Fatherhood’s transformations: What if someone checked the facts?

For Father’s Day, W. Bradford Wilcox wrote a piece for Slate, “Daddy’s Home: Fatherhood transforms men. But only if they live with their kids.” Raising the question: what if Slate checked the facts they published? Oh, right.

Anyway, people who publish what Wilcox writes by now have been duly notified of his dishonesty, data manipulation, and incompetence in the service of ideological (and financial) ends. But I do this as an exercise in critical thinking and research, and to help people who want to be informed understand these shenanigans.

So here we go, on the specific claims only. Bogus claim-inflating spin between claims ignored. For each claim, the source, interpretation, and Veracity Score™ from 0 to 10.

The claim: “For many men, the transformative physical power of fatherhood first manifests itself when the pounds start piling up. One recent survey found that the average father puts on more than 10 pounds while waiting for baby to arrive.”

• The source: A Motherlode post that links to a BBC news story that reproduces a press release from a marketing firm. No information on the research methods. The marketing firm, Onepoll, has no information about the poll on its website. Does this supposed weight gain of fathers-to-be reflect the evolutionary draw of wedded fatherhood? Said a spokesperson for Onepoll (who we are listening to why?): “So if the kitchen cupboards are suddenly brimming with snacks and food, it’s no wonder blokes are tempted to tuck in as well.”
• Veracity Score: 2 (Maybe fathers gain weight during their partners’ pregnancies. This is “transformative physical power”?)

The claim: “Studies suggest that after the arrival of a baby men’s testosterone falls…”

• The source: This paper measuring testosterone level in a sample of Filipino men at two points four years apart. Those who were married with children four years later had larger drops and lower levels. This seems like a legitimate finding. Why wouldn’t men’s hormone levels change in response to such changes in their environment and behavior? It seems a little dicey that the men took their own saliva samples, since other research (from the same study) shows levels change dramatically in the first half hour after people wake up. Although they supposedly took the samples right when they woke up, and recorded the time, it seems possible sleep is the issue here (although they controlled for a simple indicator of “sleep quality.”)
• Veracity Score: 6

The claim: “Studies suggest that after the arrival of a baby men’s… prolactin levels rise.”

• The source: Unsourced claim from a parenting advice book.
• Veracity Score: 0 (Maybe true, who knows? No evidence here.)

The claim: “But these hormonal changes don’t just happen for any father; they appear to be most likely for men who are living in a long-term relationship with the mother of their children.”

• Source: The link is to the same Philippines study. There, the authors write: “Because this sample is drawn from a cultural setting in which it is rare for men to become new fathers outside of stable romantic partnerships or to file for divorce, there were few single new fathers (n = 12) or divorced men (n = 9), who therefore were excluded from longitudinal analyses.”
• Veracity Score: 0 (the study specifically said not that)

The claim: “Moreover, research by anthropologist Peter Gray indicates that drops in testosterone are most pronounced among men engaged in ‘affiliative pair bonding and paternal care.’”

• Source: This paper that measured testosterone levels at one point in time among 126 men in Beijing, 30 of whom were fathers (all conveniently having exactly one child). The fathers had lower testosterone levels. The paper doesn’t have a longitudinal design, however, so it can’t make causal claims – and does not mention drops in testosterone. Also, among the fathers there was no difference between those with younger children and those with older children, which is not good for the hands-on-nurturing effect theory.
• Veracity Score: 2 (some association, no causal connection, bogus description of “drops” by Wilcox)

The claim: “Fathers who live with their children are significantly less likely to be depressed, and more likely to report they are satisfied with their lives, compared to childless men.”

• The source: This paper using the National Survey of Families and Households. The paper did not use longitudinal data, and the authors wrote, “Before we can be confident that fatherhood is causally associated with the outcomes we observed, we must address this possibility [of selection effects], probably with longitudinal data.” Is it just possible that happier men are more likely live with their children, rather than the other way around? I’d consider it. Further, they entered some statistical controls for marital status, income, and race/ethnicity. They wrote:
  • Once a number of controls were entered, however, especially marital status, these effects of fatherhood largely disappeared. The two exceptions were that men with children living elsewhere remain somewhat more likely to have depressive symptoms than men who were currently living with their children, and men with older children were slightly more satisfied. For the most part, however, fatherhood does not appear to be independently associated with psychological and physical health.
• To clarify: (a) those living with children over age 19 were slightly more likely than those with younger children to be satisfied with their lives! (b) those living apart from their children were slightly more likely to be depressed than those living with their children. This does not require evolutionary rocket-science to predict.
• Veracity Score: 0 (would be 1 for the partial effect, but he loses a point for gross exaggeration and misstatement of the findings.)

