Santorum blames gay marriage for bad economy

[Alcon]

Except, Ben:

1. "Gay marriage weakens the natural family, because you're arguing that 'sex doesn't matter'" is an unfalsifiable claim whose proponents have consistently failed to furnish empirical evidence.

2. It ignores the positive effects of monogamy in general; in essence, it creates a "broken window" of normalized non-monogamy among gays.  If you are arguing that the gays' "broken window" in terms of "de-gendering" marriage affects heterosexual relationships, how can you ignore this effect, which seems like it would obviously outweigh the one you mention.

3. I have never seen any argument or indication that childless heterosexual relationships, or heterosexual relationships with adoptive children, have had any sort of this "broken window" effect -- which renders an already abstract, unfalsifiable claim even trickier to accept.

No?  I mean, I agree that it's not nutter versus some arguments out there, but do you actually find it a compelling argument?

[Alcon]

Ok, let's go back a bit.

Do you believe that gay marriage argues that the sex you happen to be is irrelevant to your marital relationship? Yes or no?

Obviously no, because I'm not dumb.  I believe that gay marriage argues that the sex you happen to be is irrelevant to the ends of the policy position.  That does not mean it's irrelevant to things that are pertinent to marriage or marriage policy, like procreative ability.  The fact that two situations are treated as the same in the broad policy does not mean they are the same, or that their equal treatment implies that the considerations are the same.

How do you reconcile this position with the understanding of the marital union as consummation? Are you now arguing that consummation is unnecessary in a marital relationship?

You'll have to tell me more about my understanding of the marital union as consummation.

Gay people don't WANT marriage. They aren't getting married in Canada. Ergo, if 'increasing monogamy' is the goal, than gay marriage is an outright failure.

Putting aside the fact that I'm not sure looking at gay marriage stats as conclusive after a few years makes much sense...a marginal effect is not the same as a non-effect.  You know what a non-failing policy is?  One that's 0.0001% better, in net, than the previous policy.

Not when 1 percent of gay people are getting married. That's a tiny number. Even if the total number of marriages dropped by a tenth of a percent, the negative repercussions would far outweigh the positives.

Your basic argument, although it's kind of confusing, seems to be that the dilution of the meaning of "marriage" so as to render sex irrelevant, has the potential to discourage people from entering marital relationships.  You argue that this "breaks" marriage,

Your argument has a few apparent flaws to me:

1. You're treating marginal effects as non-effects (selectively.)

2. You're dismissing positive externalities in the case of incentivizing gay monogamy, and I'm not sure why.

3. You're assuming that early marriage rates encapsulate all direct positives and positive externalities of gay marriage, and I'm not sure why.

4. You are assuming that including gays will structurally effect the institution of marriage, by the simple change of definition, as opposed to be limited to being a negative externality.  Basically, you're treating gay relationships as having externalities limited by their numbers when it's inconvenient to your argument, and having structural externalities to the whole institution when it's convenient to your argument.

5. You seem to be ignoring the parallel argument that incentivizing institutional monogamy would have a structural effect in encouraging long-term monogamy among all populations.  I don't see that as being any more falsifiable than your claim here, and yet you believe one but not the other.

6. Even if you can find a good enough reason to dismiss #5, this whole thing is based on secondary and tertiary correlations and yet you seem utterly confident of it for some inexplicable reason.  And, yet, you're dismissing marginal effects as being non-effects.  That seems whack to me.

I might be overcomplicating things here a little, but your argument seems like a mess.  A nuanced mess, but a mess.

It's not a hard argument. Look at births out of wedlock. Those born out of wedlock are much less likely to do well.

What does that have to do with childless or child-adopting heterosexual relationships (like the portion you quoted), and how does this all relate to the "consummation norm" or whatever?

