same-sex marriage

New & Noteworthy

Richie Zweigenhaft published a new TSP Special on the race and gender of people holding fortune corporate board seats. Comparing 2011 to 2023, Zweigenhaft found that white men have gone from about 2/3 majority to slightly less than 1/2 minority. Read the special here, and the full article here.

This week’s TSP clippings includes Eric Klinenberg on MSNBC’s Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast and in The New Yorker to discuss his new book 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed, Elizabeth Wrigley-Field in the StarTribune following new research by Wrigley-Field and colleagues that suggests ‘excess deaths’ (the number of deaths over the average expected deaths in a time period), Emine Fidan Elcioglu was interviewed by The Trace about her research examining a southwest border militia group that supplied information on migration routes to the U.S. Border Patrol, and Surinder S. Jodhka in IndiaSpend on India’s caste system fueling social exclusion.

From the Archives

Justice Alito made some controversial statements about same-sex marriage. Read our ‘There’s Research on That’ by Caity Curry and Allison Nobles to learn about some of the complexities surrounding LGBT parents.

Less than a week ago there was a Neo-Nazi rally in downtown Nashville. Learn about some similarities between 1930s Germany and the U.S. today by reading this piece from the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

More from our Partners & Community Pages

Contexts Latest pieces include:

• Sophie X. Liu on some of the financial and social complexities of the legalization of cannabis in California.
• Katie Mercer and Stefanie Mollborn on the class differences of distancing during COVID-19 and affluent communities’ perceptions of their moral superiority through privilege.

Council on Contemporary Families has several new pieces including:

• Bethany Everett writes on some of the State-Level protections for infant and maternal health of the LGBT community.
• Marcus Maloney and Kate Babin cover some of the implications of Andrew Tate and the appeal of the manosphere.
• Lauren E. Harris covers her research on older adult dating during COVID-19 and interviews with 100 single adults ages 60-83.

The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies posted Professor John Packer‘s annual Holocaust Remembrance Day Lecture, titled “Remembering, Learning, and Applying ‘Never Again’ as the Essential Lesson of the Holocaust.”

New & Noteworthy

This week we have a new Discovery from Mason Jones on Self-Help Books from work by Amber Gwynne. The research found that readers learned that the books were not a “quick fix” and they still needed “to do the heavy lifting”.

Valentine’s Day was this past week and we reposted some pieces from us and our partners to acknowledge the holiday. This includes recent coverage of some sociology by Lauren Harris on ABC’s The Golden Bachelor, Valentine’s Day in Japan, and more.

Our media report from this week includes Scott Schieman (Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto) in The Conversation on how accurate the ‘unhappy worker’ narrative is, coverage of Boris Kagarlitsky’s (prominent Russian sociologist and editor-in-chief of the Marxist online publication Rabkor) sentencing to five years in prison for his critical view of the war in Ukraine, Tina Fetner‘s (Professor of Sociology at McMaster University) new book, Sex in Canada: The Who, Why, When, and How of Getting Down Up North, in Brighter World and Vancouver is Awesome, and Christina Ciocca Eller in The Harvard Gazette on educational institutions rankings.

From the Archives

Orthodox Greece recently legalized gay marriage. Read Louisa L. Roberts‘s Special Feature on research of international attitudes toward same-sex marriage to learn more.

Russia has made advances in space-based nuclear weapons. Learn about some of the history of testing nuclear weapons from 1945-1998 from this Sociological Images piece by Gwen Sharp.

More from our Partners & Community Pages

Context’s Winter 2024 is out and ready to read! This issue includes pieces on eviction, “Green Card Soldiers”, race and drug addiction, Q&A with Malcolm Gladwell, and much more!

Council on Contemporary Families has two pieces to read. First, Richard Petts and Daniel L. Carlson write up some of their research on domestic labor in Society and Mental Health and how this work extends far beyond childcare. And second, Jennifer Randles and Megan Carroll write up their different research studies on the societal and cultural beliefs surrounding the role of fathers.

First Publics‘s latest includes Calvin John Smiley‘s work on building trust and using practical applications of sociological concepts in education to address the prison-industrial complex.

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This week on The Society Pages, we tackled drug addiction and harm reduction, body image and stigma, Twitter as a public forum for shaming, marriage equality and health, and the thin line between The Bachelor‘s Juan Pablo and Duck Dynasty‘s Phil Robertson. Plus much more (as always)!

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Addendum to my post last week criticizing Scalia’s characterization of the state of sociological research on the question of the impact of gay and lesbian parents on child development:

Phil Cohen (and others, in both public comments and private communications) point out that Scalia didn’t just miss the ASA brief or make up his claim that there is “no clear answer” among sociologists on the matter.  Rather, it would appear that he got the line from reading another brief on parenting submitted by sociologist Mark Regenerus and his colleagues that explicitly and directly countered the organizational consensus account. (See Cohen’s account.)

So is Scalia off the hook? Not quite that easy. For one thing, Regenerus’s brief is based on a highly controversial paper published in the journal Social Science Research about a year ago. (To say that that study has been controversial is putting it mildly; just take a look at some of the reactions chronicled previously by Cohen). Setting aside the question of how this piece got published in the first place (a significant matter of speculation and consternation in the field), one wonders if Scalia read the paper, or subsequent commentary about it—much less really parsed through the research on both sides of the issue. And even if some of the findings hold more water than most sociologists will allow, there seems little ground to warrant the larger societal implications that Regenerus imputes.

I won’t get into the specifics further, except to paraphrase Cohen’s summary: So what we have here is one sociologist (or one sociologist and his collaborators) denying the scholarly consensus which Scalia takes to mean there is no consensus. “Just like with evolution and climate change,” as Cohen puts it. I guess there are folks scientists who still think the earth is flat or that gravity isn’t really real either.