- illustration by Katelan Foisy
In 2003 I got my first sabbatical and headed for what I thought would be a leisurely year of research in the Netherlands, the first country to allow same-sex couples to marry. I hoped that the Dutch experience could help us understand what would happen if same-sex couples were allowed to marry in the United States. Shortly after my arrival, though, theory became reality when the Supreme Judicial Court brought marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples to Massachusetts, creating a tidal surge of interest in the issue.
Although I have studied economic and policy
issues for lesbian, gay, and bisexual people for more than a decade,
it’s challenging to study a topic in the headlines. I’ve spent the
last two years at UCLA’s Williams Institute conducting research and
writing reports, journal articles, op-ed columns, testimony, and a
book to answer the big questions asked by policy makers and the public:
Did gay marriage destroy heterosexual marriage in Europe? Will gay
couples harm marriage? Will allowing gay couples to marry break state
budgets? Will businesses be hurt? (My answer to each of these questions,
by the way, is no.)
The demand for answers is growing. As of April 2007, 20 percent of
the United States population lives in the five states that allow gay
and lesbian couples to marry or enter a civil union that gives couples
all the rights of marriage that states can grant (California, Massachusetts,
Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey). Several others are on the verge
of a similar change. Not surprisingly, my research shows that these
states share some of the same characteristics seen in the European
pioneers: They are more tolerant of gay people, less religious, and
more diverse in family structures. The comparison with Europe suggests
that the individual United States are right on track in moving toward
equality.
Six years of marriage equality for homosexual couples in the Netherlands
and three in Massachusetts suggest that marriage can easily weather
this recent change. My interviews with Dutch couples and my analyses
of Dutch and American survey data show that gay and straight couples
share the same views about marriage: They marry (or not) for the same
reasons, and they see modern marriage as a partnership of two equal
individuals. More than 8,000 same-sex couples have married in Massachusetts
since 2004, which is just about the same number as in the Netherlands.
The fact that roughly half the state’s gay couples have chosen to marry
so far suggests a reasonable fit between an old institution and these
new families.
