sexual orientation

A little over a month ago I posted a map of the legal status of same-sex marriage throughout the U.S. It was soon made obsolete by the legalization of same-sex marriage in the state of Washington. In addition, several readers pointed out that the map hid important differences within categories.

Ned Flaherty, Project Manager of Marriage Equality USA, sent in a link to an updated and more comprehensive map at their site. Green states have fully legalized same-sex marriage; yellow states recognize domestic partnerships or civil unions; and pink states do not allow either. The lettered codes provide more information on exactly what the status is in each state:

Click on the map or go to their website to look at the much larger version; they also have a round-up of pending or possible legislation and court cases in various states.

Paula F. sent in a link to Babble.com’s list of the top 100 ‘mom blogs’ of 2011.  Mom blogs have become wildly popular in recent years as a way to document and comment on the experience of motherhood, and this particular list illustrates some interesting things about social privilege.  Paula was struck by the lack of racial diversity among the selected blogs and noted how women of color are vastly underrepresented.   For example, only 7 of the blogs are written by African-American moms, and 4 of those refer to the mother’s race in the title (although the same is not true for any of the blogs written by white women).

A quick review of the blogs reveals some other interesting issues related to social privilege and motherhood.  In addition to the lack of racial diversity, the blogs included in the list show very little variation in terms of class, sexuality, age, and marital status.   (The blogs were chosen by a panel of “experts” that took into consideration nominations from Babble readers, so it’s unclear how representative they are of mom blogs in general.)

While there is the more obvious privilege of the “digital divide,” or the disparate access that people have to technology and the internet, there is also privilege in having the spare time to devote to intensive writing/blogging and the connections necessarily to draw sponsorship and advertising.  Moreover, while some of the selected blogs do offer narratives that deviate from traditional ideas about mothering and motherhood (for example, several blogs discuss mental health issues, the struggles of parenting, and forming blended families), they nonetheless reproduce a narrow image of who mothers are, what they look like, and what they do.

 ————————

Christie Barcelos is a doctoral student, a mom, and a blogger, but not really a mom blogger.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

It can take a while to find the right word.  But a mot juste may be crucial for framing a political issue. If you like the idea of men being able to marry men, and women women, what should you call the new laws that would allow that?

The trouble with “gay marriage” and even “same-sex marriage” is that these terms suggest – especially to conservatives – some kind of special treatment for the minority.  It’s as though gays are getting a marriage law just for them.

At last, the gay marriage forces seem to have come up with a term that invokes not special treatment but a widely-held American value that’s for everyone – equality.  A bill in  New Jersey has been in the news this week, mostly because Gov. Christie says he will veto it.  The bill is a “marriage equality” law.

The governor is in a bit of a squeeze.  As a Republican with ambitions beyond New Jersey’s borders, he can’t very well be for gay marriage.  But if his opponents can frame the matter their way, he now has to come out against equality.  Which is why the governor continues to refer to the issue as “same-sex marriage.”*

It’s like “abortion rights” or even “women’s rights.” A phrase like that might rally women to your cause, but if you want broader support, you need a flag that every American can salute.  I’m not familiar with the history of abortion rights so I don’t know how it happened, but those who want to keep abortion legal have managed to frame the issue as one of freedom to choose.   They have been so successful that the media routinely refer to their side as “pro-choice.”   To oppose them is to oppose both freedom and individual choice, principles which occupy a high place in the pantheon of American values.

It’s not clear that the “marriage equality” movement has been similarly successful, at least not yet.  I did a quick Lexis-Nexis search sampling the last week of the months January and July going back to 2007.  I looked for three terms: “same-sex marriage,” “gay marriage,” and “marriage equality.”

The general trend for all three is upwards as more legislatures consider bills, with big jumps when a vote becomes big news – that blip in July 2011 is the New York State vote.  But the graph can’t quite show how “marriage equality” has risen from obscurity.  That first data point, July 2007, is a 4.  Four mentions of “marriage equality” while the other terms had 25 and 50 times that many.  As of last week, “gay” and “same sex” still outnumber “equality,” but the score is not nearly so lopsided.

Here is a graph of the ratio of “equality” to each of the other two terms.  From nearly 1 : 20 (one “marriage equality” for every 20 “gay marriages”) the ratio has increased to 1 : 3 and even higher when the discussion gets active.

