Five and a half years after gay marriage became legal in Massachusetts, it is nearly impossible to find reliable figures -- or even unreliable figures -- on how those marriages are working out. For a variety of reasons -- more on those below -- nobody has a clear picture of what the gay divorce rate is in Massachusetts . . . or anywhere else.
We know, of course, that marriage as an institution has continued to survive and prosper -- giving the lie to the barbarous rhetoric, from the Christian right and elsewhere, that gay marriage would lead to the end of civilization as we know it. In September, writing at Huffington Post, Bruce Wilson noted that the overall Massachusetts divorce rate was the lowest in the nation and falling steadily -- so that in 2008, the divorce rate was equivalent to where the national divorce rate was before World War II. And even some right-wing commentators are backing off predictions that gay marriage would have quantifiable, adverse affects on straight marriage.
That's good rhetoric, but we still lack good numbers. The divorce rate, after all, has been falling nationally for about a decade -- perhaps the Massachusetts divorce-rate plunge is part of a national trend that has nothing to do with gay marriage. Which is where stats wunderkind Nate Silver comes in.
Silver reports today on FiveThirtyEight.com that while most states have seen their divorce rates fall between 2003 and 2008, there's one categorical exception: states that have banned gay marriage. In states that actively prohibit gay marriage, the divorce rate is up. As Silver elaborates, states that didn't ban gay marriage "saw their divorce rates decrease by an average of 8 percent between 2003 and 2008. States which had passed a same-sex marriage ban as of January 1, 2008, however, saw their divorce rates rise by about 1 percent over the same period." (Connecticut is an outlying exception: though it allows gay marriage, it has nonetheless seen a 0.9-percent rise in its divorce rate over the previous five years.)
While Silver's stats are interesting, and add a new piece to the puzzle, there's still a glaring paucity of information on gay divorce, as distinct from divorce generally. "I don't know anyone keeping track of these numbers," says Joyce Kauffmann, a lawyer and member of the Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Bar Association who has handled gay divorces. "Any figures out there are purely antecdotal."
Given the potential ideological usefulness of stats on gay marriage -- pro or con -- it's somewhat surprising that neither side has hazarded a serious guess, or fielded a study. Then again, as the Times pointed out in November, it's often difficult for gay couples to obtain a divorce. Since gay marriage is legal in only five states, couples must often travel far from their home states to be wed. Thanks to the federal Defense of Marriage Act (which legally defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, and allows gay-marriage-banning states to ignore same-sex unions obtained in more lenient states), attempting to get a divorce in a state that doesn't recognize the marriage can be a bureaucratic nightmare. Gay couples can find that they aren't granted access to divorce courts. The IRS may not allow them any tax breaks for splitting their assets, as happens in straight divorces. All in all, one would expect the gay divorce rate to be low -- if only because the difficulty of obtaining one appears to be prohibitive.
That's true even here. Massachusetts grants same-sex marriages to out-of-state couples without a residency requirement. But in order to get divorced here, you have to prove you've lived in-state for a minimum of one year. An influx of same-sex marriages from out-of-staters could, theoretically, be an active force in driving down the Massachusetts divorce rates -- there's an incentive for out-of-staters to marry here, but a dis-incentive for those same couples to get divorced here. This generally lackluster arrangement has not been without at least one fantastic, if unintended, consequence. In October 2009, a Texas court overturned a lower-court decision and ruled that a gay couple who married in Massachusetts should be granted a Texas divorce -- and, in the same stroke, ruled that Texas's ban on gay marriage was, by the way, totally unconstitutional.
One thing that would make it easier to track the gay divorce rate? States that allow same-sex marraige could, well . . . track the gay divorce rate! For its part, however, the state of Massachusetts makes no official demographic distinction between gay and straight marriages or divorces. If you're counting along at home, that's one giant leap forward for equality, and one small step backwards for statisticians.
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