The claim: “After the arrival of a baby, new fathers tend to work more hours and pull down more money.”

• The source: The link is to a 1998 book by the late Steven Nock. I don’t have the book, but more recent research by Rebecca Glauber (using the same data) confirms this. Glauber suggests the effects could be the result of the gender division of labor within marriage or employers’ preferential treatment (or other unobserved factors).
• Veracity Score: 8 (true statement, but doesn’t address whether “fatherhood is socially transformative for men.”)

The claim: “By contrast, men who have children outside of wedlock, Nock found, are less likely to be employed, earn less, and have higher rates of poverty compared to their peers who did not father children outside of wedlock.”

• The source: This paper by Nock. When you are talking about a group of men who are poor on average to begin with, it’s hard to know if unmarried fatherhood made them poorer. The paper reports that these negative outcomes are associated with men who father children outside of marriage. However, the paper also reports (grudgingly) that the effects are no longer significant when prior conditions are controlled or when brothers are compared with each other. Thus, there is no causal effect found for men having children outside of marriage.
• Veracity Score: 1 (“less likely” is true, but the non-causal nature means it offers no support for the claim that “fatherhood is socially transformative for men.”)

The claim: “men who live apart from their children attend church infrequently and drink more frequently, much like their peers without children.”

• The source: This paper again. Quick check of the tables shows that alcohol and drug abuse is no different between men who live with children versus without once a few basic demographic variables are controlled, so that’s wrong. As for church, the paper shows the association in the cross section but makes no causal claim.
• Veracity Score: 1 (association for 1/2 the claim, no causal effect.)

You will note some of these claims have Veracity Scores > 0. I didn’t ignore those claims because that would have been misleading (however, if I’m wrong and the testosterone stuff is wronger than I thought, please let me know).

To some blog editors, claims come and go. You might balance them out by posting something from someone who disagrees. Hanna Rosin, a founder of Slate’s XX, dismissively calls this “data wars.” More clicks for them. One alternative would be to not publish the bogus stuff in the first place.

h/t Neal Caren for suggesting this.

What current demographic facts do you need to know?

The other day I was surprised that a group of reporters failed to call out what seemed to be an obvious exaggeration by Republican Congresspeople in a press conference. Did the reporters not realize that a 25% unemployment rate among college graduates in 2013 is implausible, were they not paying attention, or do they just assume they’re being fed lies all the time so they don’t bother?

Last semester I launched an aggressive campaign to teach the undergraduate students in my class the size of the US population. If you don’t know that – and some large portion of them didn’t – how can you interpret statements such as, “On average, 24 people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in the United States.” In this case the source followed up with, “Over the course of a year, that equals more than 12 million women and men.” But, is that a lot? It’s a lot more in the United States than it would be in China. (Unless you go with, “any rape is too many,” in which case why use a number at all?)

Anyway, just the US population isn’t enough. I decided to start a list of current demographic facts you need to know just to get through the day without being grossly misled or misinformed – or, in the case of journalists or teachers or social scientists, not to allow your audience to be grossly misled or misinformed. Not trivia that makes a point or statistics that are shocking, but the non-sensational information you need to know to make sense of those things when other people use them. And it’s really a ballpark requirement; when I tested the undergraduates, I gave them credit if they were within 20% of the US population – that’s anywhere between 250 million and 380 million!

I only got as far as 22 facts, but they should probably be somewhere in any top-100. And the silent reporters the other day made me realize I can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good here. I’m open to suggestions for others (or other lists if they’re out there).