[Alcon]

Ben, do you maybe mean that it was 1% of the marriages in Canada that were gay, rather than 1% of the gays who were married? The statistics that I'm looking at give us 12,438 same-sex marriages in Canada between June 2003 and October 2006 (with same-sex marriage still not being legal in much of Canada for a lot of this time span), and 147,391 marriages of any kind in 2003, a rate which at that time (the website that I'm looking at for this particular number is from 2007) was said to be more or less stable. So if there are ~140,000-150,000 marriages a year, and 3,731.4 of those were gay on an average between a little over three years during all of which gay marriage wasn't legal throughout Canada...uh, that doesn't gel with what you were saying.

Here, links.

Same-sex marriage rate
General marriage rate

So given all that verbiage, what in Canada is the gay marriage rate among gays of "marrying" age? Again however, it is totally irrelevant from an ethical standpoint whether it is 1%, 10%, 50%, or 100% - totally irrelevant - isn't it?

To be fair to his argument, he's saying the positive effect on 1% of gays is less than the negative effect on society from "de-gendering" marriage.  So he's not saying that 1% of gays have no value, but rather that it's reasonable to ignore them because 99% of gays are disinterested, and there's a net-negative effect on society.

The problem is, his argument about the negative effect on society is ridiculously selective, to the point where he's establishing, ignoring and limiting policy externalities at apparent convenience; and he seems all too willing to throw that 1% (if that's really it) under the bus, as if they were responsible for the disinterest of the 99%.

And he's also starting to go all Milhouse on us with this vague "consummation" stuff.

[Alcon]

Ben, do you maybe mean that it was 1% of the marriages in Canada that were gay, rather than 1% of the gays who were married? The statistics that I'm looking at give us 12,438 same-sex marriages in Canada between June 2003 and October 2006 (with same-sex marriage still not being legal in much of Canada for a lot of this time span), and 147,391 marriages of any kind in 2003, a rate which at that time (the website that I'm looking at for this particular number is from 2007) was said to be more or less stable. So if there are ~140,000-150,000 marriages a year, and 3,731.4 of those were gay on an average between a little over three years during all of which gay marriage wasn't legal throughout Canada...uh, that doesn't gel with what you were saying.

Here, links.

Same-sex marriage rate
General marriage rate

So given all that verbiage, what in Canada is the gay marriage rate among gays of "marrying" age? Again however, it is totally irrelevant from an ethical standpoint whether it is 1%, 10%, 50%, or 100% - totally irrelevant - isn't it?

It is irrelevant, and also hard to calculate. First, you have to pin down what percentage of the population is "eligible" to engage in a same-sex marriage. If we low-ball it and say 1%, that's roughly 150,000 Canadians. If we take the numbers from 2006-2007, with there being roughly 12,000 gay marriages, then that means that 24,000 gays are married in Canada.

24,000/150,000 = 0.16 = 16% of the homosexual population in Canada is married.

Even if gays made up 5% of the population, that would still place the number of married homosexuals at roughly 3%, as of 2007.

Five years later, it's safe to assume that there are a lot more than 24,000 married gays in Canada.

He is correct that a lot of those marriages were probably non-residents.  He just seems to be a little eager to set low values as zero; and for all of his abstract arguments about the negative externalities on heteros, he doesn't seem to be giving any due to the arguments about why it might take gays a while to come around to the whole marriage thing.  His argument is complicated and has some fair points, but he seems to be going out of his way to ignore some factors and highlight others.

[Alcon]

Ok, then are you arguing that your sex is in fact relevant?

You can't have both of these. One or the other. Either things like procreation are relevant or they are not.

If you are arguing that they are both the same and should be treated the same, then you are saying that procreation is irrelevant to marriage.

Semantics only work if you know what you're talking about.

You can have two situations with different policy implications and considerations, and the same end policy in the same way 2+3=5 while 1+4=5, and the same way 1+2 and 1+1 can both =>1.  Either you're missing me that or you were defining "relevant" as "prompting a distinction between policies," which is an incoherent definition for "relevant."  After all, something can cause you to have the same two policies for two different situations, when you otherwise would not have; does the fact that it renders identical policies make it "irrelevant"?  Obviously not...in fact, it makes it relevant.

(That may not be the case here; I'm just pointing out that your argument is illogical.)