If the movement is successful, that upward trend should continue.  When you hear Fox News referring to “marriage equality laws,” you’ll know it’s game over.

———————————

* Christie is usually politically adept, but he’s stumbling on this one.  He referred to a gay legislator as “numb nuts” (literally, that might not necessarily be a liability for a politician caught in a squeeze).   Christie also said that he’s vetoing the bill so that the matter can be put on the ballot as a referendum – you know, like what should have happened with civil rights in the South.  

I think people would have been happy to have a referendum on civil rights rather than fighting and dying in the streets in the South.

Several critics, including Numb Nuts, responded that, yes, Southern whites would have been happy to have civil rights left up to the majority.  African Americans not so much.  (If you’re looking for an illustration of Tocqueville’s “tyranny of the majority,” the post-Reconstruction South might be a good place to start.)  The analogy is obvious – race : 1962 :: sexual orientation : 2012 – even if it was not the message the governor intended.

Yesterday a federal circuit appeals court upheld an earlier ruling by a lower court that Prop 8, the law banning same-sex marriage in California, was unconstitutional (the law was passed as a ballot measure in 2008). According to the court’s ruling, Prop 8 “serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples.” You can read the full ruling here.

The ruling did not address whether any ban on same-sex marriage was inherently unconstitutional; instead, it focused on the fact that same-sex marriage had been (at least briefly) legal in California, and Prop 8 was designed to specifically take away a recognized status that was in existence at the time it passed.

After the ruling, Talking Points Memo posted a map showing the current legal status of same-sex marriage throughout the U.S.:

Does anyone know what’s going on with New Mexico?

UPDATE: Reader Anonymous Bosch explains, “Gay marriage is de facto illegal in New Mexico, since licenses won’t be granted to gay couples. There hasn’t been enough legislative support for either bans or civil unions…”

Feast your eyes on this:

Social change makes life interesting.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Since its release in November, Get Up!’s commercial supporting gay marriage in Australia has garnered substantial social media interest (over four million views on Youtube). The U.S. LGBT news magazine The Advocate called it “possibly the most beautiful ad for marriage equality we’ve seen” (source). Take a look:

From a sociological point of view, what is interesting about this ad is how it avoids the powerful, but charged language of equality and rights. Supporters of same-sex marriage typically frame their cause in terms of non-discrimination (“all people are equal”), non-interference or privacy (“how is my gay marriage affecting yours?”) or in terms of freedom of speech (“I should marry who I want”). See images of posters using this frame here and here.

Rights language such as this, however, comes with the potential of conflicts and trade-offs. Accordingly, opponents of same-sex marriage have often capitalized on this in their responses. This poster, for instance, expresses a fear or mockery of assertive, unbridled individualism. Posters with this frame here.

 This “Yes to Proposition 8” video is another good example. In it one woman claims that, if gay marriage is legal, her religious identity will be subject to discrimination and her freedom to speech will be contested.

The language used by the marriage equality movement, then, enables its opponents to re-frame their responses in the same type of language.

This is why the Get Up! commercial is a game changer. Instead of using “rights talk,” it keeps both words and slogans to a minimum. It uses visuals to embed the couple in a network of family and friends.  At the end, for example, the camera steps back to show not just the couple but a wider network of people who happily witness a marriage proposal. This approach implicates the happiness of not just two individuals, but a community.  The message is that gay marriage is not just about individual rights, but about collective celebration and social recognition.

—————————

Ridhi Kashyap is a researcher in the Migration Group at the Institute for Empirical and Applied Sociology in Bremen, Germany. She studied interdisciplinary social sciences at Harvard University, and was a human rights fellow there after graduating in 2010. She is actively interested in human rights, particularly as they implicate issues of gender, migration, and development.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Earlier this month I read an essay that explained to me why I am not married. These reasons included:

• I’m a bitch.
• I’m shallow.
• I’m a slut.
• I’m a liar.
• I’m selfish.
• I don’t think I’m good enough.

I’m not kidding.

Coincidentally, the Pew Research Center released 2010 data showing that just 51% of all American adults were currently married. This is an all time low, down from 72% in 1960.

