Link Banana

Two interesting data points, both pointed out by Kevin Drum, should cheer gay activists and allies:

• Support for Proposition 8, California’s ballot initiative to define marriage as “between a man and a woman,” is only at 42%. With 51% opposed, most think it’s unlikely to pass, leaving the recent court decision in favor of gay marriage as state law.
• American public opinion now favors gays serving openly in the military by a wide margin. Where in 1993, only 44% of people supported it, a recent poll puts the number as high as 75%.

Kenji Yoshino offers an interesting idea — straights getting only as close to “marriage” as gays are allowed — though I wonder what good it would actually do. (Anyone who would think to do this probably already favors gay marriage.)

The Temporary Domestic Partnership Strategy asks straights to cross over, in a limited way, from sympathy (pity for the plight of others) to empathy (direct experience of that plight). It seems plausible that if a straight couple experienced a temporary domestic partnership even briefly, they would have a more visceral sense of why gays need the right to marry. For instance, straight couples will find that no contractual arrangement can give them rights against the federal government (which would refuse to issue either partner a green card). Moreover, these couples would experience the importance of the word “marriage” when confronted with the question of their marital status in the myriad places that question is posed.

Even for homosexuals eager for the right to get married, there could be one drawback to California’s making it legal: doting parents and the persistant question of “When are you gonna get married?”

Benoit Denizet-Lewis’s piece in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine isn’t earth-shattering and it isn’t a sociological examination of gay marriage, but it’s certainly interesting enough recommend. A sample:

“The expectation for many years was that if you did any dating in your 20s, they were essentially ‘practice relationships’ where you did what heterosexual kids get to do in junior high, high school and college,” says Jeffrey Chernin, a Los Angeles psychotherapist and the author of “Get Closer: A Gay Men’s Guide to Intimacy and Relationships.” “But for many gay men, your 20s were about meeting a lot of different people, going out to bars with your friends and having a lot of sex. That has long been considered a rite of passage in the gay community.”

But young gay men today are coming of age in a different time from the baby-boom generation of gays and lesbians who fashioned modern gay culture in this country — or even from me, a gay man in his early 30s. While being a gay teenager today can still be difficult and potentially dangerous (particularly for those who live in noncosmopolitan areas or are considered effeminate), gay teenagers are coming out earlier and are increasingly able to experience their gay adolescence. That, in turn, has made them more likely to feel normal. Many young gay men don’t see themselves as all that different from their heterosexual peers, and many profess to want what they’ve long seen espoused by mainstream American culture: a long-term relationship and the chance to start a family.

I’m not sure whether this news — if true — merits a “duh!”, a “huh?!”, or a “yay!”

Women seeking a lifelong mate might do well to choose the guy a notch below them in the looks category. New research reveals couples in which the wife is better looking than her husband are more positive and supportive than other match-ups.

The reason, researchers suspect, is that men place great value on beauty, whereas women are more interested in having a supportive husband.

(via clusterflock)

I’ve been hearing a lot recently about how beneficial marriage is, so I was somewhat gratified to see that it’s not always good for you.

On average, the unhappily married had higher daytime and 24-hour blood pressure readings than single people. Having a wide social network had no effect on the trends for either married or single people. But marital satisfaction was significantly associated with satisfaction with life, lower stress, less depression and lower waking blood pressure.

“Just being married per se isn’t helpful,” Dr. Holt-Lunstad said. “because you can potentially be worse off in an unhappy marriage. So choose wisely.”

Twitter — that 140 character “microblogging” engine — officially became the least romantic way to propose when it was recently used for that purpose by Greg Rewis.

Ms. Mills got unusually little, especially considering English divorce law:

England is reputed to have the most generous divorce laws in the world. Not only are the couple’s assets supposed to be divided roughly equally, but also—rare in a rich country—everything gets thrown into the pot, including wealth acquired before the marriage. And prenuptial agreements are not recognised under English law.

John Nagl, one of military’s most well-known members among civilians (he was on The Daily Show, for example), is leaving the service. Slate’s Fred Kaplan offers an interesting reason for the Army’s brain drain:

The prolonged and repeated tours in Iraq were among the reasons for the trend. This is not the case for Nagl. But he represents another problem that the all-volunteer military is facing—the growing influence of the modern soldier’s family. It’s not that more soldiers have families than was once the case; in fact, the numbers are about the same as they were 30 years ago. But it is the case that more men in the military are married to professional women. In the past, many, if not most, officers married women who had grown up in military families. (Gen. Petraeus married the daughter of West Point’s superintendent.) They knew what the gig was when they took it—the endless rotations, the life of never settling down in one place, of a career officer. Now, many officers’ wives (or, in the case of female officers, their husbands) have their own careers; they don’t want to spend years in Fort Riley, Kan., then a few years more in Fort Hood, Texas. And at some point in the trade-off between private and professional lives, the officer gives in to his or her spouse, takes a stable job, buys a house, and gets out of the service.

This isn’t actually news — it appears to have happened a while ago — but being half of a pair of mixed-sex fraternal twin it seemed morbidly interesting to me. The British pair had been adopted by separate couples at birth and didn’t find out they were related until after they were married. Strange indeed.

(via Boing Boing)