Then you don't see consummation as having any relevance to marriage?

Considering how confused I find your definition of "relevance," maybe you should just say your argument re: consummation to avoid a potential misunderstanding there.

Uh, yeah. Sorry. If a policy that's supposed to bring freedom to people is outright rejected, then that pretty much says it all? Maybe the policy stinks and/or doesn't meet the needs of gay people.

So, all else being equal, we should revert to a policy that provides even less utility?  Uh, no, sorry.

All I'm seeing are negative externalities associated with the policy. If you've got positive externalities, then I'd like to see them.

Because it's an empirical effect? You've asked for something that can be measured. This is one thing that can.

The measurements you've made are secondary correlations.  Your central claim is not empirically measurable.  You've observed a phenomenon (failure for marriage rates to rise), and hypothesized that it's on account of a "broken window" caused by homosexual relationships, or at least that homosexual relationships have failed to reverse the trend and are therefore ineffective policy.  Is that about right?

I also mentioned an (equally unfalsifiable) argument for a positive externality.  Is your sole justification for rejecting that, that marriage rates have not gone back up?

I'm stating that the evidence that we possess at present shows an insignificant increase in one type of marriage and a significant decrease in another type of marriage. Ergo, the policy is an outright failure at producing the desired result, increasing the marriage rate in Canada. In fact, it's been quite the opposite.

...

It would be, except this theory isn't working out this way. If gay marriage increased overall monogamy, we would not be seeing the things we do see. We're seeing precisely the opposite.

Have you controlled these numbers for (non-)presence of same-sex marriage?

Not sure where I've dismissed them altogether? I've argued they are substantially outweighed by the negative effects.

That's not how it came across, but fair enough.

What percentage of children overall are raised in these circumstances? By far the greatest correlation is the overall marriage rates.

What do you mean "the greatest correlation"?  To what?  With what?  Greatest in what sense?

Also, did you just ask what percentage of children are raised in childless marriages?

I'm starting to wonder if you're even trying to do anything but reply as quickly as possible...

[Alcon]

No, I've observed a decline in marriage rates, consistant with the broken window thesis. The thesis matches the observations, and attempts to explain why.

You're articulating a thesis that does not actually matched the expected observations. Which leads me to wonder, do you believe that this will change in the future?

It was predicted that there would be no effect. That has been shown to be false. The folks that predicted (prior to the change of the law), that marriage rates would decline, has been shown to be correct.

What happens to theories that make wrong predictions? It leads credence to the folks who predicted that marriage rates would decline that they were able to correctly predict what was to come.

Even if they are right for the wrong reasons. See what I'm saying?

So, you're essentially arguing that -- even if gay marriage does not affect the marriage rates, or even slows down losses -- because we cannot separate out correlation and causation, we should presume it has a negative effect on causation if a negative correlation exists?  I just want to clarify your argument before we continue.

Also, my hypothesis does not fail to match empirical evidence because my hypothesis does not necessarily claim that the effect of gay marriage will be enough to reverse larger trends.  You cannot ascribe an empirical claim to an argument simply because that empirical claim could be made about an argument.  I can present a version of the pro-gay marriage hypothesis that is equally as unfalsifiable and matches the evidence as approximately well as the argument you're presenting.  Does that make it compelling?  Absolutely not.  So why do you believe yours with such apparent certainty?

I think the claims made about gay marriage (also unfalsifiable, granted) was that gay marriage would not have a negative effect on marriage rates, not that marriage rates would not continue falling.  (So, more akin to the contrasting hypothesis I'm describing.)

Marriage rates have the biggest effect on the total children born out of wedlock. Even if it goes up with a small segment of the population, an overall decline will have a much greater effect on this number. More children born out of wedlock on average means greater poverty.

I agree, but that doesn't answer my question.

One of me, about 10 of you folks... Bear with me.

Sorry to be impatient.  It's always easier to see communication issues as being the other person's fault.  I appreciate your efforts.