Comparing this data with the essay above is a nice illustration of the difference between “normative” and “normal.”  Normal is what is typical in a statistical sense; it is what actually holds.  Normative is what is believed to be good and right in an ideological sense; it is what it is believed does or should hold.

If you go by the essay, written by the thrice married and now single Tracy McMillan, marriage is an ideal state that we all should, or do, desire.  In her reality, if you aren’t married, it’s because you’re doing something wrong.  Marriage is normative.  In actual reality, though, the state of being married is not any more normal than the state of being unmarried.

Only if marriage is normative does the non-normality of marriage become something that needs explaining.  McMillan jumps in with hateful stereotypes, but social science has much better explanations.

• Low-income women often do not take-for-granted (as many middle class people do) that they can sustain a marriage through tough times.  Accordingly, they wait much longer before marrying once they meet someone they like (as long as 10 years or more), so that they can be as sure as possible about the match.  In other words, they take marriage very seriously and are reticent to just jump right in.  They know they’re “good enough,” Tracy; in fact, they value themselves and their relationships enough to really put them to the test.  (Read Promises I Can Keep for more.)
• Other women get divorced because men don’t do their fair share.  Unresolved conflicts over childcare and housework are one of the top reasons that couples dissolve.  Women struggle to keep up when they’re working a full time job and doing 2/3rds to 3/4ths of the childcare and housework.  They may not see the data, but they may intuit that single mothers do less housework than married ones (it’s true).  So they divorce their husbands.  They’re not “selfish,” they’re just trying to survive. (Read The Second Shift for more.)
• Other people aren’t married because they’re in love with someone of the same sex.  They’re not “sluts,” they’re discriminated against.

And, just for the record:

• I’m not married because I don’t want or need the state’s approval of my relationship and  I certainly don’t want it interfering if we decide to part.
• I’m not married because the history of marriage is ugly and anti-woman; because I don’t like the common meanings of the words “wife” and “husband”; and because even today, and even among couples that call themselves feminist, gender inequality in relationships is known to increase when a couple moves from cohabitation to marriage (and I don’t think I’m so special that I’ll be the anomaly).
• I’m not married because I’m opposed to the marriage industrial complex. It’s exploitative, stereotypical, and wasteful.
• I’m not married because I value the fact that my partner and I decide to be together every day, even though we don’t have to jump through legal hoops to do otherwise.
• I’m not married because I don’t want to support a discriminatory institution that has and continues to bless some relationships, but not others, out of bigotry.
• I’m not married because I don’t believe in giving social and economic benefits to some kinds of relationships and not others.  I don’t believe that a state- or church-endorsed heterosexual union between two and only two people is superior to other kinds of relationships.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

The point is that when the normal and the normative don’t align it often leads to social conflict over the meaning of the gap.  Some people, like McMillan, may jump in to tongue-lash the deviants.  Others may revel in defending non-conformity.  In any case, it will be interesting to see how the conversation about marriage continues, especially if, as the trend suggests, married people become a minority in the near future.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Sonita M. sent in a report from the Movement Advancement Project about the state of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) families.

LGBT families are more likely to be poor than non-LGBT families.  Nine percent of married cis-gender different-sex couples live in poverty, compared to 21% of gay male couples and 20% of lesbian couples:

LGBT couples may be more likely to be in poverty in part because of wage differentials between gays, lesbians, and their heterosexual counterparts.  Research shows that gay and bisexual men earn significantly less money than heterosexual men, whereas lesbians make somewhat more money than straight women.  Gay men would be more likely than heterosexual men to be in poverty, then.  But what about women? Women in same-sex couples face the same wage disadvantage that all women face, but also are not married to the heterosexual men that are making so much money (making it so that heterosexual women can make less money than gay women, but still be less likely to live in poverty). Make sense?  I hope so.

The second reason that LGBT couples with children are more likely than cis-gendered different-sex couples with children to live in poverty is that Black and Latino LGBT people are more likely than White LGBT people to be parents, and Blacks and Latinos are disproportionately poor to begin with:

Among same-sex couples, being a parent is also correlated with immigration status, which also correlates with class.  Non-citizens are more likely to be parents than citizens:

The two million children in America being raised by LGBT parents, then, are more likely to suffer from class disadvantage.  The authors of the report go on to discuss the ways in which formal policy and informal discrimination contribute to this state of affairs.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.