They refer to the US unless otherwise noted:

Description	Number	Source
World Population	7 billion	1
US Population	316 million	1
Children under 18 as share of pop.	24%	2
Adults 65+ as share of pop.	13%	2
Unemployment rate	7.6%	3
Unemployment rate range, 1970-2013	4% – 11%	4
Non-Hispanic Whites as share of pop.	63%	2
Blacks as share of pop.	13%	2
Hispanics as share of pop.	17%	2
Asians as share of pop.	5%	2
American Indians as share of pop.	1%	2
Immigrants as share of pop	13%	2
Adults with BA or higher	28%	2
Median household income	$53,000	2
Most populous country, China	1.3 billion	5
2nd most populous country, India	1.2 billion	5
3rd most populous country, USA	315 million	5
4th most populous country, Indonesia	250 million	5
5th most populous country, Brazil	200 million	5
Male life expectancy at birth	76	6
Female life expectancy at birth	81	6
National life expectancy range	49 – 84	7

Sources:
1. http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html
2. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html
3. http://www.bls.gov/
4. Google public data: http://bit.ly/UVmeS3
5. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2119rank.html
6. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/hus/contents2011.htm#021
7. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2102rank.html

Education-gender earnings crossover

It has been remarked that, in the olden days, men with only a high school education earned more than women with a college education. That’s true, as I reported to Stephanie Coontz for today’s New York Times column. And the olden days ended about 20 years ago.

Until the early 1990s, men who were high school graduates – but not college graduates – earned more than women who were college graduates. And men who were high school dropouts earned more than women who were high school graduates.

Source: My analysis of March Current Population Survey data from IPUMS.

I don’t know what’s going on with the big 1992 drops. It could have to do with CPS survey design changes (I used last year’s earnings for people who worked 35+ hours last week and 50+ weeks last year).

You could describe these crossovers as a modernization of the labor force, with education rising in importance relative to gender. Or not.

Gender equality: Family egalitarianism follows workplace opportunity

The Council on Contemporary Families has assembled an online symposium for the 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act.

The full release with a list of contributions is here. Here is my essay:

Gender equality: Family egalitarianism follows workplace opportunity

Unsticking progress toward gender equality in the labor market – extending the legacy of the Equal Pay Act – will help move families forward toward more.

Gender inequality within families is reciprocally related to gender inequality in the paid workplace. That is why one of the legacies of the Equal Pay Act, which brought scrutiny and sanctions to bear on gender discrimination at work, has been growing egalitarianism within families as well. Research consistently shows the effect of workplace progress on equality within couples. Most recently,analysis of the American Time-Use Survey confirms that women’s own earnings are associated with the amount of housework they perform. Each thousand dollars of earnings is associated with a 14-minute reduction in daily housework.

In 1962 fewer than one-in-seven nonfarm managers were women, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Women earned less than 10 percent of degrees in law and medicine, and full-time employed women earned just 59 percent of what men made. Not surprisingly, at that time just 7 percent of wives ages 25-54 earned more than their husbands – and wives did almost six-times as much housework as husbands. Their constrained workplace opportunity weakened their relative standing at home.

Today women hold about 40 percent of managerial jobs, receive almost half of law and medicine degrees (and the majority of BAs), and earn more than 75 percent of men’s earnings. Wives outearn their husbands in 28 percent of couples – a historic high. These gains have led to an impressive reduction in the disparity between husbands; and wives’ housework. Today wives only do 1.7-times as much housework as their husbands. Inequality at home and the workplace remain formidable, but labor market progress has made possible large steps toward parity within families.

Most of this progress, however, took place in the 1970s and 1980s. The stall in both arenas since then is unequivocal, as I describe in a forthcoming Boston University Law Review article. As progress toward equal labor force participation and access to occupations and equal pay slowed, the division of labor within families got stuck as well. The ratio of wives’ housework to men’s housework, which fell below 2.0 in the early 1990s, hasn’t moved appreciably since (see figure).

Source: Bianchi et al., 2012.

Both workplaces and families are sites in which cultural expectations and attitudes play out. However, the paid workplace is more amenable to policy intervention, while families tend to be more tradition-bound. Unsticking progress toward gender equality in the labor market – extending the legacy of the Equal Pay Act – will help move families forward toward more egalitarian relationships.

Equality, inequality (let’s call the whole thing off?)

Over on the Orgtheory blog, Fabio Rojas created a stir in (two posts) for saying both that “feminists killed feminism” — and that feminism has won. (My most recent related comment might be this “still a patriarchy” post.)

Anyway, here’s a Google ngrams interpretation: the share of all references to “gender” that “gender equality” and “gender inequality” each command (details here):

The use of “gender equality” took off, relative to “gender inequality,” right around the time the trend toward gender equality stalled on most measures (and a little while after working moms started replacing working mothers).