(Edit: Also, for some reason, my subconscious was originally convinced that you were a particular returned banned poster who I had a strong distaste for.  You're obviously not, but my subconscious is still getting purged of the association...it's probably affecting my ability to be nice to you still, a little.)

[Alcon]

I'm saying that we can dispose of the argument that gay marriage would increase marriage rates overall. I agree with you that I don't think the argument has been sufficiently proven (wrt to other effects on society) to explain the marriage decline, if for anything else, that it's simply not been around long enough.

I don't think many proponents of gay marriage have made the argument that gay marriage itself would be enough to reverse trends that, all else being equal, originate from 90% of the overall marriageable population.

I don't understand the second sentence, sorry.

However, there's a big gap between, 'insufficiently proven' and between 'proven to be incorrect'. I think the evidence that we do have is supportive of the broken window hypothesis.

You really think the continued (although slightly slowed, overall, I think?) decline in heterosexual marriage rates is enough to prove this grand "broken window" hypothesis about gay marriage itself?  I'm putting aside the debate over whether gay marriage is alone enough to reverse long-standing trends in marriage, because I think that is a pretty fringe argument.  Are you really convinced that gay marriage is breaking the window further, considering the nature of the evidence at hand?

I'd have to think on how to respond to this in detail, but that hard-set belief seems incredibly counterintuitive to me.

Marriage rates increasing (irrespective of the cause) would falsify the theory outright. Ergo the thesis is falsifiable.

Again, I don't think that's the thesis gay marriage proponents are arguing; nor do I think gay marriage opponents would accept that gay marriage is repairing windows if this trend reversed itself.  I think this fight is about effect on the margins, which is understandable considering it pertains to a rather small number of marriages.

Because people smarter than me with many more letters after their name are coming to the same conclusions.

Obviously most accredited folks who write on gay marriage support it, so I assume you've analyzed the arguments here enough to discern which accredited folks to give more due to.  Unless I am missing a body of evidence or theory after giving this thought and research, I think we're approaching the point at which the "certainty gap" between us and them, is no longer about their superior information.  (Academics and other experts obviously have non-evidentiary incentives to claim certainty, or publish disproportionately in areas where they believe they are certain.)

Based on the stuff we've talked about in this thread, do you really think this is a slam-dunk evidentary case for a positive aggregate or negative aggregate effect from gay marriage?  I'm unambivalent about gay marriage for other reasons, but I don't think it is.  This is just very hard to observe empirically.

I mean:  If there is no correlation between presence of gay marriage and accelerating divorce rates, doesn't that rather outshadow the evidence you've presented so far?

Then I've apparently lost the course. Please restate your question again. My apologies.

No worries.  It doesn't really fit the conversation, but I'll bring it back if it's relevant again.

Teddy? He's a friend for sure, and encouraged me to sign up. But I'm here mostly because I got zotted at FR for preaching the merits of Santorum.

Here I can be a Santorum fanboy and not be accused of working for him, thankfully.

Alexander Hamilton, actually, and I have no idea why.  I guess you share a similar Political Matrix score and both oppose gay marriage.  Hamilton's reasons for opposing gay marriage were psychopathy masked in high-level arguments like this...that's why I was too willing to assume you were dismissing marginal benefits to gays as a non-benefit.  Sorry again.

[Alcon]

I do not support gay marriage, however, I do believe that these kinds of comments from Santorum do not help the Republican cause in November.

I'd appreciate if you read something in this topic besides the title or abstained from posting.

[Alcon]

It would except these folks keep getting proven right, on the slope of these things. Overall divorce is down somewhat, but not the rates.

I don't understand your response, so I'll ask again:  If there's no correlation between legalizing gay marriage and worse trends in divorce rates, don't you feel more uncertain?  Remember you were essentially arguing that the best we had was the simple "macro-level" correlation.  Here's a way to try to control for the variable you're trying to isolate it, and suddenly you seem kinda dismissive of the possibility.

I've seen the arguments since about 2000 or so, that people were consciously avoiding getting married out of solidarity with their gay brethren. Ergo, preventing gay marriage was a hindrance to marriage overall. Clearly it's been proven not to be the case.

