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Remember this nugget from Larry Stickney’s attorney, Mr. “Government was created to kill” Stephen Pidgeon?
Same-sex divorce…is 8 times higher among homosexual men, and 300 times higher among homosexual women.
Pidgeon said these numbers were from a study looking at France, but there can be no study on the divorce rate of same-sex couples in France because same-sex marriage is not legal in France. Similar wild and unsubstantiated numbers have been fabricated by many anti-family activists. Larry Stickney has posted a video of Pidgeon speaking this lie on the Protect Marriage Washington website (they’re the Referendum 71 people).
I decided to check the actual, meaningful numbers here in Washington. Not same-sex divorce rate, because as in France, same-sex couples can’t get married in Washington. But domestic partnership dissolution rates. After reviewing the numbers, I can see why Pidgeon resorted to make-believe; reality just doesn’t jive with his apparent need to vilify gay families.Before we get into the DP dissolution numbers for Washington state, let’s just pause to see how the local professional heterosexuals are faring. Larry Stickney has a 67% personal divorce rate (3 marriages, 2 divorces) and Rep. Matt Shea a 100% divorce rate (1 marriage, 1 divorce). Both men are on the Protect Marriage Washington Board of Directors. Both men say that marriage is “one man and one woman for life”, and use an ideal that they personally failed to attain as some sort of weird rationale for repealing the domestic partnership law.
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And now to the numbers. The Washington Secretary of State keeps track of two numbers: the number of DP registrations, and the number of DP terminations. DPs were first available (in a much-reduced form) on July 23, 2007. As of June 2, 2009, there had been 5,475 DP registrations and 137 terminations. This means that the DP termination rate is a piddly 2.5%
I’m not going to even try to compare this to heterosexual divorce rates because it’s an apples/oranges thing, and heterosexual divorce rates are calculated on a percentage population basis. But most importanly, there are some important reasons besides a broken relationship that a DP’d couple may need to terminate the DP that isn’t in the heterosexual marriage equation. For example, a same-sex couple may terminate their DP upon moving to a state or country where they can obtain bona fide marriage. Or, an elderly different-sex couple may terminate their DP if they initially got one when the DP was little more than a power of attorney and health care proxy. Not all heterosexual couples may choose to stay in the DP system as DPs become more robust and bind them more tightly in a legal sense.
Suffice it to say that regardless of the fake stats spewed by Stephen Pidgeon et al., the reality in Washington state is that over 97% of us with DPs are stickin’ to ‘em. Too bad the professional heterosexuals can’t say the same for their cohort.
Cross-posted at Washblog.
16 Comments
Sometimesthe statistics just sneak up and bite you on the ass, don’t they boys?
MassachusettsOne might be able to make a useful comparison on divorce rates by looking at Massachusetts.
If I remember correctlyMassachusetts doesn’t keep separate stats for same- and different-sex marriages. You would need to look at each marriage license and guess which sex Party A and Party B was to decide how to categorize the marriage. It’s not impossible, but…
Because California dispensed with the Party A/B scheme and let people check off “husband” or “wife”, we could have had some good data from that state if “the people” hadn’t trashed the whole system with Prop 8. I’m not sure whether IA, VT, ME, NH or CT make identifying s-s couples any easier.
It’s still rather telling thatMA has the lowest divorce rate in the country. Not substantial, but still a big point in our favor.
yes and,apparently not only are heterosexuals still procreating within the bounds of wedlock, but so are LGBT people! the wonders of the lord are boundless.
Further factsI have friends who are a couple. They were in a domestic partnership. One was transferred out of the country with his job. Legally they could no longer be in the domestic partnership so had it dissolved. They still consider themselves married. If they had been legally married they wouldn’t have needed to divorce as there is no requirement for shared residence in marriage laws. So, at least one of those 137 terminations is not terminated in fact, only legally. I wonder how many others there are.
A StudentRecently, a student wrote a paper that was disgusting. She was very homophobic and saying nasty stuff about gay people. I told her that no one will accept her argument if she is so mean about the topic. One really weird item was uncited stats that said gay males have a 50% chance of divorce and lesbians have a 180% chance of divorce. I asked her about it because I said there was no chance that she could a stat like that–there are no marriages over a longtime except for Mass, and they would not be representative. I asked where she got this stat. She said that she heard it at church, but I asked her about the logic regarding it, and she could not answer. She was freaked that I would question it.
BTW she failed the class. Not because of that but because she was a lazy student.
a little more detaili was curious and so poked around a bit on what info different states request/require on marriage applications. in states like CT, it’s not even consistent from town to town. interesting.
MA
The Massachusetts Notice of Intention of Marriage does ask for the sex of each person (doesn’t mean the state will or won’t provide that information readily). FYI, GLAD has a comprehensive document on How to Get Married in Massachusetts.
IA
Iowa uses the Party A/B system but allows each person the option of designating themselves bride, groom or spouse and listing their gender. Very nice I must say – no pidgeon-holing in Iowa.
CT
In Ct, it seems that different town clerks collect different information on their marriage license application forms. For instance, Bridgewater forces one person to be “bride” and the other to be “groom”. There is no way to designate the true gender or sex of the person. However in West Hartford, sex is mandatory information and one person can choose between “husband/spouse” and the other “wife/spouse”. No husband/husband or wife/wife option available apparently. Here is GLAD’s tome How to Get Married in CT.
check the mathShouldn’t the divorce rate for Larry Stickney be 67%?
Not to mention…that, well, there’s no way lesbians could have a 180% chance of divorce. I suppose she might have meant to express that as a 180% higher chance of divorce than heterosexuals. Because after all, heterosexual divorce is supposedly around 50% already. But you can find a stat to say anything you want. And it’s completely unacceptable to put something in an academic paper that you heard at church (or at work, or on the street)!
Especially stats like these:From advocate.com:
This means the Dutch divorce rate is comparable to the UK’s dissolution (gay divorce) rate which, according to PinkNews, is also around 1% which is in itself notable because the British divorce rate has long been higher than the Dutch, who have one of the lowest divorce rates in Europe.
I have to wonder if Larry the Hutt might need his eyes tested. These stats may well have snuck up on him, but it’s a lot like being snuck up on by a T-Rex.
Is the divorce rate any higher than in the Bible Belt?What does the “divorce rate” among same-sex couples have to do with marriage equality? If we prohibited marriage based on divorce stats, no one in the Old Confederate states would be able to get married and Newt Grinch would be banned for life.
let no bad stat go unansweredyes, what you say is right on target. but if we leave these fake stats go unanswered, they just linger in the air and become accepted as “truth” and add to the overall subliminal doubt about our “worthiness” that the Pidgeon, Randall and Stickney types try to create in people’s minds.
This is another reasondomestic partnerships are not the equivalent of marriage, as one man/one woman proponents claim. DP’s are generally not portable and if they are the terms vary from state to state. California the shared residence requirement is more flexible and one partner can leave for a period of time, so long as they intend to return to the home. Wouldn’t intent to return always be there regardless of how long they were apart? At least until the couple decided to permanently separate.
That’s how I read it.When our DP was “notarized”, I doubt the notary was aware of the shared residence requirement. He didn’t ask.
Ours was done at the UPS storeby a twenty-something straight guy. He was cool, after notarizing the document he proclaimed, “I now announce you Domestic Partners.”