Another Inevitable Result of the Great Inversion

So one thing that's making the rounds today is a poll showing an ever-increasing number of people saying they wouldn't like it if their child married someone of the opposite political party. This of course shows how terrible Americans are, how acrimonious our partisan divides, how tribal our politics, etc. Because you see, in 1960, 4% of Democrats and 5% of Republicans said this. In 2008 it was 20% of Democrats and 27% of Republicans. Now it's 33% of Democrats and a whopping 49% of Republicans. People are becoming that much more ideologically intolerant, I guess.

Or not. We don't know how ideologically intolerant people were in 1960. Not from this survey data at least. Because, as I detailed in my previous post, back in 1960 party identification correlated only weakly with ideology. More to the point, there was a considerable amount of ideological overlap between the two parties. A Democrat and a Republican from Massachusetts had an awful lot more in common with each other than that Democrat would have with a Democrat from South Carolina. Indeed, it's quite likely that, at least if you go back a little further, the Massachusetts Democrat would have had more in common with the South Carolina Republican than with his southern co-partisan.

So if you had the strong feeling that you didn't want your son or daughter marrying someone whose ideology you found hateful, it just wouldn't make a lot of sense therefore to decide you didn't want them marrying someone of the opposite party. You would presumably want to be discriminating among cross-partisans, just as you would need to be discriminating among co-partisans. These days, though, if someone puts an R after their name it gives me a pretty good idea of what they're all about, or at least what they're willing to tolerate. So whether you like the practice or not, it just plain makes a lot more sense to disfavor members of the opposite party, for your children or for yourself.

A Constitutional Right Deferred

As best I can tell, there were two conversations going on at the Supreme Court in today's oral arguments about gay marriage. One was on the actual merits of the issue: does the Constitution permit state marriage laws which exclude same-sex couples? And... there doesn't seem to be that much doubt that the Court thinks it does not allow this. I mean, somewhere between three and four members of the Court clearly think that it does allow this, but it doesn't seem like Anthony Kennedy, whose vote will definitely be crucial, had really any patience for the purported arguments in favor of the exclusionary state laws. He said something, for instance, about how the states' focus on the need to foster child-rearing was an interesting argument that, unfortunately, rested on totally untrue factual premises. It's really pretty clear that there aren't five votes right now to uphold these laws.

But there was also the other conversation: is the time right to declare these laws unconstitutional? This has been a popular theme in discussion about gay marriage, whether it's appropriate for the judiciary to step in and take the issue out of the hands of the democratic process. Or, alternately, at what point in the process of increasing social acceptance of homosexuality the courts should step in. A too-early ruling, the thought is, would fail to garner widespread acceptance and might spark a backlash. On this view, the courts should only declare anti-gay marriage laws unconstitutional once we can fairly say that the national conversation on the issue has concluded with a verdict in favor of marriage equality, such that all the courts are doing is enforcing that newly-forged national consensus on a few recalcitrant states.

What nonsense.

Which State Will Accept Gay Marriage Next?

The state of Virginia just lost a case in federal court today, and I daresay it will not appeal the ruling. A federal district judge has ruled, as is their wont, that Virginia's laws prohibiting same-sex marriage violate the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, and are hence invalid. The interesting thing is that Virginia's governor is a Democrat. Not only that, but so is the Attorney General! Mark Herring won a nail-biter of a race last year, by far the most exciting of Election Night 2013. He has since announced that he thinks Virginia's anti-gay marriage laws are some combination of bad and unconstitutional. Presumably he won't appeal. If that's right, it means Virginia's a gay marriage jurisdiction as of right now. Okay maybe as of whenever they dig out from under the current snowstorm. And this has me thinking, what other states might find themselves joining the marriage equality ranks without any further political action? That is, what states might accept a ruling by a federal judge striking down their anti-gay marriage laws, and decline an appeal?

On When to Get Married

For some reason there have been a lot of posts on the internet recently arguing about the correct time to get married. Should people get married young? (I.e., like, 23, whereas "marrying young" used to mean more like 19.) Should people get married at the currently-more-conventional late-twenties time? After that? People are advancing arguments in various directions, some of which take the form "I did X, and it worked for me" and others of which are trying to be more general economics or morals arguments. But I feel like they're all kind of missing the obvious:

Get married if and only if you have met someone with whom you have fallen in love, and who has fallen in love with you; you both want to spend the rest of your lives with each other, possibly including raising a family; and you both feel sufficiently confident about all that that you want to take advantage of legal institutions that provide a broad variety of benefits if you remain together but will make your lives pretty miserable if you ever split up.

On this view, marriage is a symptom, not an effect. And it's a symptom of a really good thing! Finding someone you love enough that you want to spend the rest of your life with them, and who feels the same way about you, is a huge, huge positive for your life. (Of course, one or both of you might be wrong, or turn out to be wrong eventually, but that's where the part about confidence levels comes in.) This makes, for instance, studying the effect of marrying early or late or whatever difficult: insofar as people are doing it the way I'm saying they should, obviously people who get married young will be happier, for the intervening years at least, because they've happened to find a massively happiness-generating situation sooner.

Now, I think it's possible some people might disagree with my approach to this question. Most criticism, I think, would focus on the word 'love,' and suggest that one might want to get married even if you don't feel a passionate romantic love for your partner. (I once read an article, on Huffington Post of course, titled something like 'Why You Shouldn't Marry For Love,' although I think it should've replaced the last word with 'lust' based on how it's written, which makes it obviously right.) These arguments, when they're not just flagrantly anti-feminist and thus not worth addressing, are usually economical in nature, or trying to be. Life is just easier with multiple earners, or whatever. In my opinion, it's a pretty important policy priority for society to make these economic arguments for marrying someone you don't love as empirically invalid as we can manage. Marrying not for love has obvious massive psychological costs; insofar as possible, people should never feel compelled or incentivized to do it.

But if we like my approach, and I do quite like it, it raises an interesting problem for the whole "when should you get married?" question: different people will meet the criteria at different times. Some people might not meet it at all. If you meet your soulmate* in college, or even in high school, and feel absolutely confident (even after acknowledging the perils of young love) that you want to be with them by the time you're both 23, go ahead and get married: good for you! If you don't meet someone like that until your late twenties, or your thirties, or your forties, don't get married until you do, and good for you as well. If you never meet someone like that, well, that's unfortunate for you, but, you know, don't get married, and good for you. Hopefully the non-married existence of those of us who haven't met the right person yet, and had them reciprocate the feelings, won't be too terribly miserable, both because we'll be able to support ourselves and because we'll be able to, you know, have a social life and have a sex life if we want to, and so on. Ideally, there is no answer, defined in non-relativistic terms, to this question, because the answer is, get married iff you find someone worth marrying.


*Use of this word not meant to imply anything about destiny; I'm just using it as shorthand for the thing I described in my marriage criterion above.