...

It's been persistant for awhile now, and there has been some handwringing about it.

...

Personally, as a historian I think we are missing the forest for the trees, but then I'm weird, so that doesn't surprise me.

It's hard for me to imagine that any non-idiots ever thought those people would be enough to reverse the trend toward lower marriage rates, if it continued.  I've been involved in gay rights issues for a few years now, and I've literally never heard this argument once in my life...and I've heard some odd ones.

If you'd like to continue against a weak argument that seems rare and nonsensical to me, that's fine, but I don't see the point of shadowboxing the weakest possible argument unless you're arguing to your conclusions.

There's a difference between something that is statistically significant and something that is not. I don't believe sufficient time has passed to confirm the theory as true even if the evidence at present, on the surface, supports it.

"The theory" being what?  And what are you performing a statistical significance test on?  Confused.

If I were to compare birthrates between the folks who do believe in gay marriage and between those who don't, it's really stark. I know folks on both sides, and it's not even close. I think one of my conservative Catholic friends has more kids than all the folks on the other side combined.

So yeah, I do believe it's having a negative effect.

You think gay marriage is having a negative effect on society because gay marriage proponents tend to have fewer kids?

I've been on your side, and not that long ago. It's a reasonable argument, if all the premises follow. However, I think that at least two of your premises are sufficiently flawed to render the rest of the argument moot.

I don't think we've even touched on either premise yet.

I'm guessing this had more to do with your conversion to Catholicism, if we're going to equivocate correlation and causation.    But go ahead, I'd like to hear the flawed premises.  I haven't really presented my argument, though, just because this thread is already complicated enough.  Caveat emptor...

Would a conservative frame this question in this matter?  A conservative frames innovations as having to show that they bring substantial benefit to society as a whole.

Traditions get some latitude on hurting people that innovation doesn't, eh?

Thanks for not calling me a psychopath.

I don't know if you're being facetious...nothing about your argument or conduct seems anything but well-intentioned.  I was just being honest about why I was inappropriately kind of unsympathetic at first. :S

[Alcon]

haha, sounds good.   I just wouldn't be surprised if someone took exception to "psychopath" appearing in the same sentence as their name, for whatever reason.  Just making sure...

[Alcon]

If thing A and thing B are headed kinda sorta in the right direction - what's the likelihood that the argument is correct? What if thingy A, B and C are all headed kinda sorta in the right direction?
What it A, B, C and D are all headed in kinda sorta the right direction. It increases with the square..

I hope this is a bit clearer...

No...straight over my head.  More concreteness/directness would help.  I'm good with abstraction, but not if I don't know the components/variables involved.

Well, I recall it quite clearly back then and it was considered a substantive argument back then. I'll see if I can dig it up.

Man, what a stupid argument.  I'm not just saying that with the benefit of hindsight.  Politically passionate people tend to get hackish, but heterosexuals outnumber gays at least 9:1.  It's just a numerically stupid argument.

Santorum's theory here about broken windows wrt gay marriage and morals overall?

OK, you confused me because I thought you meant "statistically significant" in the mathematical sense.

Yeah. I like kids and Santorum likes kids too. Kids are good. Need more of em cause of demographics.

I like kids too, although I'm not sure society's biggest problem is the absence of kids among those dispassionate about having them.  But...anyway, I don't think gay marriage support is a causal agent in reducing individual fertility rates, but I think this may be an unnecessary side argument.  (You tell me if I'm wrong, of course)

Well, the ones I consider flawed are the permanency of sexual preferences and role of marriage within society. I don't think the premise that homosexuality is fixed or that marriage is an individual right make any sense.

I don't believe either of those in any absolute sense either.  I definitely don't think marriage itself is an individual right.  Although I think sexuality is somewhat more fluid than dynamic, I think it's a bit of both (overall - not necessarily on the individual level.)

A conservative would say that changes propagate through the system. It's not enough to say that things may be bad now, a change could make things worse than they are present. Alleviating something bad has to be weighed against unintended consequences. In short, they look at the second and third orders of the equation, not just the first.

