They All Have Indoor Bedrooms, Too

Our buddy at the Associated Press, Lisa Leff, is out with a story that carried the following headline: "Report: Gay Couples Similar to Straight Spouses"

Well, we already know one obvious and significant difference: the lack of one of the sexes.

So what is this report talking about, exactly?

Same-sex couples who identify as married are similar to straight spouses in terms of age and income, and nearly one-third of them are raising children, according to Census data released Monday that provides a demographic snapshot of gay families in America.

Age and income. Well, yes, people tend to get married when they are older rather than younger, and their income tends to rise with age. For example, "Joe" is more likely to be married if we check in on him at age 32 than he would be if we checked in on him at 19, and he's likely to be earning more money, too.

[Much more after the jump.]

As for the couples who are raising children (and I wonder how many of them have sole or main custody) – unlike with many married couples, none of those children are the biological offspring of both adults. As I've said before, there are instances where I think foster or adoptive parenting is better than the alternative, even lacking a parent of one of the sexes, but I generally do not support actions by adults that deprive a child of living with a married mother and father.

The study released by a think tank based at UCLA also found that Utah and Wyoming were among the states with the highest percentages of gay spouses in 2008, despite being heavily conservative states with no laws providing legal recognition of gay relationships.

That's likely due to the conservative nature of the states – and sparse population -facilitating stability and an appearance of monogamy. If there are few bars with a hook-up feel to them, after all, having a steady makes more sense to more people. Also note that these couples considered themselves married with no state recognition whatsoever. That's freedom.

The data from the annual American Community Survey showed that nearly 150,000 same-sex couples in the U.S., or more than one in four, referred to one another as "husband" or "wife," although UCLA researchers estimate that no more than 32,000 of the couples were legally married.

This is a misappropriation of language. Of course they are free to speak that way, but a husband is a man who is married to a wife, and a wife is a woman who is married to a husband. Without a wife, there is no husband, and vice-versa. This is why, when California temporarily had court-imposed neutered marriage licensing, the forms had "Person A" and "Person B", or something like that.

Gary Gates, the UCLA demographer who conducted the analysis, said

"Most proponents of traditional marriage will say that when you allow these couples to marry, you are going to change the fundamental nature of marriage by decoupling it from procreation. Clearly, in the minds of same-sex couples who are marrying or think of themselves as married, you are not decoupling child-rearing from marriage."

Uh, didn't his own report say that less than a third of these couples are raising children? All of those children were conceived with the help of at least one person outside of that relationship. Most were conceived through a relationship one of the adults had with a prior partner of the opposite sex. So yes, this does further separate child-rearing from marriage (and vice-versa), as these people didn't see fit to marry or to stay married to the mother or father of their children. They were good enough to join body parts with, though.

So the bottom line seems to be that the headline tries to make nonmarriage look like marriage, solely based on participants calling themselves married, and having similar age and income ranges to married couples. It's a stretch, but it is to be expected when there is a deliberate attempt to get people to stop thinking of marriage as something that unites a bride and a groom.

We have seen that some of these couples call themselves married without any state recognition of their relationship as marriage or a domestic partnership. So then marriage doesn't depend on the law - and according to their thinking, it doesn't require both sexes. What, then, is marriage? Not all "married" couples are monogamous - some have even mutually agreed to have an "open marriage", and I'm sure plenty of our marriage neutering friends would say we're not to judge and say those folks aren't married, or are somehow doing something wrong. So "forsaking all others" goes out the window, in practice, along with vows such as "love, honor, cherish" (we all know of spouses who have behaved towards each other like enemies or at least rival siblings), and "til death do us part". Especially with the abandonment of the bride+groom composition, what then, is marriage? If you can't have the objectively verifiable bride+groom foundation at the core, it ceases to have much meaning at all.