Florida became the 36th state in the Union to legalize gay marriage today. In light of that event, I thought I'd write a post about it all.
A couple weeks ago I was skiing for the weekend at a resort in West Virginia. I couldn't get a girlfriend to be my ski buddy, so I found myself spending the entire weekend with my dad. This was fine with me. My dad and I have an excellent relationship and, as I spend most of my time at college or camp and away from home, I treasure every minute I get to spend quality time with him. A bit of back ground on my dad; he's got a PhD in History and spends pretty much all of his time thinking about what's going on in the world and how it's going to affect him. We got onto the topic of gay marriage while 30 feet in the air, our legs dangling off the ski lift.
While my dad and I don't exactly see eye to eye on the topic of gay marriage, personally I don't really have much of an opinion one way or the other as long as I don't have to do anything I don't believe in, my dad brought up an excellent point. His very unnerving factoid was that he has never seen any statistics on how many gay marriages there have been since it was first legalized.
Once I got home after the weekend and warmed myself up, I powered up the old laptop and did a quick Google search. Now, gay marriage has been legal in the US since 2004, when the state of Massachusetts decided to legalize it. That means, that since 2004, if you were gay and really wanted to get married, you could move to Massachusetts. I did a quick search after that to find out the number of gay marriages there have been since 2004. Firstly, it was a little murky to find the actual number of marriages. About the fourth link down, I found one article by a place called Pew Research Center. This article did hold exactly what I was looking for. It gave me the numbers of gay marriages to happen in each state, there were nine at the time, that allowed gay marriage, withholding Maryland and DC. The number they gave me? 71,165. Over a time span of about nine years, 2004-2013. The Numbers from 2014 hadn't come in yet. I then ran how many marriages happened in the United States in 2013 into Google. The first link I came across told me exactly how many marriages happen a year, how old the bride commonly is, how old the groom is, how much money they spent on the wedding. The number of US marriages a year? About 2.3 million. Multiply that number by 9, and you get 20.7 million marriages. I then divided 71, 165 by 20,700,000, a trick I learned in grade school to calculate my test averages. My number? .00343. That's .003 gay marriages to happen in the US since it was first legalized.
It isn't that gay marriages aren't happening. It's just that the demand for them isn't as high as the media would have you believe. It isn't even close. It's virtually a non issue. I'm sure, if you happen to spend any time on any social media platform with young adults, you've seen the image of the two little old ladies who got married in their 90s after decades of waiting. You know multiple celebrities, like Ellen Degeneres or Neil Patrick Harris who are gay and have gotten married. I'm not saying that you shouldn't believe in gay marriage if you do or stand up for it. I'm here to say that gay marriage is drastically over publicized and given far more media attention than it deserves. Focus your energies on a cause that affects a much wider percent of the population, like racism for instance, and work on erasing that. Gay marriage isn't going to go away and it will probably become legal everywhere eventually, but affects too small a percentage of the population to justify all the hype. Do your research, find a cause you believe is worthy of fighting for, and don't just go with the flow.
Scroll the day away!
A.
This is actually a great indicator of the movement in general - the stats on the number of gay people in the United States isn't quite as low, but this shows just how much support is really behind groups like GLAAD, and how masterful they are at controlling their message. There were some pieces over the past six months or so at conferences run by GLAAD and their ilk stating their true goals bluntly, and the need to restrain and mask them until the time is right - I'll look, and if I can find, I'll post here.
ReplyDeletePS I wanna go skiing with your dad