I would prefer to preference such things in relationship to demonstrable reality, not some sort of vague ideological heuristic.

[Alcon]

Still really waiting for a reply on what I thought would be a simple empirical question (plus the other stuff.)

[Alcon]

It's the one you tried to reply to with your last post.

Your argument, as far as I understand it, is that your hypothesis (the "broken window" effect, exacerbated by gay marriage) should be presumed valid because the evidence (continued deterioration in marriage statistics) supports it.  I asked whether you would be inclined to reject your hypothesis if, after trying to isolate the variable "presence of same-sex marriage" -- since heterosexual trends could naturally be expected to drown out any non-extreme effect of same-sex marriage -- no correlation was evident

(By the way, I'm surprised to see you making the "you argued that polls were changing in 2008 -- it didn't happen" argument.  Does failing short of 50% somehow nullify well-substantiated trends?  If not, this is a non sequitur reply.)

[Alcon]

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All I said is that the evidence we have at present supports the thesis. I don't believe it's sufficient to prove the thesis.

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I would be inclined to reject the hypothesis if the evidence presented was precisely the opposite of what the thesis argued.

I hope that's clearer.

OK.  So, just to clarify, if I run a comparison of divorce trends in jurisdictions that have legalized same-sex marriage versus those that have not, and it does not indicate a correlation suggesting that legalization of same-sex marriage is an explanatory variable (or that it's a mitigating variable), will you...

1. ...reject your hypothesis?

2. ...accept the counter-hypothesis I described as most accurately matching the evidence?

I mean, in your previous posts, you have put a lot of stock in this "broken window" hypothesis.  When I asked you why you bought into it, you basically said that this correlation (gay marriage's failure to reverse preexisting trends) was the only empirical evidence we have on the subject, and that it was the proper measuring-stick for evaluating our respective hypotheses.  You conceded that gay marriage may have a positive effect, or no effect, but that all we can see is that the overall trend has been toward more divorce as same-sex marriage has become an issue -- and, however secondary that correlation is, it's the most direct empirical evidence we have.

I am presenting a method that attempts to isolate the variable "presence of same-sex marriage," which is what we are trying to do here.  It is objectively better evidence: it establishes direct, instead of secondary or tertiary, correlation.  It may not be perfect, but if you put so much stock in secondary/tertiary correlations, consistency seems to demand you put a lot of import into evidence that isolates the variable you want to look at.  Right?

[Alcon]

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Statistically significant evidence - showing that the divorce rate has dropped, yes. Inconclusive evidence? No.

Hold on.  You accepted the declining marriage rates as compelling evidence despite the fact that you can't run a statistical significance test on it!  You didn't testing any variable; you're just saying "thing A happened as thing B happened, so it's likelier that thing A explains thing B than that it doesn't."  You're accepting circumstantial evidence there.  Now I'm running an analysis that compares the relationship between thing A and thing B in places that have same-sex marriage versus those that don't.  Once I isolate the variable -- which removes the "noise" of irrelevant variables! -- you're now rejecting circumstantial evidence and requiring a statistical significance test.  Wtf?  You must know that makes no sense.

It's indefensible to accept Hypothesis A and reject Hypothesis B, when Hypothesis B has more evidence than Hypothesis A, just because Hypothesis B doesn't reach statistical significance...especially if Hypothesis A's evidence is so circumstantial (i.e., more indirect) that you can't even perform a statistical significance test on it!

[Alcon]

Fun fact, the state that has had gay marriage the longest, Massachusetts, also has the lowest divorce rate per capita. No other state has gay couples that have been married 5 years in that state and want to divorce. And they're still the lowest.

Massachusetts has had the lowest divorce rate long before gay marriage was legalized.

I doubt you will find much difference if any in the divorce rate from legalizing gay marriage.

I agree with you...unlike Ben, I doubt that gay marriage has an effect on the divorce or marriage rates either way.  However, in the first five years of legal gay marriage in Massachusetts, the divorce rate fell 21%, compared to 3% in states that disallowed same-sex marriage and reported statistics (n=43).  Highly statistically significant, as was the difference over the same period between states banning same-sex marriage and those who just don't have it.