Is the use of “equality” triumphalism (pro), fatalism (con), or a more positive feminism?

Previous ngrams posts.

That economists’ paper about gender inequality, marriage and divorce

I was planning to write a note about this paper by economists, “Gender identity and relative income within households,” which got a lot of play two weeks ago. But I forgot about it until today, and then noticed that in the New York Times Catherine Rampbell, economics writer, dropped it in her story on the Pew Report about women as breadwinners. In the cautionary part of the article, Rampbell mentioned “A new working paper by economists” that showed:

…perhaps even more tellingly, couples in which the wife earns more report less satisfaction with their marriage and higher rates of divorce.

Maybe reporters like what’s new, or maybe it was just on her radar because she reads Freakonomics, the Economist or the Financial Times, which all uncritically wrote up the paper when it came out. But it’s really a shame in a story about current trends to cite a “new” paper which (for this part of its analysis) used data more than 20 years old.
Anyways

Here is a brief critique I was going to give when the paper came out. Just taking two lines from the abstract, I offer a few suggestions:

1. Couple matching

The distribution of the share of household income earned by the wife exhibits a sharp cliff at 0.5, which suggests that a couple is less willing to match if her income exceeds his.

Suggestion: It’s not a good idea to use the relative incomes within couples years after they got married to discuss how relative income affects mate choice decisions. People move, change jobs, have children, etc., in the first few years after they get married. You need to look at income before marriage to study mate selection.

2. Divorce

Couples where the wife earns more than the husband are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce.

This part of the analysis uses data from Waves 1 & 2 of the National Survey of Families and Households NSFH), which were collected in 1987-88 and 1992-94. I don’t always insist that everyone use data from this minute, but at some point — around two decades — a study becomes historical. That judgment depends on the context and the question being asked. In this case, relative earnings of spouses (as we just saw in the Pew report) has seen an order-of-magnitude change over this period. And the paper is about norms! That is, the authors speculate that couples with high-earning wives divorce because they are outside the mainstream. So if, 20-25 years later, they’re not outside the mainstream anymore, the paper might not be salient.

Secondly, this is well-worn territory, and the specific hypothesis offered here has been tested and found wanting in several award winning papers using more thorough measures and testing competing hypotheses. (The NSFH, one of the most productive data collection efforts ever, maintained a bibliography up to 2004, which lists 180 papers under the category “union quality and stability.”) For those interested in the fuller story, I recommend these:

• “Women’s Economic Independence and the Probability of Divorce A Review and Reexamination” (2001), by Liana Sayer and Suzanne Bianchi (winner of the Reuben Hill Award from the National Council on Family Relations for best article of the year on family issues). Their critique of the research existing prior to 2001 applies specifically to the 2013 Bertrand et al. paper:

…[M]easures of marital commitment and satisfaction are better predictors of marital dissolution than measures of economic independence. This strongly suggests that the independence effect found in prior research, which did not include controls for marital quality, may have been measuring the role of wives’ economic independence in exiting bad marriages, not in exiting all marriages.

• “She Left, He Left: How Employment and Satisfaction Affect Men’s and Women’s Decisions to Leave Marriages” (2011), by Liana C. Sayer, Paula England, Paul Allison, and Nicole Kangas (winner of the Rosabeth Moss Kanter award from the Purdue Center for Families and the Boston College Center for Work & Family, for the best work-family research article of the year). Their key finding is that employment within couples does matter for divorce, but it depends on marital satisfaction:

We find that when men are not employed, either husbands or wives are more likely to leave. When wives report better than average marital satisfaction, their employment affects neither their nor their husbands’ exits. However, when wives report below average marital satisfaction, their employment makes it more likely that they will leave.

• “Wives’ Employment and Spouses’ Marital Happiness,” by Robert Schoen, Stacy Rogers and Paul Amato (2006). They report that employment effects on divorce depend on marital happiness. Specifically:

…shifting into full-time employment is more likely for unhappily married than for happily married wives. … [C]ontrary to frequently invoked social and economic theories, wives’ full-time employment is associated with greater marital stability.

This provides a followup to a previous study using the same data which found…

…clear evidence that, at the individual level, women’s employment does not destabilize happy marriages but increases the risk of disruption in unhappy marriages.

