test for marriage, though that does not work as well as they hoped.

The upshot is that Americans couple up, move in together, and even start to have kids at about the time and rate that they always have.

As the new CDC report, First Marriages in the United States puts it,

"If entry into any type of union, marriage or cohabitation, is taken into account, then the timing of a first union occurs at roughly the same point in the life course as marriage did in the past."

Fewer Than a Third Think There is a Democratic War on Religious Freedom

A YouGov/Economist poll found that only 29% think the Democratic Party is "waging war on religious freedom."

Even among weekly churchgoers and people who say religion is very important in their lives, most reject this recent culture wars theme.

More Good News on Teen Pregnancy

Teen pregnancy rate in the U.S.:

1990: 116.9 per 1,000.

2010: 34.3 per 1,000.

This is the lowest teen pregnancy rate in forty years.

The rate is going down because teens are having less sex and using contraception more.

The Belief That Women Are Not Different From One Another is a Distinctive Difference of Women

One of the hallmarks of difference feminism is that women tend to make different choices than men do, and this is fine. Equality of opportunity for women and men is not likely to lead to the same outcome.

Egalitarian feminism, by contrast, tends to see any difference in outcome between men and women - a difference in the proportion of CEOs of large corporations, for example, or of average pay - as evidence of discrimination against women. They are committed to the idea that women are essentially the same as one another, as well as the same in essence as men, so inequality among women is also evidence that something is wrong.

The belief that women are essentially the same as one another, and that justice means keeping equality among women is, Deborah Tannen has found, one of the distinctive hallmarks of women's communication and relations with one another.

The belief by egalitarian feminist women that women are the same is one of the women's differences that difference feminism accepts.

Happy Easter - Even if it is the Most Pagan Holiday

The Resurrection is the peak of the Christian calendar.

The American celebration of Easter is the most pagan of holidays. 

Nonetheless, both are happy occasions.  I celebrate them.

Little Men Continues the Virtuous World of Little Women

Some months ago I read Louisa May Alcott's Little Women for the first time.  I do like it as a moral tale.  I nominated her as a possible American equivalent of Anthony Trollope.

Today I read Little Men.  It is also a fine moral tale.  Since it is set in a school, it is full of opportunities for explicit moral instruction.  Most of these do not take place in the classroom, but in developing the characters of the boys (and some girls) in their interactions with one another outside of class. The charm is in the mild and humorous incidents.  The deep appeal of the novel, though, is about the shaping of good character.

In the comments on my post on Little Women, it was offered that we shouldn't compare Alcott and Trollope, since one was writing children's literature and the other adult literature.  The more I think about this distinction, the less I think it holds up.  I think what the authors have in common is more important than the age of the subjects they write about or for.  They are both portraying a God-ordered world in which good character and good conduct are right and true, and in which those who do right can be happy, whatever their worldly fortunes might be.

You Still Have Only a Slim Chance to Have Your First Baby in Your Forties

The number of women in their forties trying Assisted Reproductive Technologies of all sorts has gone up dramatically in the last few years.

The proportion who succeed, though, has not.  The Yale Fertility Clinic puts the success rate after 42 at 9%, where it has been for some years.

Yet many women coming to the clinic, who are highly educated and well-informed about many other things, have only a vague notion that fertility declines dramatically in their thirties.  They are often surprised, even offended, when told that they waited too long.

Good News From Burma

I am so encouraged by developments in Burma.  The military government seems to be gradually letting go.  They allowed 45 by-elections to go forward - not enough to control parliament, but enough to create a base for the previously banned opposition.

And the great news: Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nelson Mandela of Burma, was elected to parliament, and her party won 40 of the 45 seats.

We may see a free Burma within a few years.  And if President Aung San Suu Kyi tells me to call the country Myanmar, I will happily comply.