Weak evidence?  Fairly.  Weaker than the evidence ("divorce rates haven't reversed after same-sex marriage started!") Ben used centrally to argue his hypothesis ("same-sex marriage causes a 'broken window' with negative externalities to heterosexual marriage")?  Nope -- that evidence is about as weak as you can get.

[Alcon]

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Not really. Fewer people actually choosing to get married supports the broken window argument. More people choosing to get married is a benefit for the state, as well as lower rates of children born out of wedlock.

It's now up to 41 percent nationwide as of 2009, if you can find me MA stats, I'd love to see them.

29 percent for white non hispanic, 53 for hispanic, 73 for black.

I was looking at it a few minutes ago, but Massachusetts's change in marriage rate for the same period was about national average.  Did you actually look these statistics up before reaching your position, or were you just hoping they'd match the conclusions you already came to?

Edit: Also, clarification on which variable(s) you want to test -- out-of-wedlock birth rate, marriage rate, divorce rate, whatever -- would help.  I'm not going to do the work testing your hypothesis just to find out you've changed your mind on variables

[Alcon]

No, I did not. I said I accepted the declining marriage rates as evidence in favor of the broken window hypothesis, expecially when coupled with rising numbers of children born out of wedlock.

That's exactly what I was saying...

Uh, 'can't' is a very different statement from saying that I haven't done so which is what I did say. Feel free.

No, you can't.  Your analysis only compares one measurement (appearance of same-sex marriage) to another measurement (overall non-change in marriage rate.)  You literally can't perform a statistical significance test on that.  You could perform a correlation test if you had some sort of objective measure for "appearance of same-sex marriage," but that's it.

Yessir, I'm saying that the evidence that we do have supports the argument.

I'm accepting evidence that supports the conclusion that we are looking at, yes.

Right, and it's incredibly weak (secondary correlation) evidence.  And the evidence I'm proposing we get is better evidence.

And you yourself have admitted that there's nothing to indicate your claim which is that gay marriage has actually increased marraige rates.

I never made that claim.  I called that claim stupid...like three times?

Again, I said, if I'm going to believe that gay marriage is a net benefit, then I want to see increases in the marriage rate. That's not happening. Inconclusive evidence isn't sufficient to prove the alternative.

You seem to believe that I should treat your evidence as compelling, even though you've said so yourself, that it is not.

...

What circumstantial evidence is there for the marriage rate increasing?

...I just wrote three paragraphs about why it's superior to isolate the variable.  Why are you pretending like I didn't?  Was my post unclear?

[Alcon]

Where are you getting this from?

I'm getting my national numbers from:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr60/nvsr60_01.pdf

Which is the CDC numbers for 2009.

State information

The analysis I was quoting was through 2008, although they now have stats through 2009.  It was just already done for me, and I don't want to run a full analysis until we've pinned down methodology.

What was the marriage rate at the time?

Instead of just randomly looking up statistics, let's figure out a methodology.  It wastes my time researching, and also makes it easy for someone to cherry-pick methodology post hoc after they see a methodology that gets the results they want.  There's no reason not to pick the methodology first.

[Alcon]

2010/2009/2008/2007/2006/2005/2004/2003/2002/2001/2000

2.5, 2.2, 2.0, 2.3, 2.3, 2.2, 2.2, 2.5, 2.5, 2.4, 2.5

I believe they call that 'cherry picking'. You picked 2008 as a 'representative sample'. Why am I not surprised?

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/divorce_rates_90_95_99-10.pdf

Divorce rate in MA is now higher than it was previously, not lower.

And it wastes my time when you cherrypick data that supports yours. Hey, I'm gonna be honest and follow the argument to its conclusions. That means I'm going to follow up on your claims and check to see what the data you are looking up actually says.

When you do something like this, this really makes me less likely to trust your conclusions. I'm disappointed.