The reason these marital satisfaction controls matter so much is that how happy women are within marriage affects their employment, and therefore their earnings. So what looks like an earnings effect is often an unhappy-marriage effect. Careful sequencing of longitudinal data (which these papers do) is required to sort this out.

I only mention the awards because I was shocked (shocked!) to see these major sociology papers in top journals, using the same dataset and asking the same questions, published over a decade, which have been cited hundreds of times in the academic literature, go unnoticed in this economics working paper, which — not-yet published, not-yet peer reviewed — would be quoted all over the place.

More married mothers earn more than their husbands

For this Washington Post article by Brigid Schulte, I did some calculations that allowed her to add, “In a trend accelerated by the recent recession” to the first sentence. When you line up the numbers this way — percentage of married mothers with children present who have higher incomes their husbands — there was a steep acceleration:

Source: My calculation from Census and American Community Survey data from IPUMS.

My explanation for this was:

“The decade of the 2000s witnessed the most rapid change in the percentage of married mothers earning more than their husbands of any decade since 1960,” said Philip Cohen, a University of Maryland sociologist who studies gender and family trends. “This reflects the larger job losses experienced by men at the beginning of the Great Recession. Also, some women decided to work more hours or seek better jobs in response to their husbands’ job loss, potential loss or declining wages.”

The trend was reported by Pew Research in this report, titled “Breadwinner Moms,” which wrote:

A record 40% of all households with children under the age of 18 include mothers who are either the sole or primary source of income for the family, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The share was just 11% in 1960.

I just did the married mothers earning more, and added the data from the years between 2000 and 2011, to show the recession-period acceleration of the higher-earning mothers. Pew added polling numbers about attitudes toward women’s income, and Schulte added exemplary interviews.

Breadwinning

A wife who earns $1 more than her husband for one year is not the “breadwinner” of the family. That’s not what made “traditional” men the breadwinners of their families — that image is of a long-term pattern in which the husband/father earns all or almost all of the money, which implies a more entrenched economic domination.

However, she can be the “primary breadwinner,” a post-1970s concept acknowledging the rise of secondary breadwinners (usually women) in families. Here is the Google ngrams trend showing appearances of “primary breadwinner” as a fraction of all uses of “breadwinner” since 1920 (click to enlarge):

I have previously complained about lumping single mothers together with higher-earning wives to construct an image of “female breadwinners.” That’s partly because the $1-more-for-one-year problem, and partly that I object to using the single-mother trend to inflate descriptions of women’s advancement.

Anyway, it’s hard to capture the trends without overdoing it, but Brigid Schulte and the Pew authors (Wendy Wang, Kim Parker and Paul Taylor) did a nice job.

Does declining marriage explain rising suicide rates for old men, too? (Trick question.)

The reason it’s a trick question is that, for older men suicide rates aren’t rising—even though their marriage rates are falling. This doesn’t fit the religious conservative story spun by Brad Wilcox here at The Atlantic and broadcast by Ross Douthat in the New York Times.

The government reported this month that the suicide rate for adults ages 35 to 64 increased 28 percent from 1999 to 2010. That’s a serious problem. Oddly, though, the report didn’t include data on those over age 64 or under 35. Why? Because the rates didn’t change significantly for those groups. That’s a fine reason for the report to focus on the other groups, but the pontificators shouldn’t let that blind them to the overall story (and longer trends).

The suicide rate for people age 65-plus dropped 5.9 percent during that period, but that was significant only at the 9 percent confidence level. In the longer run, though, the drop in suicide rates for older people is certainly significant. Here is the trend from 1991 to 2009 for men, by age:

From 1991 to 2009, the suicide rate among older men dropped more than 25 percent, from 40 to 29 per 100,000 people. During that time, suicide for middle-aged men dropped and then rose again, ending up within a point of where it started the period. So the two-decade story is not one of increasing middle-aged male suicide (at least not yet). And, of course, during that time marriage dropped for all three groups.

Source: Current Population Surveydata from IPUMS.

So who would tell a story of declining marriage causing increasing suicide? Christian conservatives promoting marriage and religion (among others). Douthat quoted Wilcox’s story and summarized:

That’s exactly what we’ve seen happen lately among the middle-aged male population, whose suicide rates have climbed the fastest: a retreat from family obligations, from civic and religious participation, and from full-time paying work.

