Study Assesses How
Many Gays Marry if Legal
By DAVID CRARY, AP
from the washingtonpost.com on the Web, April 26, 2006
NEW YORK -- A new study
attempts to gauge the percentage of gays and lesbians who have chosen to marry
in places where that option is legal, with estimates ranging from as little as 2
percent to more than 16 percent, depending on the location.
A co-author of the report, released Wednesday, said both sides in the gay
marriage debate may take heart from the findings.
The Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, which opposes gay marriage,
reviewed data from the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada and Massachusetts, all of
which allow same-sex partners to wed.
In each case, the study offered a range of estimates of the percentage of gays
who had married, based on varying approximations -- from 1 percent to 5 percent
-- of how many gays were in the general population.
In the Netherlands, where 8,127 same-sex couples married from April 1, 2001,
through last December, the study said this represented between 2.6 percent and
6.3 percent of the country's gays and lesbians.
The study estimated that between 2 percent and 5 percent of Belgium's gays and
lesbians, and 5.9 percent to 16.7 percent of those in Massachusetts had married.
Same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts in May 2004, and 7,341 gay and
lesbian couples had wed there through last December.
The institute study said calculations for Canada were difficult because the
country allowed nonresidents to marry, but it estimated that as many as 14.3
percent of the gays and lesbians in the western province of British Columbia had
married.
The report does not draw any major conclusions, saying it is too early to assess
long-term trends.
"Whether same-sex marriage will emerge as commonplace or normative among gays
and lesbians, or fade as time and novelty passes, cannot yet be determined," it
said.
However, Maggie Gallagher, president of the Institute for Marriage and co-author
of the study, said interpretations of the findings might vary according to one's
views on gay marriage.
One faction, she said, might conclude that opposition to gay marriage was an
overreaction given that seemingly modest numbers of people were choosing it.
Another faction, she said, might look at the same numbers and contend that they
did not justify overturning the long-standing concept of marriage as exclusively
heterosexual.
"That's why the debate is so contentious," Gallagher said. "In one view,
if you treat gay couples any differently, that's akin to racism. There's
another view that there's something special about the unions of husbands and
wives."
Gary Gates, a specialist in gay demography at the UCLA School of Law's Williams
Institute, was given an advance look at the study. He disagreed with
Gallagher's suggestion that relatively few gays and lesbians were opting for
marriage.
Looking specifically at the Massachusetts data, and noting the limited time
period of 20 months, he contended that a sharply higher percentage of gays and
lesbians were deciding marry than heterosexuals of marrying age.
"Numerically, same-sex couples will never comprise a major portion of the
married population," Gates said in a telephone interview. "But gay people
do seem to be really interested in getting married -- it's kind of a compliment
to the institution of marriage."
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