You're wrongly accusing me of impropriety here.  The extent of my "research" so far hasbeen looking at this analysis, which uses the "divorce rate" as divorces over marriages.  The link you gave is another statistic, divorces per 1,000 persons.  The analysis I got that from was also written in 2010, before 2009 statistics were issued.  My point was just to demonstrate that an analysis that isolates the "presence of same-sex marriages" variable is superior to a secondary correlation analysis, and can show different results.  

Have you noticed that I keep asking you to agree on a methodology before we do the analysis?  Now, you're accusing me of: 1) Not looking at the data before I linked to that analysis; and 2) Presenting that analysis as a conclusive argument when it is flawed.

I did not look at the data yet because we haven't chosen a methodology yet.  It is bad to look at the data before choosing a methodology because it could bias me in methodology choice.  I will happily include both means of calculating divorce rate, if you like.

Accusing me of presenting that analysis as a conclusive analysis is also bizarre, considering I called the analysis "fairly weak," and have been trying to get you to agree on a methodology for a more robust argument.  My only point, again, was to demonstrate that an analysis that isolates the "presence of same-sex marriages" variable is superior to a secondary correlation analysis, and can show different results.

(Also, I'll note that an eyeball measurement of the table you linked to, ironically, does not appear to indicate an increase in the divorce rate so calculated between 2004-2008.)

[Alcon]

Here's the marriage rate in MA, over the same period.

5.6, 5.6, 5.7, 5.9, 5.9, 6.2, 6.5, 5.6, 5.9, 6.2, 5.8.

So, despite the fact that there has been a 15 percent drop in the overall marriage rate, the divorce rate has jumped up 20 percent.

Divorce rate/Marriage rate =

.446,  .393, .351, .390, .390,  .355,  .338, .446,  .424, .387, .431.

If I go back further, the marraige rate has dropped from 7.1 to about 5.6 today. So in 15 years, marriage has dropped 23 percent.

Divorces/marriage did drop, but have a sharp upward trend. matching the record high in 2002.

You are dividing marriages in a given year over divorces in a given year, which means you're dealing two highly volatile numbers (just look at the variance on this table.)  It would be best to perform this analysis including other states to reduce the volatility, and maybe use less volatile statistic (like marriages over population, divorces over marriages, divorces over population) and combine years into periods (e.g., "post-gay marriage" and "pre-gay marriage") or something, to mitigate these problems.

Which is exactly why I want us to agree to a methodology before we jump into these numbers; especially dealing with such volatile numbers (seriously, look at the variance on those tables), it is easy to shoehorn data into hypotheses and find trends that don't actually exist (which is why the other, non-gay-marrying states can function as convenient controls!)

[Alcon]

bah, but I don't want to do a quick-and-dirty, because once I've seen these numbers, I can't un-see them before I do a formal analysis.  It poisons my decisionmaking abilities.

But whatever...if we have to do this before agreeing on a methodology, let me check the post-gay vs. pre-gay changes for Massachusetts versus the other states.  Hold on.

edit: Uh, also I think we can use all of the states as controls.  Why not?  I've already converted both tables into an Excel document.  I don't know what's so special about those states.

[Alcon]

also, I just dropped a barbell on my foot so this may be a bit longer before I complete this than I expected.

[Alcon]

It was actually a dumbbell*, and I didn't need feeling in that toe anyway, so we're back on.  Calculating now.

Edit: And thanks, I'm fine, just a little bleeding

[Alcon]

Ben, just to make sure you're OK with this methodology and I'm not doing anything dumb (a little distracted by my toe), here's what I'm doing:

Comparing post-2004 vs. pre-2004 marriage and divorce rates [calculated as in the PDF from the CDC] for Massachusetts vs. other states, as well the marriage:divorce ratio.  Determining whether the post-2004 vs. pre-2004 changes were more or less favorable in Massachusetts versus the other states.

Of course, I'm excluding states that did not report every year.

I think the combination of the periods is a necessary evil because one year of Massachusetts data alone would have way too much variance potential.

Sound good?  (Still working on importing the data; states with spaces in their name screwed it up)