If he’d looked at the larger trend by age, maybe he wouldn’t have written his next paragraph:

The hard question facing 21st-century America is whether this retreat from community can reverse itself, or whether an aging society dealing with structural unemployment and declining birth and marriage rates is simply destined to leave more people disconnected, anxious and alone.

For some reason our seniors just aren’t getting the pro-suicide message, so they’re not part of the story. In fact, neither are the 31 out of 35 wealthy countries that have seen falling suicide rates in the last several decades, even though every one has had falling marriage rates for decades.

Why not? Let me look more closely at that older age group of men, breaking them down into the younger-old (65-74) and the older-old (75-plus). The trend is clear for this group that has seen falling suicide rates: less marriage, more employment.

Douthat and Wilcox could have said, “We love marriage, but in this case it looks like declining marriage isn’t causing a big problem.” But why should they? They have their story and they’re sticking to it.

Of course, no sociologist is going to deny that married men usually have lower suicide rates—and I’ve written about it myself. But for older men, at least, that doesn’t seem to be driving the trend for the last several decades. Rising employment rates are a good place to start for explaining declining suicide. And falling marriage—if it has been had an opposing effect—hasn’t been as important.

Be a man, a Morehouse Man — and treat your boyfriend right

I’m sure other people will have more insightful things to say about Obama’s speech to Morehouse College’s graduation today [official transcript here, one copy of the video here]. But let me just point out the juxtaposition of what seemed like serious heteronormativity with whatever the opposite of heteronormativity is.

He opened with jokes about the rain, including this:

I see some moms and grandmas here, aunts, in their Sunday best — although they are upset about their hair getting messed up.

And he gave several references to what it is to “be a man” — such as, “a family man, and a working man, and a Morehouse Man,” and, referencing previous Morehouse graduates…

…what it means to be a man — to serve your city like Maynard Jackson; to shape the culture like Spike Lee; to be like Chester Davenport, one of the first people to integrate the University of Georgia Law School.

And then there was this:

Keep setting an example for what it means to be a man. Be the best husband to your wife, or your boyfriend or your partner [some response, and he wags his finger at them.] Be the best father you can be to your children. Because nothing is more important.

That’s my transcription from the video at 22:17. For whatever reason, this passage has been transcribed incorrectly by some people. The White House website quotes it as:

Be the best husband to your wife, or you’re your boyfriend, or your partner.

While USA Today had it as:

“Be the best husband to your wife, or boyfriend to your partner.”

Anyway, he also had an interesting passage on what it means to be an outsider in America:

As Morehouse Men, many of you know what it’s like to be an outsider; know what it’s like to be marginalized; know what it’s like to feel the sting of discrimination. And that’s an experience that a lot of Americans share. Hispanic Americans know that feeling when somebody asks them where they come from or tell them to go back. Gay and lesbian Americans feel it when a stranger passes judgment on their parenting skills or the love that they share. Muslim Americans feel it when they’re stared at with suspicion because of their faith. Any woman who knows the injustice of earning less pay for doing the same work — she knows what it’s like to be on the outside looking in. So your experiences give you special insight that today’s leaders need.

Including “gay and lesbian Americans” in that list of outsiders isn’t shocking anymore. But I was intrigued by his reference to “parenting skills.” Could it be a nod to the Regnerus affair, in which the parenting outcomes of gays and lesbians were at issue?

Homogamy tipping point update: between elections edition

After the last election I described the trend toward legal homogamy as taking a tipping point shape. Not a media-hype tipping point that’s really just a milestone or watershed (like the arbitrary 50%), but a bona fide straw-that-breaks-the camel’s-back shape – that is, an exponential trend.

The between-election update shows us continuing on that trend, with Rhode Island and now Delaware falling on the line. Here I’ve plotted the percent of the population living under a post-homogamy state regime, and the number of states (including DC):

Even assuming they don’t legalize it nationally, if the Supreme Court lets California’s homogamy law stand after all this graph will go through the proverbial roof.

On the other hand, of course, the future is not yet determined. We won’t know till it happens what happened. In that I must agree with the Family Research Council, Heritage Foundation and National Organization for Marriage, who write in a recent pamphlet:

Q: Isn’t same-sex marriage inevitable?
A: No.

(I disagree with the rest of the pamphlet.)