Draw Breath

I had a mentor who said to me once that the fact that straw men exist is no reason to waste time on them. Wise words indeed when it comes to academic writing. With blogging on the other hand, it can be fun. So it goes with this profoundly daft letter to today's Irish Times. One Michael O'Driscoll of Cork manages to be wrong on all the facts and illogical by his own mistaken premises. What an achievement. At the risk of being accused of liberal intolerance (still, to the best of my knowledge, liberals only need to be happy to suffer fools, not to indulge them) I think this merits some sort of response.

Now, it is indeed the case that some of what O'Driscoll has to say simply doesn't merit a response. He seems to suggest that the value of marriage lies in its being exclusive. After all, "everything is special, then nothing is." Perhaps the world is full of people who share some sort of Shmittian view of marriage, where it's the doors that make the club, but I don't think I'm particularly perverse in valuing my marriage for the relationship it formalises, not the fact that I have goodies them gays can't have.

Such nonsense aside, I'm fascinated by O'Driscoll's claim that "there is a substantial body of evidence, however, which indicates that
same-sex unions are far more prone to dissolution than heterosexual marital unions. They also experience higher rates of violence, mental
and even physical illness." Really? I can tell you now that no such evidence exists. Taking dissolution alone (because I'm not so sad as to address all this crap), there is in fact very little evidence on this matter and what evidence does exist seems to point at quite the opposite conclusion.¹ That is, that predictors of relationship dissolution work in quite the same way for straight and gay couples alike. As Kurdeck found in his limited study, "there is no evidence that gay partners and lesbian partners were psychologically maladjusted, that they had high levels of personality traits that predisposed them to relationship problems, that they had dysfunctional working models of their relationships, and that they used ineffective strategies to resolve conflict. The only area in which gay and lesbian partners fared worse than heterosexual parents was in the area of social support: Gay partners and lesbian partners received less support for their relationships from family members than heterosexual parents did" (p. 896).

Which brings me on to the question of why there isn't much research on this sort of area. There are two main reasons (I'm sure there's more), all of which expose the problem with the thinking behind this letter.

First, it's impossible to compare like with like. It's more or less established that the formal and informal benefits conferred by marriage act as constraints on unhappy individuals leaving relationships. As King and Bartlett have it here, "civil unions will have important legal, social, and financial implications and take place within a defined social ritual." If the institution was available to same sex couples it would "probably increase societal and family support for same sex couples and enable them to resolve difficulties that inevitably arise rather than simply leave a relationship." So, there's two ways of looking at this, both of which might carry weight. First, if gay relationships are less stable it might be because of the lack of social support, not the lack of commitment. Second, if a proper comparison is to be carried out, it would have to be between all relationships, gay and straight, not gay relationships and marriage.

Second, there is no such thing as a catch-all gay relationship. Indeed, there's no such thing as a catch-all straight relationship. Relationships are driven, surprise surprise by gender differences, for instance. Moreover, there's no reason to expect the type of relationship O'Driscoll wants to exclude to conform to the type of relationship O'Driscoll wants to extoll. It's likely that both are a product more of his fevered imagination than any actual lived experience. Whatever, it's very hard to study two categories of relationship that only exist as ideal types.

It should also be said that any greater levels of psychological ailments among gay people are unlikely to be a result of gay people's spending time with people that they love and that love them. It seems more likely that such ailments are a function of gay people being forced to spend time with, or hiding from, people that hate them or, you know, that belittle and condemn gay people and their relationships.

But let's not stop there. This Bill O'Driscoll is talking about is a Civil Partnership Bill. It's a licence that extends some tax and inheritance benefits of marriage to people in long-term relationships. It's not marriage. If O'Driscoll wants a priest to tell him he's terribly special then he's perfectly welcome to. For the rest of us all we want is a spot of social recognition and support and not to have to pay inheritance duties on houses we buy together. Why we have to be into members of the opposite sex in order to avail of that privilege is a mystery to me. Moreover, and here's the militant gay liberal bit, even if 99.99% of gay people spent half their lives doing things that would make Caligula weep (the stuff that homophobes seem so fixated on) and the other half weeping and wailing and even if 99% of gay people couldn't hold a relationship down, all that is no reason why the .01% in this imaginary scenario shouldn't avail of relationship-based tax breaks. As it happens, numbers of gay people in relationships aren't vastly short of the numbers for straight people but that's irrelevant in a society that enshrines the equality of individuals.

All that O'Driscoll is left with is that straight people sex makes babies. Indeed and it does. If that is what he values he should be arguing for tax breaks for family units that include children, not for married couples.

Anyway, that's enough for now. I really ought not read the Irish Times letters page. Here's Russell Brand on other letter writers:

1. Herek, 'Legal Recognition of Same-Sex Relationships in the United States: A Social Science Perspective' American Psychologist 2006 (see here (pdf)): "Research on the stability and duration of same-sex relationships is limited, but data from convenience samples show that long-lasting relationships are common (Blumstein & Schwartz, 1983; Kurdek, 2004). Moreover, the one published study in this area that examined factors leading to relationship on dissolution found that a decline in relationship quality predicted dissolution of same-sex and heterosexual relationships alike (Kurdeck, 2004)."