Brandt Hershman doesn't know when to quit.
Like a successful businessman with a self-destructive cocaine habit who ignores friends' and relatives' pleas to stop using, the Republican state senator from Wheatfield ignores the better advice of major companies and universities.
Hershman wants to amend the state's constitution to ban any legal recognition of same-sex couples, including civil unions and domestic partnership benefits. Several university faculties and major companies in Indiana oppose it. State universities fear it will threaten their abilities to extend benefits to the partners of gay and lesbian employees and to recruit new faculty. Eli Lilly and Co. and Cummins Inc. fear it will threaten their ability to attract talented employees.
Hershman's family-values lemming march relies on two superstitions: first, that homosexuality and acceptance thereof causes societal decline; and second, that legalizing gay marriage will degrade heterosexual marriage.
The first superstition stems from fundamentalist Christian dogma and involves the same illogic that makes people think crops will fail for lack of goat entrails offered to the gods. The second approaches rationality, but doesn't quite make it.
One proponent of the second superstition is Stanley Kurtz. In a 2004 article in The Weekly Standard, Kurtz asserted that the movement to legalize gay marriage in the Netherlands, which began in 1989 with the first court case challenging marriage laws, increased out-of-wedlock births as activism disassociated marriage from parenting. Out-of-wedlock births have increased at an accelerated annual rate since 1997 after registered same-sex partnerships were legalized in December 1996. Kurtz apparently didn't notice the graph based on Dutch government statistics that he used to demonstrate the increase showed an upward trend in out-of-wedlock births beginning in 1975 and already well-advanced by 1989. He likewise failed to demonstrate a causal relationship between the accelerated increase of 1997 and legalization of civil unions.
With the closest thing to a rational case against gay marriage amounting to scapegoating, let's hope the next advance in gay rights doesn't coincide with the arrival of Halley's comet or a plague of locusts.
Evidence from elsewhere also contradicts gay marriage opponents' claims.
The only U.S. state that allows gay marriage, Massachusetts, has one of the lowest divorce rates in the country, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Several states with constitutional gay marriage bans have some of the highest rates.
A 2001 University of Southern California study by Judith Stacey and Timothy Biblarz in American Sociological Review found no significant differences between children raised by gay and straight parents. While psychologists generally agree that living with both biological parents is best for children, evidence does not indicate that having two gay parents is necessarily bad for them.
While campaigning for the state Senate, Democrat Sue Errington visited a Spectrum meeting. She asked the 60 or so students assembled if they planned to leave the state after graduation, and almost everyone did. Considering that those Spectrum attendees probably constituted a representative sample of gay Indiana college students, we can reasonably conjecture that banning gay marriage will make them no more eager to stay.
Supporters of the ban would probably love to see Indiana become a homo-free zone, but they had better look forward to Indiana's future as an economic backwater.
In a 2002 study published in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Richard Florida found that large concentrations of gay people correlated with large concentrations of educated people, confirming his hypothesis that diversity attracts talent. With Indiana's college graduates fleeing, a gay marriage ban won't increase the allure of an already economically mediocre state.
At best, Hershman's attempt to ban gay marriage stems from unfounded fear. At worst, it's pandering to bigotry that will only hurt this state and many of its people in the long run. Either way, let's hope the House and voters place more value on hard evidence than on superstition.
Write to Alaric at ajdearment@bsu.edu
Read More
Three Air Jam teams take home the win
October 12, 2012Nineteen teams shimmied, shook and flipped for a sold out John R. Emens Auditorium on Thursday night during the 25th annual Air Jam.
Bill Clinton Speaks at North Central High School
October 12, 2012Former President's Speech Could Have Effect on State Senate Race
